Learning to Earn

Cruiseline

Determined to achieve financial stability, we launched Cruiseline, a telephone chat line for gay men in Toronto, in 1989. The Press was an early entrant into this new and growing industry. By 2005 Cruiseline was Canada’s leading name in gay chat line services, operating everywhere in the English-speaking parts of the country.

The invention and subsequent success of Cruiseline had profound consequences for the Press.

The profits generated by this new business transformed the struggling Press from a hand-to-mouth community newspaper to a well-capitalized enterprise that was no longer dependent on inadequate local advertising revenues to finance its work.

With the extension of Cruiseline across Canada, the Press recaptured the national span and community connections that had been amputated with the closure of The Body Politic.

And the success of Cruiseline gave the Press confidence that it could succeed commercially by harnessing new technologies.

Xtra West & Capital Xtra

In 1993, the Press deployed some of its Toronto chat line profits to expand dramatically, adding both Vancouver and Ottawa to its theatre of operations in just three months.

After a year of planning, the Press launched Xtra West in Vancouver in July 1993. Conceived on the model of Xtra in Toronto but managed independently by local staff, Xtra West met with immediate success, going on to become an anchor of Vancouver’s long-established gay and lesbian communities.

And when Ottawa’s Go Info suddenly collapsed, the Press quickly stepped into the gap with the launch of the monthly Capital Xtra in September 1993. Since then, Capital Xtra has been an important engine of community-building in Ottawa and a permanent reminder to federal officials that gay issues are an inescapable facet of Canadian life and politics.

As with Cruiseline, this expansion also changed the Press and carried it farther from its origins, as it reorganized itself into a divisional structure to accommodate its on-the-ground engagement of workforces and communities in three widely separated cities.