From the editor: A word on our OUTstanding readers

Between Feb. 15 and March 14, more than 937 readers voted for the activists, politicos, businesses, restaurants, venues and services in this year’s OUTstanding Awards. Voters came from every age and every corner of the LGBT community. In this issue, the list is in!

You’ll find the OUTstanding Awards list in our cover story, but we learned interesting things about our voters, too. In our survey, we asked your age, gender identity, sexual orientation and zip code.

Our readers truly are centered in Colorado. Of the 937 respondents, 829 – or roughly 88 percent – reported Colorado zip codes. Of those, 646 – or 69 percent of all respondents – live in Denver. The most popular zip code was 80218 – in Denver’s Capitol Hill, no surprise – with 114 respondents.

Outside Denver, 130 respondents came from Denver suburbs, 20 from Boulder, 12 from Northern Colorado, and nine from the Colorado Springs area. Four came from Ski Country, and eight more were scattered throughout the rest of the state.

Outside Colorado, a peculiar cluster of respondents – 54 of them – were from Sarasota, Florida. What’s that about? There were five in Arizona, six in New York, and the rest were scattered around the country. Just one zip code appeared to be from either outside the U.S. or a person who typed a bunch of random symbols – Google informs me it is Canadian.

Well, you learn something new every day!

Exactly 500 respondents identified as men, 403 as women, 20 as trans and 13 as queer – some did not answer. 615 respondents identified as lesbian or gay – two thirds of the list – plus 194 as straight, 77 as bisexual and 49 as queer or something else. When it comes to age, two percent were under 20, 35 percent in their 20s, 27 percent in their 30s, 21 percent in their 40s, 10 percent in their 50s and five percent of respondents were over age 60.

We know this isn’t a perfect sampling of the diverse, diffuse, and often hard-to-identify LGBT community, or of our readers; many of whom are more inclined to be interested in the OUTstanding Awards than others. For example, I suspect that we have many more readers over age 60 who didn’t complete the survey because it was online. Many under 20 just don’t know who the people and places they’d be voting on are. The same may be true for the readers we know we have in Pueblo, Greeley and Wyoming, where there may not be a pride store or a “gym to cruise at” to vote for.

Still, there’s a little worm in my mind now telling me where we need to work: next year’s survey could have more categories relevant to trans readers, bisexual readers, queer-identified folks, and the LGBT communities in Fort Collins and Colorado Springs!

But our community isn’t one to take no for an answer, and many of you wrote in names and places that didn’t fit elsewhere on the list. Enough readers submitted write-in responses to create new categories for “OUTstanding sex educator,” “OUTstanding straight ally,” “OUTstandng local photographers” and many more.

Congratulations to all our OUTstanding community favorites, and thanks to our readers for participating, campaigning and supporting your friends. So without further adieu, you can find Out Front Colorado’s 2012 OUTstanding awards right here.