Thursday, April 05, 2007
Plain Dealer Reporter The party gets bigger every year -- and the one in Cleveland raised the roof.
Nearly 1,000 people, mostly women, poured into Union Station Video Café and Bounce Night Club, adjoining gay bars on Cleveland's near West Side, to celebrate on the eve of the NCAA Women's Final Four championship game.
The event, which started eight years ago in a hotel room as an evening of wine and cheese for a small group of women, has become a tradition in the tournament's host city for hundreds of *** basketball fans who never miss a Final Four.
Event organizers say that the party's growing popularity and a host of other entertainment options geared toward a *** audience are signs that cities, like Cleveland, are embracing the *** contingent at women's sporting events.
Tami Brown, vice president of marketing for the Convention and Visitors Bureau of Greater Cleveland, called the tournament weekend a "dry run" on Cleveland's gay-*** friendliness initiative.
Earlier this year, the visitors bureau teamed up with the *** Gay Bisexual Transgender Community Center of Greater Cleveland to develop a gay-*** travel guide to encourage diverse tourism. The guidebook, which will offer travel tips and gay-friendly dining and lodging suggestions, will be available online by the end of the month and should be published by June.
In the meantime, Brown said the visitors bureau scrambled to post a gay-*** itinerary of entertainment suggestions to its Web site in anticipation of a significant *** turnout for the tournament. But the itinerary needed further revision and was pulled from the Web site before the weekend, she said.
"If we don't have any complaints this week, we'll know we're in good shape heading into the official launch" of the initiative, Brown said.
for full article - http://www.cleveland.com/news/plaindealer/index.ssf?/base/cuyahoga/1175762060203131.xml&coll=2