A 70-minute interview with legendary Manchester gay village business woman Julia Grant.

A decade ago, Julia Grant was one of the best-known business owners in Manchester’s gay village and an outspoken voice in both the LGBT and mainstream media.

After Mardi Gras 1999 raised nothing at all for good causes, she ran the successful and free-to-enter GayFest for two years. But, some people — including local councillors and Manchester City Council — weren’t happy at all.

Unexpectedly, in 2002, Julia sold Hollywood Showbar and her other businesses and left. Despite rumours and malicious gossip since then, she didn’t speak out in public.

Now, in this exclusive interview Julia Grant reveals the LGBT history that you won’t see at the current Manchester Pride exhibition at The Lowry gallery. Plus she recalls the events that drove her out of the city.

This was recorded on 10 July 2011 during the Sparkle weekend.

Note: eventually, when time allows, archive photos, video and other media will be added to this interview.

You may have heard about the notorious raid on a drag ball at a temperance hall in Manchester in 1880? An article in The Guardian (Village People, 7 August 2004) refers to the incident, but it begins with the scene just over one hundred years later.

In 1988 “Canal Street in Manchester city centre was still a red-light district,” writes the author. Going on to describe how police officers patrolled its “dank alleys”.

“This kind of surveillance was nothing new in the area,” she continues. (more…)

Manchester’s 6th annual World Naked Bike Ride took place on Friday 3 June 2011 at 7pm. Here’s my exclusive video of it.

In the latest example of free hosting services not being forever, Google is planning to close down its Google Video service.

Originally the service was due to close to visitors on April 29th with another two weeks for users to download their videos (until May 13th). Those dates have now been scrapped but it’s obvious the direction this is heading in. So, if you need to, save any videos you have on there while you still can.

When the closure happens, anyone who has linked to any content on Google Video or has embedded videos on their pages will end up with a bunch of links that don’t work or that redirect somewhere else.

Google is wealthy and could easily keep this service running so those pages and videos are online ‘forever’. But it’s a commercial company and primarily concerned about its image and business plan.

If you want a sustainable presence online in the longterm, get proper web hosting, run your own website and link to your content on there. That way, you are in control and really building something for the future.

You won’t be handing over rights in your content or suddenly have the rug pulled from under you at a few weeks notice. How long before Facebook goes the way of MySpace?

Meanwhile, Amazon’s cloud continues to be down for some customers.

Crash 2.0: Amazon battles to restore confidence in cloud computing as web chaos continues into second day Daily Mail.