Subject: Lavender World Site
From: [email-masked]
Date: Thu, 22 Jun 2000 11:59:08 -0500

June 22, 2000

Lavender World Site - www.lavender.ws

A Queer site selling the "Straight" goods?

There are a large number of queer websites selling queer goods.
Check out the shopping sections of any of the queer search engines
or directory sites and you will find pride wear, novelties, fashions
etc. You will also see sites selling queer books, movies and music. 
What you will not find is everything else you consume daily. If you 
do, they are sold to you in major online stores that look and feel 
very straight. We aim to change that!

Our "About Us" section on the homepage says it very well:

"We are an online retailer dedicated to providing everyday goods
to gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered persons. We strive to
have our stores reflect the queer community, however, due to the
diversity of the community they may not individually do so. Our
inventories focus on everyday goods. There are many fine queer
retailers and e-tailers with specific merchandise directed at the
community. Our goal is to allow them to thrive by carrying 
complementary, rather than competing goods, and by providing a 
site where they may be listed."

Face it, we all love to read books and enjoy films that are relevant
to us. We love to show off our pride, but we may only buy one pride
item per year for the current year’s celebrations. We do, however, 
spend more of our disposable income on everyday "straight" goods. 
That is why we have over 500,000 everyday items online in proudly 
queer stores, and we ship anywhere in the USA. For example, we carry 
general title books, movies and music. We have pet supplies, sports 
gear, camping equipment, digital cameras, travel goods, computers, 
software, electronics, art, and we have an online pharmacy and a 
wellness store. We are trying to make buying the necessities of 
life, and some of the luxuries, more relevant and hopefully more 
fun. Our store names include: "Same Sex Pets", "Ms. Sheeba Chateau’s
Pharmacy" (guess how we came up with that name), "Swish", 
"Equeerlibrium" and "Stud Software".

We have a large amount of online queer resources which can be 
found in the directories and search engines in our "Queer Searches
and Zines" section. We are working to build our list of queer goods
retailers. Right now most of the queer search engines offer good 
lists of retailers, but we would like to add additional support to 
these retailers by listing them directly. Realizing that the big 
mega stores only carry queer authors after they have "made it",
smaller retailers are the ones which offer us the emerging voices 
which may not otherwise get heard. We want to see these retailers
thrive. We hope to offer them a chance to appear on an online portal
where queer people go to buy things. They are welcome to register at
www.lavender.ws. 

More information is available at www.lavender.ws or upon request 
to [email-masked].

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