This tour is not bad, so I will start with the good: Kathy is clearly a very passionate woman whom I believe is doing excellent work. I am sure that for many people, this tour is educational and informative. I would in fact recommend it especially for queer teenagers, recently-out queerfolk from conservative communities, or for straight people who feel very clueless about queer culture and want to know more. In other words if you know next to nothing about the LGBTQIA+ community, this is a great tour for you.
And now for the less good: unfortunately I do not feel that Kathy is as knowledgeable as she would like to believe. I should state that I'm a Millennial, and I would estimate Kathy is a Boomer. She represents, as far as I can tell, a fairly outdated segment of the gay & lesbian — yes note I am specifically referring to gay & lesbian only — community that has a history of being somewhat exclusionary to members of the queer community who don't fit into a very specific binary mold. For example she told us it's no longer "cool" to be bisexual, and really didn't seem like she understood any concepts outside of the cisgender binary, or even for example what pansexual means. She gave us a very Wikipedia rundown of all the flag meanings and various gay & lesbian terminologies (yes, again, specifically gay & lesbian, nothing beyond that) which may be helpful and titillating information for my slightly racist grandma to learn about, or for your average white gay male who doesn't need to know about anything outside of his white gay male bubble. But if you're under 30 and live in a somewhat liberal area, you probably know most of this stuff and won't learn anything new from this tour.
I do not actually regret going on this tour. I genuinely feel Kathy is doing good work and I don't feel that any of the comments she made, though showing a certain lack of knowledge, came from any place of malice. At the end of the tour we stopped outside a human rights charity shop and she talked about a lot of the work that she and others in the community are doing, and I feel like the money I paid for this tour went to a good cause. But I didn't attend purely because I wanted to support a good cause, I was hoping to actually learn something new and I did not. I felt like I had more to teach Kathy than she had to teach me.
This is not a tour for out, proud, streetwise queers, this is a very basic "gay culture 101" tour. Take your clueless straight friend, otherwise just learn by doing and hit up one of the local clubs.
Одговор домаћина
Sep 2019
Dear S, Thank you very much for taking the time to share your tour experience. Given the vast amount of information provided on tour as well as, the broad spectrum of individual knowledge of tour members, the tour encompasses as much as possible. This is why at the beginning of each tour I encourage people to feel free to speak up, ask questions or let me know if any words or terminologies have changed. I look forward to having Millennials on tour and the opportunity to learn something new everyday. So thank you again as I appreciate your feedback.