We want your opinion!

There is a section of this movie dedicated to the active gay life in Victoria that has recently become the subject of discussion. There is a short segment where one of the hosts takes the viewer on a walk through the woods in Beacon Hill Park (at 11:45min into the movie)... the host says:

"This is pervert alley... this is where all the Nancy's go, old men looking for young men, lesbians, this is where it all happens..."

We received this letter about the section.

What we thought was a groundbreaking expression of inclusion, some people see as actually an attack on gay culture. This is the furthest thing from what we intended. We proudly display two rainbow stickers on our front door (and all over the web site), we are listed in the Vancouver Island Pink Pages, and we have had many gay employees and guests. The whole basis of youth hostels is to allow people to experience other cultures and thus encourage understanding and tolerance and we strive to expand on that proud tradition. However, upon taking a second look at the controversial section of the movie, we have come to the conclusion that without background information, and taken out of context, it could easily be mistakenly seen as offensive. So, we've decided to invite feedback regarding the movie. Should we offer an explanation about the section of video and make it more clear on the site that we are gay-friendly? Or should we just remove that part of the movie altogether? Contact us with any comments.

Here's the movie (oceanisland.wmv)

Here's the deal with the file: on most windows computers this should load in a little pop-up window with nice controls and everything, on macs it'll probably try to download the movie, which is probably the only way you'll be able to watch it. To download the file to your computer, right-click (or control-click on a mac) that link and click "save target as" or something similar in the menu that comes up.