Gay Youth UK, or GYUK as it has been shortened to by many of its members, was founded in 1997 with the aim of providing a complete resource for young lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans and questioning people living in the UK. Since it's time utilising IRC and Yahoo! as a means to facilitate discussion, Gay Youth UK has evolved through three websites to become a community of over 4000 members sharing information and offering advice to those in need of guidance and support.
Aims
At Gay Youth UK we strive to:
- Unite those who are 25 years of age or under and identify as LGBT
- Provide support for those questioning their sexuality in the UK and worldwide
- Provide impartial and up-to-date information on LGBT issues from as diverse a point of view as possible
- Facilitate discussions of issues affecting the LGBT community
- Provide a platform from which young LGBT persons can express their views publicly
- Maintain an environment of safety, fairness and freedom of expression
Forums
Gay Youth UK's most active resource are it's forums which have been slowly increasing in pace for some years now (thanks, in no small part, to a crack team of moderators who keep things running smoothly). Members are quickly introduced to the forum's fast pace of topical discussion and general chit chat, but can also seek advice within our support forums from other members and our team who are in, or may have been in, a similar position. Should they want to socialise away from their keyboards, members can also join one of Gay Youth UK's frequent outings in cities all over the UK organised through the forum system by an administrator and two members.
Regions Gay Youth UK represents
As well as national content, Gay Youth UK splits it's service up into 12 regions within the UK, you can review these below. You can follow a region's link to review all content associated with it.
- Scotland
- Northern Ireland
- North East
- North West
- Yorkshire & The Humber
- Wales
- West Midlands
- East Midlands
- East
- South West
- Greater London
- South East
Accessibility
Due to the nature of the site, accessibility has been a concern from the start. We have made sure to extract the site's content from it's visual style and to code semantic XHTML so that Gay Youth UK should be open for interpretation by a plethora of screen readers. Although we try our best to make sure our fonts contrast their background, some might still find the default text size hard to read, Gay Youth UK was designed with font sizes that increase and decrease effectively; use the option to increase font size in your browser if you are having trouble making out the text at it's standard size and see for yourself.
Need to be discreet?
In some situations it is simply not possible to view a website that screams your sexuality. We realise that we have a name that leaves little to the imagination as to the site's purpose, that is why we have decided to offer two ways of accessing Gay Youth UK. The discreet site at http://www.gyuk.org.uk/ removes all of the obvious tell tale signs, you can be sure that by accessing that address you will never be greeted with obvious logos or text, whilst our main address at http://www.gayyouth.org.uk/ offers the full website. You can switch between skins quickly by clicking the red or green buttons at the top of the main content box.
Website technology
The Gay Youth UK website is based upon very modern technology, using Drupal to manage the site's content outputting standard XHTML2 and CSS3, rendering nicely in all modern (and most ancient) browsers. Also, if you want something a bit more lightweight, we have thrown in a sprinkling of RSS 2.0 feeds too, just check for the 
icons underneath content.
License
All content, bar forum posts and comments, on Gay Youth UK is released under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 UK: England & Wales license unless otherwise stated. Basically, you may reproduce and revise any work on this website, but you need to attribute us and cannot use it for commercial gain.