As London’s World Pride festival scaled back this year due to financial and organisational difficulties, Europe’s biggest gay lifestyle magazine has launched the inaugural Attitude Awards.
Attitude magazine Publishing Director Darren Styles announced the move at a press conference at the W Hotel, Leicester Square.
Headline sponsor of the event, to be held 16 October 2012 at One Mayfair, will be Virgin Holidays.
The Attitude Awards will benefit the Elton John AIDS Foundation.
Styles said 18 awards would be presented across three categories: entertainment, lifestyle and politics and fashion and style, honouring those that Attitude, and its readers, love and admire the most. Three Attitude Icon Awards will be struck for those who have made outstanding contributions to gay life.
“All winners, our very own A-list, will be celebrated in a bumper awards issue of Attitude, to be published on 17 October,” Styles added.
“Attitude is an amazing brand, with proven longevity and the power to engage with its market in a way that marries sensitivity and responsibility with the celebratory,” Styles said.
“We are channeling that brand and those values into the event space, and with some style. We launched Club with Attitude to mark our 18th birthday party back in April, and the inaugural Attitude Awards are a natural extension that will cement Attitude’s position as the pre-eminent gay title.”
Styles told CN he had chosen the venue, One Mayfair, because: “You can do anything with it as a dry-hire venue. We want to do something unusual”.
Andrew Shelton, Marketing Director of Virgin Holidays, said he was “looking forward to a fantastic event and the chance to raise awareness of our growing, varied and exciting range of holidays”.
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