A couple weeks ago, I was fortunate enough to be in London during the London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival. Wandering down to London’s Southbank, I nursed a hangover in a dark room and watched a Danish film called Brotherhood (Broderskab) about two neo-nazi men who fall in love. Brilliant, tragic and well-paced, it really left me thinking… mostly that I miss cinema like that.

It’s no secret that those of us who have chosen to live in the middle of nowhere have very impaired access to anything queer — from the total lack of a scene, anything resembling a gay bar, no access to gay literature and certainly Mullingar’s local cinema doesn’t bring anything gay, ever.

Those of us in the sticks who long for a gay community only have recourse through the internet, where we are fortunate enough to have it. However, one thing we in Ballyfeckinnowhere have in common with all you in the Big Smoke is that we don’t get to see many gay things on the television, and when we do, it’s gay content made for straight audiences.

For those fortunate enough to have broadband internet, we now have access to a far more varied selection of entertainment, thanks in part to a new website called QUOD.tv.

Founder and CEO, Colin Fallesen, was kind enough to meet with me at the film festival in London and go through with me how his service works, where he thinks it’s going and talking about all the great content available to us.

Colin himself is  soft-spoken and enthusiastic about  his business. In fact, he said he’d been to nine films at the festival, working it all around his already very busy schedule. His media credentials are impressive and he knows the industry well enough to make this work, but that doesn’t mean that the plan has gone off without a hitch.

Butch Jamie

Originally planned to be a broadcast channel, the project was unable to secure enough investment to get it off the ground. Plan B is what we have now, and it’s an impressive website full of queer content to make you think, laugh, cry and … simply enjoy relevant programming.

As Fallesen points out, it’s not a big setback. Because many of the new set-top boxes will include internet television channels, for a lot of people the difference between a broadcast channel and an internet channel may soon be academic.

So let’s get down to exploring the website. QUOD.tv has some different sections. The first one you should visit is QUODONE where you can watch some content for free. It’s mostly trailers for the content available to purchase on the site, but there is also the in-house produced “The Powder Room” which is a chat show hosted by Miss Kimberly and features interviews with notable gays.

When you’ve decided what you want to watch, you can put money on your account. Then, when you decide to watch — for instance — Butch Jamie, you use €3.39 of your balance. In a surprisingly consumer-friendly policy, you are only charged for how much of it you actually watch — so if you don’t like a movie (and stop watching it), or your internet connection drops, you are only charged for the minutes you watched, and not the whole thing.

There are loads of films availabe — all featuring lesbian, bisexual, gay, trans and one that features an intersex teen — called XXY

There is the QUODCLUB section where you can choose a free video featuring club music and guys or girls or both dancing along.

The QUODTRAVEL section is interesting and features episodes from dozens of world cities, focused on the LGBT scene, rather than your more traditional sights.

Hopefully we will see more of this kind of media-on-demand in the future. Certainly for the LGBTQ community access to relevant media is always lacking so QUOD shows us again how new technologies are solving old problems and bringing art, information and entertainment into our living rooms… even in Mullingar (I swear!).

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