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WGAY's Coming-Out Party
Key West gay outlet has superstation ambitions

If Key West's over-the-air station aimed at the gay market catches on, the station's owners hope to take their WGAY station concept nationwide.

“This has never been done before,” says Jason Sherwood, WGAY's general manager and co-owner of Paradise TV, along with his father, Burt, who has been in the broadcasting business since the 1950s. “There's nobody else doing this for free and over the airwaves.

The Sherwoods acquired a construction permit from the FCC to build the station, with the intention of setting it up as the market's first gay-themed outlet.

To program WGAY, they're teaming with Palm Springs, Calif.-based Pride Nation, which runs a gay-themed broadband channel, Proud TV, at pridenation.com and on Akimbo's set-top box, which connects broadband channels to televisions. Proud TV also is carried on SBC's Homezone.

Proud TV carries such programs as The Kenji & Bella Show , a cooking program in which a Chilean chef and a drag queen work the kitchen together, and Poker's Wild , in which losing contestants lose their clothes. Sherwood says WGAY will be careful to stay within the FCC's decency standards.

“We have to be just like NBC, ABC, CBS and Fox in the U.S.,” Sherwood says. “We're going to be just as regulated by the FCC as anybody else, although some of our programs may be more flamboyant.”

Comcast On Board

WGAY has hammered out a retransmission-consent deal with Key West's local cable operator, owned by Comcast. Assuming that the final technical issues get ironed out, the station should be available on Key West's cable system in January. Some 65% of the station's programming will be provided by Pride Nation; the rest will be produced locally and will eventually include entertainment and news, says the younger Sherwood.

If all goes well, the Sherwoods (both of whom are straight, for what it's worth) plan to turn WGAY into a superstation, like Turner's TBS and Tribune's WGN, that's carried nationwide on digital tiers.

“It will run like a typical affiliate with a national network partner like CBS,” says Allen Edwards, president of AEU Media Group, Pride Nation's parent company. “We would keep the WGAY name as a superstation, and then the [Internet] side would be Pride Television,” which has been running since 2000.
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