Bringing Sex(and the Steel City)y Back

Sex and the Steel City has made its rounds over the years.

Whether it was moving on from a totally separate issue to an insert, reviving it from the dead after it was put to rest in 2014 or making the decision to not distribute 8,000 copies of full-on porn around campus and the community, looking through the SATSC archives is both hilarious and moving.

Special issues are a lot of work. Every aspect of this issue has a meticulous planning process and an entire team of staff and volunteers to get the job done. This year’s edition of SATSC was no exception.

On top of making sure that our regular, 28-page issue is both high-quality and on stands on time, our staff worked around the clock looking for submissions, editing content, laying out pages and planning a launch party. Razan Samara, our Arts & Culture editor, spent months planning the issue, from working and reworking our page count, layouts or what the cover might look like. Some of our contributors did double their paid workload in order to get this issue on stands.

Despite the various planning meetings, extra hours in the office, stress headaches and way too much coffee, we got it done, and it looks incredible.

We published the last Sex and the Steel City magazine in February 2016. The 32-page issue was distributed at the same time as our weekly paper and despite its popularity, was cut the following year due to budget cuts and complaints about the fact that it was NSFW.

After floating the idea around how to bring it back last year, we revived the special edition in the form of a some extra pages in our Arts and Culture section. We strayed from our traditional format about writing about sex for the sake of writing about sex and instead published pieces surrounding sex, health and relationships.

This year, we decided to follow suit, putting in an additional 12 glossy pages filled with artwork, information about LGBTQ2SA+ friendly spaces in Hamilton and several pieces on sexual health and wellness. We also added our feature and sports section to the fun with some themed articles and decided to have a launch party for it — which you should come to, tonight at Redchurch Cafe from 7 p.m. to 11 p.m.

Special issues allow our staff and contributors to stray from our usual content and dive into topics that interest them, never minding what may be too taboo for our weekly issue. It allows our production team to really show off how talented they are. Most importantly, it allows us to stray from the ordinary and be as creative as we want.