"DAYTONA BEACH Promotes Summer Break for Gay, Lesbian Travelers" was the boosterish headline for a recent story in the Orlando Sentinel newspaper. As the article explained, there are two reasons why this Florida resort town's Convention and Visitors Bureau was promoting a three-day spring fling aimed at gays and lesbians -- dollars and cents.
This year's "Beachfest" attracted as many as 20,000 visitors and generated close to $8 million for local businesses, according to tourism officials. Beachfest chairman Jerry Corliss told the Sentinel that when the event was launched in 1994, "We had to knock on business doors asking for financial assistance. Now, they're coming to us (because) they want part of the dollars. This event has grown by leaps and bounds."
Why is this story worth noting? Because in all the hubbub over the religious right's protests against gay friendly businesses and events (think Disney's "Gay Days," or mainstream advertisers on gay-themed TV shows), we sometimes forget that were we not so successful in gaining this sort of corporate backing, the bigots wouldn't be so upset.
Consider Levi Strauss, the nation's largest apparel advertiser. The company ran a 12-page advertising supplement in the November 1998 issue of Out magazine, a leading gay and lesbian publication. The ad featured 10 men and women who are openly gay or lesbian, including actor Wilson Cruz and photographer Eve Fowler. "We're trying to reach 25- to 34-year-olds whom we call urban modernists," Levi Strauss's marketing head told the New York Times. "When we looked at who made up that group, gay men and lesbians are a large part of it."
This is a smart move on the part of the Dockers makers. In a survey by Greenfield Online Inc. and Spare Parts Inc., a marketing communications company, 80 percent of the self-identifying lesbigay respondents said they preferred to buy from companies that spoke to them as gays or lesbians.
The embrace of the gay market, predictably, has incited the gay bashers. The Tupelo, Mississippi-based American Family Association every month has its members send complaints to companies that either sponsor TV shows with gay or lesbian characters or buy ads in gay publications (including Levi Strauss). Other anti-gay groups are also active on this front. The Washington-based Americans for Truth about Homosexuality, for example, recently attacked Anheuser-Busch for sponsoring a "leather pride" street fair in San Francisco.
Alas, the religious right isn't the only group attacking business support for gay events. The gay left is simply beside itself. For example, for the first time in its 28 years, San Francisco's annual gay pride parade (officially, and inclusively, known as "The Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Pride Parade") accepted sizable corporate sponsorship. A thick, glossy pride magazine with pricey advertising made it possible for parade organizers to hire paid staff and produce a slicker, higher-tech -- and faster? -- affair, reported the San Francisco Chronicle.
The capitalism-haters were not amused, and labeled the acceptance of corporate money as a surrender to "commodity fetishism." Said a spokesperson for a group called Lesbian and Gay Insurrection (LAGI), "We find it offensive that the audience, the community, is being marketed as someone to sell something to." Oh, the shame of being a targeted market.
Writing in the August 1998 issue of Out magazine, columnist Pat Califa warned darkly that "these days we are basing our demands for equal rights on the claim that we are a valuable marketplace that ought to be liberated, so it can be exploited like any other natural resource forced to bare its throat to capitalism." Virginia Apuzzo, an assistant to the President and the highest ranking out lesbian in the federal government, chimed in with the market bashers when she declared at the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force's 1998 Creating Change conference that she hadn't "spent 29 years of my life to become part of a market niche." And a commentator on the popular weekly syndicated radio show "This Way Out" warned, "The idea that all gays and lesbians have large disposable incomes waiting to be reaped, a skewed image at best, may not necessarily be beneficial to the queer movement for equal civil rights."
But no one is claiming that all gays and lesbians are filthy rich; it's just that because most of us don't have children, and many of us live in two-income households (making us DINKS?double income, no kids), we are, in fact, a prime market demographic. Since it seems to me that it's easier to advance the fight for legal equality with the backing of corporate America than without it, the reason that the lefties are upset seems to come down to sheer hatred of the free-enterprise system.
Antagonism toward capitalism, and a romantic attachment to state socialism, aren't new, of course. Since the days of the Gay Liberation Front, which swore Marxist solidarity with liberation movements from Cuba to Vietnam, a knee-jerk scapegoating of capitalism has been a mainstay of gay politics. Not too long ago Pulitzer Prize winner Tony Kushner ("Angels in America") wrote in The Nation magazine that "Homosexuals... like most everyone else, are and will continue to be oppressed by the depredations of capital until some better way of living together can be arrived at." That "better way," Kushner makes clear, is socialism and the elimination of privately owned enterprises.
NGLTF's Urvashi Vaid, a long-time opponent of "mainstreaming" and lesbigay "assimilation" (a sellout of the radical queer cause), has written that "as more of us move into a space where we can be personally gay or lesbian... we risk being appeased."
Rather than aspiring to join the mainstream, Vaid wants lesbians and gays to radicalize American society by "building a powerful, grassroots, political movement rooted in notions of Liberation and not merely Rights."
Vaid never really said what she means by "Liberation," but judging from her speeches it's not hard to figure out. In a 1991 tour de force, she wailed that the world "has taken off its ugly white hood to show its sexist, racist, anti-gay and capitalist face."
She pines, "The gay and lesbian liberation movement has turned into a gay and lesbian marketing movement" and complains that "a political movement is not what is being sold."
All this hoopla over corporate support for our cause! Could it be that the gay left fears that such acceptance could cause gays and lesbians to turn away from socialist daydreams, especially the ones in which they get to be the new commissars? Corporate acceptance may be good for gay people, but it's bad for the worldwide revolution against free markets.
Meanwhile, the same corporate support and mainstream advances that unnerve gay leftists will continue to provoke fierce new attacks by the radical right. That means gays who eschew both the leftover left and homophobic right must carry out an ongoing battle on two fronts, with no rest for the weary. No wonder we need events like Beachfest!