Yay For Gay

What do you get when you have two working people bringing home a salary with no child to spend it on? A marketer’s wet dream. According to San Francisco research, 76% of the gay and lesbian community earns more than the national average of $40,000 a year. This is largely because there is no child in the picture so both parties can afford to work. Marketer’s refer to it as DINK (dual income no kids) and are tickled to death by this jackpot. But what do you do when you have a mass of money to appeal to and the rest of your market is still up their bigoted ass? Use innuendo like your life depended on it.

For some reason, advertising to gays has this stigma that misled people to believing it must be sleazy or overly sexual to be effective. As though the only way to get homosexual attention is through sex. But isn’t that already a maxim for advertising in general anyway? Sex sells…to everyone. For decades the sexy attempts to sell to straight men has produced sweeping outrage from women for the shocking indecency and deprecation. When advertisers find themselves in this new light of moral awareness, they use a tactic like product placement. Homo-placement discreetly places symbols or other gay suggestions in the ad that blow over most hetero-heads. However, these ads that target gays don’t frequent your average CNN or ABC. They implement the classic American device known as “separate but equal.” Advertisers will run one gay commercial on Logo or Bravo and another, basically identical without homosexual implications, to the rest of America.

I’m not totally certain how I feel about these strategies to incorporate gay characters in mainstream commercials. On one hand, the fact these companies are using utmost discretion sends a message that being gay is something to hide. However, subtle placement could also be seen as attempts to normalize the homosexual community to the rest of society. While there’s always room for scrutiny, these ads could be baby steps toward tolerance (the non-offensive ads, anyway), a way to include homosexuals in ads without alienating them. Perhaps eventually pave the way to overall social equality. After all, there’s no better way to reach the top than through capitalism!

While it’s true that marginalized groups in history have acquired power through economic resources, it’s always been through producing or controlling money. However, gays and lesbians are breaching equality in the economic realm as the role of the consumer. It is because they’re so attractive to advertisers that they are offered the some kind of route to equality. Unfortunately, this commodization of homosexuality resulted in ads that hide gay culture with innuendos behind a straight appearance. Misrepresentation like this is ignoring millions of homosexuals who don’t experience reality like this, thus rendering their lives invisible once again.