Yesterday I Was A Queer; Today I Am A Gay Consumer

by Perry Brass

A funny thing happened on the way to Gay Liberation: we became a market. We went from being unmentionable to sellable. The nice thing was that we weren't stupid enough to buy this idea wholesale, although many of us (myself included) are a bit amazed how fast it happened. It is indeed part of America's wonderful, unique, democratization process: we're all consumers, and even though our sex and romantic life may still be to many people (for the sake of "taste") in the closet, our own taste has been recognized as . . . marketable.

A decade ago, if you had mentioned the "gay market" to most of corporate America, it would have been too embarrassed to laugh. The gay market? You mean bath houses, sex services, and poodle grooming? Right? Now you mention the gay market and corporate America thinks: well, maybe the laugh's on us; afterall, things are tough now, and facts are facts. The gay market translates into ONE THING: a white, cohesive, middle class that seems to want to be tapped and at this point is ready for it. (I emphasize the word white because to marketers this is the operative word. For their purposes, we are a uniform, white market, and we are seen as perhaps the last segment of this market that has gone untapped.)

Or is it?

The gay marketers themselves, those lusty, trustworthy guys who have all the answers and seem to come up with new projects every week with which to cocktease straight, big-bucks "America, Inc.," have had the answers, of course, for decades. Literally, they will tell us, since the early 70s.

The average income for gay households is . . . $60,000. No, it's actually $72,000. No, wait a second, it's-wud-you-believe?- $93,000. Wow. Yeh. No.

Well-actually it's any amount of money they want to put on it, since the majority of gay households are just as underground-that is, the bulk is just as invisible-as ever. The proof of this pudding is that despite the 20-30-60 million gay/lesbian households in America (a number that no one can lay their hands on, no matter how hard they try), gay causes still have an unbearably difficult time limping along. The Gay Games in New York for instance were left with a whopping near million-dollar deficit, even though the event, coupled with Stonewall 25, was the largest public gay event in history. A huge number of gay businesses, especially gay magazines trying to milk the "ever-growing, recession-proof" gay market, go under quickly.

There are many reasons for this: to be openly gay and wealthy is still to be a rare exception. Sure, in any urban setting there are hundreds of "A-Gays": queens with large amounts of inherited wealth, or their social-climbing fellow-travelers who may not be as well-heeled, but still want to swim in the same icy waters. These men are the backbone of any symphony society, the local opera, ballet, etc. They preside over animal society fundraisers and will raise millions for stray poochies, but don't ask them for money for stray queers.

The only thing that has brought the A-Gays six inches out of the closet has been AIDS. As the A-Gays started dying of the same disease that the Z-Gays were dying of, a few-and we mean very few-old money A-Gays started venturing out. But for the most part the A-Gays align themselves with the "A" everything else. They will not jeopardize one dollar of their money (or one millimeter of social position) for any cause, no matter how close to home. This is not a matter of cowardliness, homophobia, etc. It is simply a matter of dollars-and-cents wisdom. The A-Gays are not interested in being on the "cutting edge" of the arts, politics, society, etc. The place where so many gays feel they should be. Instead the A-Gays are interested in keeping their well-manicured fingers on the handle of Power's cutting edge. And you don't keep your grip on that slippery handle by allowing yourself to slip down to the razor side.

To put it succinctly: they don't want to get cut.

So, take away the famous A-Gays. Then take away the Z-Gays, who are working class or out of work (and overstressed, and for the most part, silent)-and what have you got left in the "gay market"?

That's right. It's the "U" Gays. People like you.

These are people who are struggling like hell to stay included in the middle-class (whom marketers still read basically as one word: white) and who always have the same conflict, that reads simply enough: Is Amex (for instance) just using us as a market, or actually recognizing us as real people?

This conflict puts a real kabong on much of the gay marketing idea, since corporations have done very little (if anything) when the doody hits the fan, to go down on the mat for us. In other words, they are not going to start fighting Jesse Helms for you and me. Corporations are traditionally conservative, despite the fact that gays are, traditionally, amazingly loyal as customers. We will follow stars who've recognized us early on, way after they've gone mainstream and conveniently forgotten us. We will buy underwear aimed at us even after the stud models wearing them have said the most stupid homophobic things possible. But we won't swallow everything.

A good example of this is that the Joseph Coors Brewing Company, run by one of the most right-wing (and openly homophobic) families in America, started an intense campaign to prove that they were going to be the good-buddies of the gay community. They took out full-page ads in gay papers, they sponsored activities like the New York Gay Games, they did some test marketing to show they were interested in getting into the "gay market." What they learned from the testing was that being part of the gay market did not jeopardize their standing among other groups like, say, straight college kids. The kids, to their great relief, would not reject Coors Beer if it became known as a "queer beer."

But neither did it help Coors with the gay market, because most urban gay men had already heard how Coors was one of the major backers of anti-gay offensives in Colorado. Coors had backed the Christian Right all over the country, and was patently anti-Choice. So despite great attempts at positioning them within the gay market, Coors has never become a great gay beer.

The gay market concept reminds me of an old story I remember hearing years ago. During the Middle Ages, the Jewish community in Rome used to come out once a year carrying the Torah for the Pope to bless. Each year the Pope would come out in all his robes, and say the same thing: "Great book! Bad people!"

Corporate America is now doing a wary dance on broken glass around the gay market, because they see that it is there, and that it does satisfy some of the criteria of a "legitimate" market: it is-somewhat-recognizable; it is loyal (in other words, why spend money on people who will switch brand allegiances on a dime-a terrible problem with the "youth market" which switches every thirty seconds); and it is white. That is, upwardly mobile, identifying with the (literate) upper middle classes. This of course is the skeleton in the closet of the gay market: that the gay market is another way of reaching into the white market. But it is a part of the white market that is already-by marketers standards-wondrously "presold." ("Presold" is a great marketer's term: it means that the targeted market already wants-and is willing to buy-what you have to sell. Now you just have to figure out exactly what among all your goodies to sell them. Then when, and how often.)

This market, in short, already knows what it wants. It wants basically the same things other people want: cars, vacations, homes, booze, food, credit to get it all, etc. And, according to marketers, it wants to be recognized. Make me uninvisible and I will buy you, the gay market says. "Show me that you actually know what my face looks like."

But, please, don't make me too uninvisible.

That's the other rub. The gay market does not want to be known, simply, as "gay." Unlike other "minorities," we still feel that "gayness" in all its varied aspects (black gays, white gays, female gays, young gays, old gays, Hispanic gays, Jewish gays, atheist gays, athletic gays-okay, you get the idea) limits us too much.

To be spotted as gay, in other words, singled out, is a no-no. In an as-close-to-comprehensive report as possible on gay consumers done in 1993 by the respected market research firm of Yankelvich Monitor in Westport, Conn, gay and lesbian consumers said that what they really wanted was to be "included" as the sales targets of companies that "target all kinds of people."

To be recognized, therefore, as worthy of being labeled a "customer," among other customers, seems to many of us a noble enough intention. This puts us back, somewhat, into the contemporary community of America, whose local temple is the shopping mall and whose main means of communication is the TV commercial. (Or its new "news" version, the infomercial.) In short, some of us have actually bought the idea that we can be bought, that by buying us as a group, corporate America is giving us the recognition that will make us "legitimate." We just don't want to be embarrassed by being singled out.

This Yankelvich report, by the way, also stated that the average yearly income for gay men was $37,500 as compared to heterosexual men, who average $39,300. Lesbians did somewhat better (as a comparative class for these purposes) with an income of $34,800 compared with straight single women who were put at $34,300. However none of these figures deal with working class people, who rarely respond, or are even asked to respond, to such consumer reports. It also picks on pretty much a self-selected group: those who are open enough to respond to such a survey as being "gay." (Like the famous Kinsey Report and other reports that deal in sexuality as a social phenomenon, what these reports really report on are current attitudes towards sexuality. In Kinsey's time a lot of men flatly said they were not homosexual or even bisexual. Even though they had been having sex with the same sex, they could not be. After all, they were married to women.)

But the Yankelvich report does refute the idea that gays have endless "discretionary pockets." Another finding of the report was that gay men do not see themselves as "trendy," despite the slick gay media's constant need to present us this way to advertisers.

What they did find was that we are more used to stress in our lives, and therefore can accommodate changes fairly well. These include adapting to new technologies such as going "on line," and new computer services. Because we are less tied to conventional family structures, gays are also more apt to be self-employed or at least somewhat outside the corporate structures that run America. This again keeps us from the big money strata that gay marketers see us in. The unfortunate fact is that very little of our vaunted "creativity" leads to the big bucks that both many gay media people, as well as homophobic gay-baiters, want to attribute to us.

The new thing in gay baiting is to establish "gay inner circles," the Lavender Mafias, that are supposed to run "vital" parts of the American economy like . . . fashion and show business. Since what really runs both of these enterprises are conservative banking interests who put up the money behind the shows, queers are for the most part still swabbing the decks-and guess who owns the fleet?

Those gay media figures in fashion and show business who are "out," for whatever reason, usually find that being this way does not conflict business-wise, and if necessary they can soft-pedal it when the time comes. In other words, we are not seeing any sort of "major" merger in the gay community of art, fashion, and social change, although there are a few important outposts. I would include among them Ellen DeGeneris, who has shown that it is possible to come out on network television and not be blown off the map (at least immediately). Ellen's impact has been stunning, but like Tracey Ullman and Sandra Bernhardt, comedians who if they are not "out" are certainly out there, commercial television, when pressed, will find suitable ways to marginalize her.

Regardless though of the (questionable) success of gay marketing, its real problem is that it satisfies nothing in the gay psyche. But a great number of men and women who are in the process (as most of American society is) of retracting from any threatening form of consciousness still want to be sold on it. They want to see that the blatant homoeroticism that currently sells everything from underwear to plumbing fixtures is making the world more "comfortable" (one of those beloved watchwords left to us from the 80s) for us.

Although I love watching pictures of near-naked men sell anything, I realize that mostly what these images do is hammer us back into a closet of surrounding non-sexuality. In other words, your "wife" is supposed to get turned on to them. Not you. Although the images are undeniably homoerotic-in fact sometimes they are down right molten-they are placed in front of a society that still wants to be in complete denial about gay sex. So men who get turned on to them are considered neutered. They don't exist. Heterosexuality is seen as the big ticket for selling anything, and when this form of sexuality is questioned or not "completed" (usually as in one man + one or more women), the sale is seen not to be made.

This translates simply enough as: "I have 'straight' sex, therefore I am." One of the constant joke forms on TV is still the ancient "'normal'-gay-who-is-taken-to-be-queer-but-isn't" format. Only when his hetero-ness is confirmed is the sale value of the show, as far as selling it both to the sponsor and the audience, validated. It is only then that we realize we are watching a real comedy. Jerry Seinfeld's nebeshy buddy, George, played by Jason Alexander, went through this format several times a season. In each episodes, the audience got to watch George explode in denial, until the forces of normalcy (better known as "babes-aplenty") would wave back over him, and the comedy ends. Likewise, there are constant sitcom jokes about hetero couples who have been together for as much as two weeks, and (is there something queer hiding in the basement?) still haven't got around to sex: "So, what's wrong with your boyfriend? He seems like such a regular guy."

"Gee, I don't know. Maybe he's just forgetful!"

These same shows frequently include gay characters who are embarrassments to gays, who see these characters as either cartoons or castrated. The shows are followed by commercials of male-stripper-type hunks peeling their shirts off, but ostensibly only for women. The hunks themselves are in a closet in which their sexuality is neutered: they are obliviously exercising, doing construction work, or horsing around. Just being "guys." To be otherwise would open them up too deeply for homosexual targeting or interpretations.

All this leads us back to gay men cutting themselves off from their real gayness, that is, from their important inner lives as men who are gay (and thankfully, don't just "happen to be that way," another lovely euphemism from the 80s). It also leads us back to straight men who, strangely enough, are doing the same thing: the straights have cut themselves off from their real maleness (something which too can not be bought, like they can buy an IBM clone). But they seem to have made this bargain with marketing sometime back, in order to get that ticket towards inclusion that they need and want so much.

Since this ticket has been denied gay men all along, one would think that we could now provide our own tickets: that we would make use of being outsiders; and for a very long time, we did. But human nature-in a conformist, market-driven society-makes this extremely difficult.

I am not sure that there is any way out of this cycle on a grand and large scale, but only on the scale of individuality. But I believe that gays (or queers in the new, queer-positive parlance) have to have their own saints (and gods) and these are not the men who provide us with Calvin Klein underwear or Ralph Lauren overalls.

We have to be pugnacious and combative in entering that place of our own selves, a place that is not always particularly "comfortable" to be. Although our relationships with friends and lovers are great comforts to us, these relationships do not come about as the rewards of marketing. ("You have all the right toys, so you get the right boys!") Sometimes, in fact, you have to be a little kick-ass, a little out there and taking no back-talk, to establish the "space" that is yours.

This space is not going to be given to you on TV, or validated by having Coors beer sold expressly to you. As an ever-ready queer bandit, I believe in using commercialism to get what I want (and saw some amazingly human touching and spirituality even in commerce-driven events like the Gay Games). But I know that commerce and marketing take over quickly. It's easy to lose sight of what you're doing or hoping to do, and I think that recently gay men have done that too often.

One of the things that we really get lost in is our fetishism. A fetish is a material object that stands in for a psychic (as in religious or sexual) part of you. For instance, deep inside you want to serve what you feel to be a "higher," more powerful Source. The idea turns you on, excites you, and moves you both spiritually and sexually: as it has done men for thousands of years. So, what do you do? You become a "slave." Instead of wanting to follow your Master across an ocean and then into a forest, you'll just follow him into a backroom and maybe lick his boots. (As if this were the hardest thing in the world to do.)

The slave has to have a uniform, so who will sell it? Currently, you can get all the slave rags you want mail (male?) order, or even on the Web. The slave wants his toys-all good slaves are supposed to have their toys, right?-so who will provide your manacles and lubricated rubber duckies? There are umpteen gay versions of "Toys-R-Us," so that won't be a problem, either. What follows then is that the slave-who only has so much time, heart, and energy left-will become a slave to his own uniform and toys; and not to the heartfelt Master he seeks.

A wonderful example of this are the White Parties and Black Parties, which started out, about twenty years ago, as druggy, sexy, communal affairs. Now, the question is: will you get your tickets through Ticketmaster (which seems to have become the final Master in gay life), or pay 40% more at the door? On Christopher Street in New York I heard two men talking about the most recent incarnation of the Black Party: "Are you going?" "No, baby, I'm blacked out. The party's become so expensive, so organized and over-produced, why bother? It doesn't feel like its for me anymore."

Anything that can be externalized, of course, will be sold. Christ had to throw the money-changers who sold sacrifices at the Temple out of it. So it seems like there has always been a big market in selling our fetishes back to us. But when externalized and sold, our fetishes become "tired" quickly and lose all their psychic functions. All of the energy and magic that we want them to have, dies. Instead it would be much better if psychically we constructed our fetishes ourselves. The need to serve, for instance, should go further than whips, boots, leather, and hankies. The need to master should go further than standing rigidly in bars.

We have to go deeper with these things, into the fires that forged them and then bring them back out. We do this again through what I have referred to previously as the gay work. This work is inner and psychically, as well as physically, involving. One aspect that is important about the work is our sense of flowing with it. That sense of "flow" that artists talk about (that time dissolves for them while they are working; that they, in the process of doing their work, become such a part of it that they feel temporarily lost in time) is also a hallmark of the gay work. It is the sense, finally, of being fulfilled by submission to this work.

This sense of "flow"-of releasing ourselves into the larger, psychic channel of the work-is something that cannot be bought and externalized. It is part of the truly humbling (and yet elevating) process of submission that is a deep component of the gay mythos. It is at the core of a psychic need that gay marketing can do so little to satisfy. Mostly what the marketing does, then, is let us know that there is a need which is not being fulfilled.

The gay work is an important part of an underground element in the lives of gay men and I would like to keep it that way: uncommercialized. Only this way can we see past the toys and the marketing, and connect with each other and ourselves. If we do not keep this underground element in our lives (an element that is rooted in a tribal consciousness that cannot be externalized), we will simply be playing with the same toys over and over again, and edging closer to nowhere with them. In many ways, I find this more upsetting than being in the closet ever was, as gay men find themselves being neutered by gay marketing, instead of being excited by it, a stage that we passed through quickly.

One of the sadder outcomes of all of this is that many gay organizations now must get on the marketing bandwagon or perish. Some of this results in linking themselves with corporate sponsors, as in the case of gay choruses, performance groups, or athletic events; or hiring marketers in the case of community groups. This puts groups within the "12-second sound bite" category of trying to sell themselves both to the corporate world and the community. The rationale for this is that we are living in an era of professionalism (and constantly escalating "professional expenses": when the "professionals" get in, expenses go up). You can no longer do a "Hey-kids-let's-put-on-a-Community-Center!" if you want anything to happen.

But another outcome is that the "market" (translation: you and I) that has already been bludgeoned by various forms of gay commercialism, starts to turn itself off to our own causes. "Oh, no, not another AIDS benefit!" "Oh, no-the Community Center wants money again and it's sending out this slick letter to get it!" So we are no longer even a community, but a market. And everything ends up in the trash, including what may be an important stake in your own life.

A friend of mine who had spent the last seven years in community involvement told me, "In the gay community it is now dog-eat-dog. People are tired of being hit up for money. They're tired of having things sold to them. They can't even look at each other." I asked him what he thought was the answer. "I think," he said, "we have to get the big picture right. We get caught up in all the details, and then we stop looking at each other."

I completely agreed with him. It brought me back to my basic premise: Yesterday I was a queer. Now I am a gay consumer.

I think I preferred it when I was just a queer.

Perry Brass's newest book, How to Survive Your Own Gay Life, from which this piece was adapted, will be published in August. The Harvest, his gay science fiction novel dealing with cloning and the market in body parts, has recently been named a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award in Gay Science Fiction.