Gay marketeers - gay journalism

When first started working as an openly lesbian journalist, there were hardly any out women in non-gay publications. Most everyone who was out was restricted to volunteer papers like Womanews and Gay Community News. At that time, being an out lesbian journalist meant paying a high professional price. As my grandmother would say, there was no money in it. As a result, the gay press, with a few exceptions like The Advocate, was run by disorganized but community-based collectives. If you could survive the collective, you could probably get your article published. Traditionally, people on professional journalism tracks stayed in the closet while the gay enterprises that had no professional future were left to the communities.

Today, gay journalism is a highly controlled and rigid phenomenon. Most of the glossy gay magazines or mainstream magazines with significant gay content subscribe to uniform styles, narrow scopes of coverage, and a sparse collection of opinions. Even though the idea of homosexuality has more social visibility, the spectrum of gay and lesbian opinion and experience represented in the media is far more narrow now than it was fifteen years ago.

In an effort to win advertising from producers of prominent luxury items, like Absolut Vodka and Kenneth Cole shoes, the glossy gay press represents its readers to advertisers as people with large discretionary incomes. Some gay magazines, in their prospectuses, claim readers with an average income of $55,000 a year. They claim gay men are the "most brand-loyal consumers" in the country.

The vast majority of gay and lesbian people end up with no representation of their lives in the media. Instead, we are bombarded by the A-list, white, male, buff, wealthy stereotype that becomes the image, in the American mind, of the average gay person. Even more importantly, it becomes the standard by which gay people increasingly measure ourselves.

This process works slightly differently for lesbian readers than for gay men because, as Esther Kaplan has observed, there is no standard preferable body type in lesbian culture. The female images in glossy gay magazines are almost all extrapolated from the gay male model. So women readers don't see female images that refer to their lived experience or collective fantasy.

In addition to market-driven changes, there has been a transformation of acceptable intellectual practice within the framework of gay print media. For a while, wild debate was once considered desirable, but it is now frowned upon and repressed. Criticism and disagreement have been replaced by the smooth veneer of a commodity. Our leaders are no longer intellectuals but marketeers.

I attribute this to the emergence of a gay management class - a coterie of people who went to the same universities, who are not exactly artists or activists themselves, but who have more power than any individual artist or activist can have. They have this power by being part of a corporate media organization, and they use it to contain individual voices and to market communities.

I know a lot of people who believe that there is a kind of class war emerging within the gay and lesbian world - that the gay conservatives and the gay pure capitalists will simply push the rest of us out of the picture with a kind of de-facto blacklist. I'm not sure I agree with this analysis, but I think it's worth examining. Obviously, people with radical political beliefs are being increasingly marginalized within the gay community and are losing access to platforms, publications, and income.

It's hard to ignore the increasing similarity between the mainstream media and the gay press's versions of gay life. This dissolution of dissent has a lot to do with the commercialization of homosexual life.

Publishers of AIDS-related periodicals will tell you that the glossy, national gay magazines have virtually abandoned AIDS advocacy. "There is still a sense in the glossy gay magazines that AIDS is downmarket - bad for the image," says Sean Strub, publisher of POZ, a magazine for people with HIV. At the same time, as more and more AIDS-related publications are appearing, people with AIDS are increasingly targeted as a consumer group.

"People who identify as HIV-positive are an evolving market for consumer goods," says Dan Mulryan of Mulryan/Nash, a New York gay-owned advertising firm. "Their spending patterns are largely influenced by their HIV status. People with HIV are not going to spend their days worrying about IRAs."

"There is an accelerated consuming pattern when people face their own mortality," says Strub. "They tend to have greater liquidity - at least for some time."

POZ has the most advertising of the current AIDS publications, and seems to target readers with significant discretionary income. One of the most noticeable characteristics of POZ is that the people featured in the magazine never look sick.

"The fact is," says Strub, "most people who are HIV-positive do not look sick."

Mulryan concurs. "People with HIV are living longer without symptoms than ever before."

In order to draw in advertising for recognized brand-name products, gay magazines have abandoned the sex ads that were for a long time their financial backbone. In gay and AIDS-related publications, this base of support has recently been replaced by ads for viaticals - companies that purchase the life-insurance policies of people with terminal illnesses at extraordinary levels of profit.

"Everyone realizes that viatical advertising is gruesome in some ways," says Mulryan. "But they do provide a service - whether it's completely moral is open to discussion." As for establishing an ethical rate of profit from this industry, Mulryan says, "Whatever the market will bear is ethical."

Asked to cite the most recent significant advance in the fight against AIDS, Strub is enthusiastic: "The home HIV test kit that we are developing is going to transform the epidemic," he says. "It will double the number of people who know they are positive." Strub believes there are currently more people who don't know they are positive than those who do. What he doesn't say is that the home test kit will significantly increase this newly identified target audience of infected consumers - HIV-positive asymptomatics who are ready to liquefy their assets.

In some ways, the gay world is becoming more and more like a novel by Kafka. The people who pioneered it are being shunted aside. The ones who have seized it are primarily interested in money and power - two things I never associated with being openly gay. And the whole thing is constructed around desperate lies, illusions, and misrepresentations.

Contrary to the privileged image flaunted by the gay press and the rightwing alike, gay people are an economically punished social sector and are increasingly geographically isolated.

A recent front-page article in The New York Times (which, frankly, now has better gay coverage than most of the gay press) reported that most U.S. cities now have at least one gay neighborhood. Now that gay people want to come out, they feel that they must live in segregation in order to do so safely. In other words, gay people's increasing sense of entitlement and self-esteem is dramatically in conflict with straight people's entrenched homophobia. In the past, when we were closeted, we could live more safely in mixed neighborhoods. Exile is the price of demanding equity. Buried in that same article was a note about a recent study revealing that homosexual men earn about 12 percent less than heterosexual men, and lesbians earn about 5 percent less than heterosexual women (who in turn earn 40 percent less than straight men).

Yet, according to the prospectus the Mulryan/Nash advertising firm uses to attract clients: "Gay consumers tend to be better educated and earn higher incomes than the average American." Mulryan/Nash backs up this assertion with a series of tables comparing gays to average Americans: "61 percent of gay people have a four-year college degree, as opposed to 18 percent of average Americans. ... 43 percent of gay people work out in a gym as opposed to 8 percent of Americans.... 64 percent of gay people drink sparkling water as opposed to 17 percent of Americans. . . ." And here's a good one: "43 percent of gay people are enrolled in frequent-flyer programs as opposed to 6 percent of Americans."

The prospectus goes on to claim, "Perhaps even more than their sheer size is the prominent position gay men and lesbians hold in the fields of fashion, design, media, and the arts. They occupy a special sphere of influence and shape national consumer tastes. Gay men have been credited with popularizing blow-dryers, painter's pants, the gentrification of urban neighborhoods, disco music, Absolut Vodka, Levi's 501 jeans, Doc Marten boots, and Santa Fe home-style furnishings."

Here's my favorite part: "Many gay men and women are separated from their families ... therefore the mechanisms that normally lead people to choose a product are absent."

In other words, since our families don't want us, and few national advertisers target us, ad campaigns in gay magazines give gay readers "an immense obligation to support advertisers who support them." Virgin Airlines placed one ad in OUT and received 250 letters of thanks. The pitch is clear - our families may not accept us, but Virgin Airlines does.

We are coming into a very difficult time in America, when conformity and personal advancement are valued above all else, even in the gay world. The choice for gay journalists today seems to be between speaking out and hurting one's own career, or else setting aside any interest in the human condition. Sometimes it seems as if the best long-term strategy is to try to outlive the current historical moment.

But you can't just sit by and wait, because life is not worth living unless you are about something larger than yourself. Ideally, progressive gay people should be able to take a fully integrated and respected position in the broader left. But, until that welcome mat is out, my hope is that we can resist the homogeneity and commodification of gay culture by maintaining democratic discourse and diversity of opinion.

Sarah Schulman is the author of six novels and one nonfiction book, "My American History: Lesbian and Gay Life During the Reagan/Bush Years."

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