Here, Queer, and Going Shopping

Business, Not Politics: The Making of the Gay Market Katherine Sender, New York: Columbia University Press, 2004. xii + 311 pp.

Time was that when a fashion trend appeared among gay men in New York, it eventually made its way by not wholly transparent routes into the straight mainstream. The long sideburns sported by the boyish heartthrobs of Beverly Hills 90210 in the mid-1990s were already old news on Christopher Street and the avenues of Chelsea. Likewise goatees, shaved heads (helped along considerably by urban African American trendsetters), smooth and muscled upper bodies, white ribbed tanktops—only Kylie Minogue and sarongs seem to have eluded straight men. The delicious irony of watching frat boys dress like faggots was exceeded only by the knowledge that we urban sophisticates had already moved on to the next style.

These days things are quite different. As Katherine Sender ably illustrates in this compelling (if occasionally uneven) study, with the increasing visibility of lesbians and gay men, queers are as much an audience to be sold to—a market—as a source of new styles. The rise of glossy magazines like Deneuve (later Curve), Girlfriends, POZ, and the granddaddy of them all, Out, made the "gay market," which was still being defined and refined, a place where large corporations wanted to place their products.

Sender traces this development over the course of several decades, from the first expressions of gay power in the 1970s to the oppressive homophobia of the 1980s to the rehabilitation of queers in the public eye in the 1990s. A crucial part of her argument, and one of the important contributions that this book makes, is the insistence that gay consumer culture "is neither necessarily exploitative nor liberatory, but produces a complex relationship between people, products, identities, and communities," both identifying and producing a new concept of "gay community" (23). Business, Not Politics does not uncritically embrace the new commercialization of sexual difference: Sender is far too savvy to believe that visibility in the marketplace of things or ideas comes without serious compromise. But neither does she resort to a facile condemnation of the imbrication of queerness into the market as a force of homogeneity and assimilation.

As Sender effectively shows, advertisers and corporations have long felt ambivalent about lesbians and gay men as potential customers. One of this book's strengths is Sender's in-depth interviews with queer people in advertising and public relations who have often taken as their life's work the expansion of gay people's visibility in the marketplace, particularly in advertising, and at the same time the representation of queers as attractive consumers and of queer publications as appropriate venues for advertising campaigns. The diversity of voices among these marketing professionals is striking. While some see no downside to the marriage of gays and the market, believing that we can only gain from the appearance of mainstream product advertising in gay publications and of lesbian and gay people in mainstream media, others are apprehensive. The majority of Sender's interviewees have "complacently equated consumer visibility with political progress" (93), but a significant minority express reservations, particularly since many of the companies that have been most friendly to gay markets are tobacco and alcohol manufacturers, whose market share is shrinking elsewhere. Even when those advertisers are not connected to products for which they are desperate to find new consumers, several of Sender's respondents voice serious concern that gay identity is being identified with consumption rather than with some kind of political or sexual solidarity.

Sender expertly balances all of these responses to the growing visibility of lesbians and gay men in the marketplace in her discussion of a twelve-page advertorial insert coproduced in 1998 by Levi's Dockers and Out magazine. Featuring a variety of gay male "role models" (e.g., openly gay Latino actor Wilson Cruz), it combined product branding, inspirational stories, and a big...