The Black Gay Dollar: Ignored and Overlooked
by Herndon Davis
Although a vast sleeping giant, amazingly the black gay community has scarcely been acknowledged and rarely marketed to as a lucrative market segment; at least not until now. As an explosion of black gay themed books, magazines, movies and television shows march onto the societal forefront, America’s black gay presence is beginning to make waves within the world of advertising and beyond.All Gays Are Not The SameFar too often the estimated $610 billion U.S. gay/lesbian market is tracked without significant regard to race or ethnicity while vast assumptions are made that all gays are basically the same, having similar interests and needs. Hence one of the major challenges gay African Americans and other gays of color have, not being recognized as a viable marketing niche. So who’s to blame, for such a vast oversight of gay people of color? Are racists marketers really at fault? In actuality the answer is a bit more complicated and two-fold in nature. Ironically, this situation lies parallel to what exists today within the mainstream community where there’s a lack of ethnic diversity and outreach to communities of color. Further, when everyone sitting at the gay advertising decision table all look the same, what usually occurs is more of the same type of gay advertising and marketing directives.“Strategic marketing to the gay community is still young, and arguably less than ten years old. Segmenting a very hard to reach population will take some time and expertise to map given the tools available to market researchers” stresses Bob Witeck, CEO of Witeck-Combs Communications, Inc., an advertising firm specializing in the LGBT marketplace.The Commercial Closet, a non-profit organization which seeks to educate and influencecorporate advertisers on LGBT inclusion and stereotypes stated in an online commentary that “few advertisers are yet at a point of being sophisticated enough about the market to begin worrying about anything other than medium-aged white men. Lesbians are widely left out of marketing plans, let alone sub-demographics such as people of color, youth, mature gays, couples, gay-parent families, and more.”Another reason for such a dearth of ethnic gay marketing is the fact that gay minority populations are not nearly as open about their sexual orientation as their white counterparts, hence making it more difficult to track and market to them directly.Earl D. Fowlkes, Jr, President/CEO of the International Federation of Black Prides, agrees and compares it to the “duality of race/ethnicity and sexual identify much like the duality of being Black and American that W.E.B. DuBois wrote about one hundred years ago in his book, “The Soul of Black Folks”. Often times we feel that we have to choose between being either Black or LGBT just like many of us felt that we had to choose to be Black or American. Only during the past few years have many Black LGBT people realized that we can be both Black and LGBT, and celebrate as well as acknowledge both which explains part of the growth of Black Pride over the past ten years.” Having to overcome racism and historical disadvantage is hard enough, but to also self-identify as gay/lesbian carries with it a double challenged existence, triple challenged if you count gay women of color.Witeck concurs, stating “anecdotally we see and understand that self-labels are more problematic for many gay black males, and prefer to avoid the identity as gay when seeking sexual intimacy. The "down low" lifestyle certainly suggests there are identity and community issues that African-Americans address that many white people do not. However, closet behaviors are certainly not isolated to any population or race.”The 2005 HIM (Hyperion Interactive Media) guide, which tracks the gay/lesbian marketplace confirms the difficulty of self-identifying as a gay person of color stating that “the mix of family pressure, machismo, and other cultural influences each have played their role in keeping these groups more tightly in the closet…” Hence, the face and voice of gay activism seen and heard most often on the evening news is almost exclusively that of gay white men who ironically still experience “white privilege” despite their challenged status as gay. Often to be gay and white still brings with it a level of access that gay ethnic minorities have never experienced. Find a Way or Create OneIronically, the lack of advertising/marketing attention towards the black gay/lesbian community and other gay communities of color has in several ways helped to bolster their own abilities to serve themselves. Back during the days of racial segregation when Jim Crow laws kept black people out of many public establishments, black communities across the country were forced to ban together in order to create their own economic centers. The more racially segregated the city, the more vibrant the black economic community, hence the creation of thriving black city districts such as Wall Street of Oklahoma City and the bustling corridor of Atlanta’s Auburn Avenue. In an eerily parallel fashion, the same thing has now occurred within the black gay/lesbian community and in other gay communities of color who feel shut out by their white gay counterpart initiatives.As a result, this has given birth and rise to numerous black gay themed books, magazines, movies and television shows that now proliferate the internet other venues across the country. Publications such as Clikque Magazine, TV show ‘s such as Noah’s Arc, and movies such as Brother to Brother, and Ski Trip, and the thousands of black gay/lesbian themed books published over several years now appear through word searches on Amazon.com, Barnes and Nobles, and Yahoo search engines websites. These dramatic facts definitely reflect a community of consumers of black gay themed products and services. In fact savvy black gay entrepreneurs already realize this and are standing to fill in the gap. From the black gay owned B
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