Hand in hand – LGBT rights movement and commerce

Posted: May 2nd, 2010 | Author: admin | Filed under: International, LGBT rights | 1 Comment »

There is always a lot of criticism and concerns, when the LGBT rights movement and commerce meet. Especially in queer and gender study essays, you find a fear of a sell-out of the movement. But if we look back in current gay history, we can see, that the LGBT movement and commercialization walked hand in hand. In two simple formulas: more gay rights = more gay commerce and more gay commerce = more gay rights. But why is this so? This could be answered with “visibility” and “acceptance”. Before the gay rights movement came up, homosexuals were simply not visible as a target group for businesses, because they had to hide due to backward legislation. The gay rights movement lead to a change of this laws, which lead also to more acceptance in the public. This acceptance is also important for businesses. Even nowadays some companies are afraid of being identified LGBT-friendly, mainly because this could scare of conservative customer groups. Fortunately, many companies are open to gay customers today. In my opinion, this is also a benefit for the community, since advertisements for LGBT lead to more visibility in public and, again to more acceptance.
In the best case, a company does not only try to make new gay customers, but also support the causes of the LGBT movement itself. Yes, I mean with money. Let´s face the truth, this movement needs money. An example was the whole anti-gay propaganda around Prop 8. We can only fight this media-dirt-campaigns with own campaigns and constitutional lawsuits. Both are very expensive.
One example, where commercial interests and support of gay rights meet, is parship. Parship is Europe’s leading dating service for people in search for a serious relationship. There is a straight version of parship, but also gay-parship. Below you find their latest advertisement for gay-parship. The main difference of this dating service is, that the members are aiming for a serious, long-term relationship. For many gay and lesbian couples, the last step, an equal marriage is still missing. This is also the topic of the head line “In love, engaged and now?”. To make an equal marriage finally possible and not only some second class civil partnership, parship supports “The Whit Knot”, a non-profit organization, which was founded in response to Prop 8 in November 2008.