Ian Johnson, Out Now
September 20, 2007
Last year Time magazine talked about a global increase in gay and lesbian advertising and marketing.
This year, Variety magazine had an interesting article on lesbian and gay marketing and advertising developments.
Now it's Newsweek magazine's turn. Newsweek ran a very interesting story under the heading of 'Gay Rights Gain Ground Around The Globe' in the current issue about how the rise of gay and lesbian community rights is taking place in so many regions across the world.
This has major implications for companies and marketers, especially global brands.
As gays and lesbians gain additional rights in the area of gay and lesbian equality, social acceptance is increased and corporate comfort with gay marketing initiatives is improved.
That in turn increases the gay marketing opportunities--and also the risk of competitor noise in the gay market space.
The Newsweek piece makes some good observations, especially about the current rise of gay and lesbian rights in places like South America, and you may find it interesting to read or skim the article.
Here is an extract:
Legal in Unlikely Places
Now mature in the west, gay power is growing worldwide, even in the land of machismo.
Sept. 17, 2007 - After eight years together, Gilberto Aranda and Mauricio List walked into a wedding chapel in the Mexico City neighborhood of Coyoacán last April and tied the knot in front of 30 friends and relatives. For the newlyweds, the ceremony marked the fruit of the gay-rights movement's long struggle to gain recognition in Mexico. The capital city had legalized gay civil unions only the month before. "After all the years of marches and protests," says Aranda, 50, a state-government official, "a sea change was coming."
The sea change spreads beyond Mexico City, a cosmopolitan capital that is home to a thriving community of artists and intellectuals.
The growing maturity of the gay-rights movement in the West is having a marked effect on the developing world.
In the United States, the Republican Party is in trouble in part because it has made a fetish of its opposition to gay marriage.
At least some gays in big cities like New York question why they are still holding "pride" parades, as if they were still a closeted minority and not part of the Manhattan mainstream.
Since 2001, Western European countries like Belgium, the Netherlands and Spain have gone even farther than the United States, placing gay and lesbian partners on the same legal footing as their heterosexual counterparts.
And now, the major developing powers of Asia, Latin America and Africa are following the liberal road—sometimes imitating Western models, sometimes not—but in all cases setting precedents that could spread to the remaining outposts of official homophobia.
Western models also helped inspire South Africa to legalize civil unions in November 2006, thus becoming the first country in the developing world to do so. In China, the trend goes back to the climate of economic reform that took hold in the 1980s, ending the persecution of the era of Mao Zedong, who considered homosexuals products of the "moldering lifestyle of capitalism."
Key people have hastened the trend in some countries. Some activists single out a few political celebrities for de-stigmatizing their cause, including Nelson Mandela, who readily embraced British actor Sir Ian McKellen's suggestion that he support a ban on discrimination on the basis of sexual preference in South Africa's first post-apartheid constitution.
The biggest and perhaps most surprising change is in Latin America, the original home of machismo. In 2002, the Buenos Aires City Council approved Latin America's first-ever gay-civil-union ordinance, and same-gender unions are the law of the land in four Brazilian states today.
By the year-end, Colombia could become the first country in Latin America to grant gay and lesbian couples full rights to health insurance, inheritance and social-security benefits.
And even Cuba has turned a corner. In the 1960s and early 1970s homosexuals in Cuba were blacklisted or even banished to forced-labor camps along with Jehovah's Witnesses, Catholic priests and other so-called social misfits. HIV patients were locked away in sanitariums as recently as 1993. Several Cuban cities now host gay and lesbian film festivals.
Tolerance, however, by no means spans the globe. Homosexuality remains taboo throughout the greater Middle East. In most of the Far East, laws permitting gay and lesbian civil unions are many years if not decades away. In Latin America, universal acceptance of homosexuality is a long way off. Jamaica is a hotbed of homophobia.
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