Marketing with Authenticity During Pride

Pride Month is here again. I know this because come June 1, my gay superpowers are supercharged. My eyes glow with a rainbow sheen and I can fly — just like everyone else among our communities of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, questioning, intersex, asexual, and two-spirit (LGBTQIA2S+) folk.

Okay, I may have exaggerated a little — or a lot.

Superpowers aside, I have mixed feelings about Pride Month, both as a marketer and a gay person. Yes, I appreciate the spirit of inclusivity, but on the other hand, I get suspicious. I didn’t quite know how to put those doubts into words until I attended the Pride Talk With SMPS for A/E/C Marketing Professionals. In this webinar, Russell Pollard of Framework Leadership addressed the issue head-on:

It all comes down to authenticity.

Authenticity is critical to any marketing campaign because we are selling more than a product — we are selling trust. And we earn that trust by practicing gender and sexual inclusivity not just in June, but the whole year round in a way that resonates with our clients, and with our current and future employees.

One way to frame gender and sexual inclusivity is to think about those standard information forms, the kind you might see at a doctor’s office. As you fill them out, what goes through your mind, besides “I just want to see the doctor”? Doesn’t it sometimes feel a little invasive? For some of those yes/no questions, don’t you wish you could just answer, “It’s complicated”?

Let’s fill out a form together, and think about how our identities influence our responses. We’ll skip over some parts, like the date, address, our date of birth, or why we’re seeing the doctor today.

Name

I love my name. Especially my middle name — Malloy. It was my grandmother’s birth name, and it’s fairly unique out here on the West Coast. If I were a pop star in the tradition of Prince, Cher, or Madonna, I’d perform as Malloy.

But what about folks such as trans and non-binary people who don’t identify with their given names?

According to a 2021 YouGov and Totaljobs report, 54% said their employers don’t include staff training on how to support trans employees while 65% of trans people hide their gender status at work. To build a culture of inclusivity, the report offers several points of advice, including the following:

·       Don’t assume individuals are out at work or that each person’s transition will look the same.

·       Communicate your DEI values, and be representative through your recruitment material.

·       De-gender language in job descriptions and ads, employment contracts, and application forms.

Sex

Showing up as yourself is a courageous act, and if someone trusts you enough to show up as who they are, will you banish them from cool kids’ table, as in high school, or will you offer them a seat?

For simplicity’s sake, I identify as a gay male, but my identity is hardly that tidy, and like the poet Walt Whitman, I’d prefer declaring, “I am large, I contain multitudes.” As it is, because of my voice, I have about a 50/50 chance of being called “sir” or “ma’am” by a call center receptionist — and I don’t really care so long as my issue gets resolved!

But sex and gender identity are more than issues of mere convenience — they’re issues of survival. And yes, looking from the outside, it may feel like things are moving too quickly, but more often than not, it’s more of a matter of perception. Girls supposedly play with dolls, while boys play with “action figures,” but the biggest difference is how the toys are marketed.

As it turns out, Nature laughs at binaries. Consider the asexual (or parthenogenic) lizards, bees, and sharks. Or those beguiling sex-changing fish. And nothing compares with the fungus kingdom — to build a dating app for the split-gill mushroom, you’d need to account for more than 23,000 different sexes!

Pronoun preferences may also feel new, but some languages like Yoruba and Tagalog don’t even have gendered pronouns. Other cultures observe third genders, like Native-American two-spirit people, South Asian hijira, and Thai kathoeys.

With that in mind, here are a few words of advice on pronoun use:

·       If you’re comfortable, feel free to use your pronouns in your email signature and profiles.

·       Let people choose to disclose their pronouns. By insisting too strongly, you may force a person to out themselves unwillingly, while others believe the very practice of using gendered pronouns is overly constricting, as Amherst College professor Jen Manion discusses in this essay.

Marital Status, Race & Ethnicity

Part of Pride Month is acknowledging how far we’ve come and how far we still have to go. As a happily married multiethnic person in a multiracial same-sex union, my marriage would not be a legal reality without the sacrifices and struggles of past civil rights advocates.

Gender and sexual inclusion succeeds only through an intersectional approach. Coined by UCLA Professor Kimberlé Crenshaw, intersexuality is:

The complex, cumulative way in which the effects of multiple forms of discrimination (such as racism, sexism, and classism) combine, overlap, or intersect, especially in the experiences of marginalized individuals or groups.

Consider the term latinx, for example. Coined by English-speaking people as a gender-neutral alternative to latino and latina, as an article in ReMezcla points out, it’s unpronounceable in Spanish. Consequently, among some invested Spanish-speaking communities, the term latine is being advanced instead.

To build an intersectional practice, remember:

·       Even with the best of intentions, we all have our blind spots.

·       It is important to listen first rather than imposing or assuming one-size-fits-all solutions.

·       Ask first rather than assuming a person’s preferred identifier.

A few concluding thoughts before I fly away . . .

I recently attended a Pride event in Monroe, WA — the town’s second Pride event hosted by the Monroe Equity Council. Pride events are now popping up in the most unexpected of places, making me feel optimistic for younger generations who get to grow up in far more accepting environments, with greater legal protections, and with an expanded vocabulary to express their identities. Yet, with recent and upcoming court rulings and some worrying legislation across the U.S., our rights also feel tenuous.

As marketers, we have an opportunity to challenge the A/E/C industry and work within our firms to offer the assurance of safe, welcoming, and inclusive workspaces for our coworkers and their relatives within the LGBTQIA2S+ communities. This is how we build marketing campaigns of inclusion that truly resonate with authenticity.

Resources

Below are some resources for editors and writers as well as books and podcasts on LGBTQIA2S+ issues. The best way to understand a perspective other than your own is a simple conversation. But other times, that’s just not possible. The books and podcasts listed below range from academic to pop culture, some safe for all audiences and others requiring discretion. Some will address uncomfortable personal truths. But each includes valuable, insightful conversations about a variety of identities and experiences.

References for Writers and Editors

Sex, sexuality & gender — which is which?

Johns Hopkins University offers an excellent comprehensive glossary, paraphrased below:

·       Sex: Your sex assigned as birth, as typically defined in medical forms. Are your chromosomes xx, xy, or something else — male, female, or intersex?

·       Sexuality: The complex ranges and series of components that make us sexual beings, and which influences our sexual orientations (gay, lesbian, bisexual, pansexual, asexual, straight, and more).

·       Gender: Binary sociological construct associated with femaleness or maleness. Gender identities are how we perceive ourselves — male, female, non-binary, and more.

Books

·       The Queen's English — Chloe O. Davis

·       The A-Z of Gender and Sexuality — Morgan Lev Edward Holleb

·       The ABC's of LGBT+ —Ashley Mardell

Websites

·       LGBTQIA+ Glossary

·       GLAAD Media Reference Guide

·       NLGJA: The Association of LGBTQ Journalists Stylebook on LGBTQ Terminology

Books & Podcasts

Books

·       Stone Butch Blues — historical fiction about life as a butch lesbian in 1970s America by Leslie Feinberg

·       The Invention of Heterosexuality — a historical look on where the concept of heterosexuality originated by Jonathan Ned Katz

·       Out in the Past: Gay and Lesbian History from 1869 to the Present — Neil Miller

Podcasts

·       Attitudes! — pop culture mixed with women’s and LGBTQ+ rights hosted by comedians Erin Gibson and Bryan Safi

·       Big Mood, Little Mood — relationship advice by trans host Daniel M. Lavery, co-founder of The Toast

·       Disability After Dark — disability and sex-positive stories hosted by queer disability advocate Andrew Gurza

·       Getting Curious — interviews with experts and academics led by Queer Eye host Jonathan Van Ness

·       LGBTQ&A — long-form interviews by Jeffrey Masters of The Advocate

·       Making Gay History — LGBTQIA2S+ civil rights history and biographies hosted by Eric Marcus

·       Nancy — queer stories and conversations with an Asian American perspective, hosted by Tobin Low and Kathy Tu

·       The Read — pop culture and queer conversations with an African American perspective, hosted by Kid Fury and Crissle West

·       Queer as Fact: A Queer History Podcast — history podcast hosted by Melbourne-based academics Alice, Eli, Irene and Jason

·       QUEERY — long-form interviews and conversations hosted by lesbian stand-up comic Cameron Esposito

·       Still Processing — pop culture and queer conversations with an African American perspective, hosted by Jenna Wortham and Wesley Morris of the New York Times

·       Why Won’t You Date Me? — long-form interviews with an emphasis on sex positivity and body positivity, hosted by comedian Nicole Byer