There’s the pink pound and the pink dollar, but do we have a rose-tinted rand to go with them? Mike Metelits looks into gay buying power
Pink money is either common enough to be a stereotype, or stereotypical enough that we think it’s common. It is the perception that gays make, have, invest and spend more money than the rest of us poor slobs.
It’s a fact of social life in London, Sydney, Toronto and San Francisco, but does South Africa have a pink rand to go with the pink pound and the various pink dollars? What specific dynamics affect any rose-tinting of the local currency? And what, if anything, are marketers and the community itself doing with all that dosh?
Reader surveys from gay and lesbian publications around the world shed light on the earning and spending habits of this population, which at first glance looks like an advertiser’s dream. They are wealthy, active, style-conscious, travel often and eat out regularly, according to the United States’s Advocate and Australia’s Sydney Star Observer.
The Advocate’s readers’ average annual household income was $83 500 in 1997. That’s R517 700 for those of you without access to handheld calculators and the latest exchange rate. Ninety-four per cent of their readers attended college, and 89% are employed. Sixty-six per cent own their own homes, and at least 54% of them travel abroad in a typical year. They follow exercise programmes, purchase insurance and have investment accounts and a variety of well- used credit cards. Similar surveys show similar results in Australia and England.
But is the South African gay community characterised by the same kind of demographics?
At first glance, the answer seems to be yes. Bryan Robinson, publisher of OUTright, a local gay-oriented publication, published a survey in 1995 showing similar results. He also sees the trend of gay market expansion continuing into the present.
Robinson’s survey showed 73% of his readers would buy products advertised in the magazine. Respondents also earned well above average salaries compared to the white working class. Twenty-six per cent of OUTright readers earned more than R98 000 that year, where only 5% of the white working class earned that much.
Clothing, travel, toiletries and luxury goods were high on the shopping lists of Robinson’s readers, along with a variety of alcoholic beverages. Forty-four per cent of the respondents were aged between 25 and 34, just about the age when most of us settle into purchasing a lifestyle.
While the initial survey was in 1995, Robinson sees the trends continuing up to the present and into the future. “Things have changed in the past five years,” he says. “The gay community has become more open and more comfortable spending money in gay- friendly industries like travel.”
Information available in publications and networking have expanded gay-friendly businesses from “gay-friendly guest houses to psychologists and financial services”, Robinson notes. This is something of a worldwide trend.
A South African bank is rumoured to be planning a gay-oriented credit card, with membership available through the Internet, providing discounts at participating businesses and donations to the annual Gay Pride March. In the US, Bank of America, based in San Francisco, has stood out by seeking diversity in its client base and staff, despite rumoured pressures from merger partners.
Advertisers have jumped on the bandwagon. The Advocate’s survey found airlines, liquor brands, the film industry, the music industry, publishers, financial service firms, theatres, travel services firms, health and fitness products and a host of other industries were advertised frequently in their pages. South African marketers are beginning to tap this market, trying to build up brand loyalty and bonding through advertising.
This exemplifies the networking Robinson talks about. “Networking is the key to building consumer power in the gay community,” he says.
Another example is in tourism. According to the British newspaper The Guardian, South Africa is the most fashionable gay tourism destination. Cape Town’s thriving gay community and good exchange rates bring Europeans here in droves. The network of gay- friendly guest houses, clubs, restaurants and bars, as well as travel firms, enable spenders of the pink pound to deposit large sums of money in relative comfort.
There are twists to the phenomenon in South Africa, and they revolve around the predictable social dividers of race, class and gender.
Race and class are the great divide in South Africa, and they put their stamp on the pink rand pretty effectively. Around the world, pink money is a middle-class, if not upper-middle class, feature. Large swathes of the US, Australia and Britain are middle class. But the middle class in South Africa is quite small in comparison to the population, and almost exclusively white.
Sexual orientation has no respect for these social divisions. “The bulk of South Africa’s gay population is black and in the townships,” says Martin Nel, editor of q online, , a local gay-oriented website with travel information, news and lifestyle features. Nel may be one of the only editors in South Africa worried that his readership is too white and too rich. “The queens in the townships don’t have the Internet, so they can’t get to us unless we move into print.”
Q’s reader survey showed two respondents out of 85 making less than R3 000 per month. Robinson, too, notes that “unfortunately our niche market is the white middle class”. However, Robinson expects the same trends that have made the white pink rand a market force to spread to the townships. Again he stresses networking, “Networking is the key to an out gay black community.” He feels the difference between white gays and black ones is a matter of time and the spread of business networks to include gay shebeens, for example.
Nel completely disagrees. “Networking is not happening,” he says, and puts it down to “total racism in the gay community”. He believes most of the gay money initiatives currently at work in the market are “gold rush” schemes, rather than community-building exercises.
Jonathan Berger, who co-ordinates legal education and advice for the National Coalition for Gay and Lesbian Equality, agrees that a pink rand exists, but also sees it as a restricted phenomenon. “People make assumptions that everyone in the community has money,” he says, but the reality is that the majority of South African gays face high unemployment, homelessness, and non-acceptance in their communities.
These are not the conditions for fruitful business networking. Advertisers and marketers go where the money is, and the money is not in the townships. Berger clarifies: “The queer market is targeted at the white middle-class market, including publications.” It is, for Berger, a very restricted phenomenon, without a lot of mechanisms for integrating the community in business terms.
Nel notes that even the Gay Pride Committee was at least de facto exclusionary until last year. Given that the Pride March is one of the inclusionary mechanisms, Robinson sees questions arise about the extent of pink rand-related trends.
Yusoof Abdullah, an executive member of the Gay Pride Committee, sees the economy as a driving factor. “When the Pride after-party costs R130, lots of young black gay guys wonder if they can go,” he says.
Abdullah views the pink rand as a restricted phenomenon as well, but is hopeful the economy will eventually even things out. “Once the historical imbalances are redressed the gay economy will be more inclusive,” Abdullah notes.
Nonetheless, Abdullah doesn’t think the kind of business networking that Robinson anticipates is happening. They both agree that there’s a time lag involved, but Abdullah argues more persuasively for an underlying mechanism, the economy, which will make the networks happen. Economic improvements will empower more of the population, and thus the gay population, unless, he says, “people revert to the ethnic gay ghettoes they all grew up in”.