At Alcohol Focus Scotland, we’ve been exploring the impact of alcohol marketing on different communities – and most recently, the LGBT+ community. Our latest report, Community Not a Commodity, brings together insights from conversations with LGBT+ people about their experiences of alcohol, the spaces where they socialise, and how they feel about alcohol marketing. As someone who is both a gay man and a public health advocate, this work has personal as well as professional significance for me. In this blog, I’ll reflect both on the findings of the report and what they tell us about how alcohol marketing intersects with LGBT+ identities – as well as my own perspective shaped by lived experience.
The LGBT+ community has a complicated relationship with alcohol, with which I am altogether too intimately familiar. Alcohol and its associated issues came close to destroying my life over a relatively short drinking career between ages 17 and 29. This covered a period before, during and after I came out as gay, began exploring my sexuality and community on the commercial gay scene and struggled, as so many LGBT+ people still do (myself included), with coming to terms with my sexuality and trying to navigate life in a world that didn’t feel like it had been built with people like us in mind.
Historically, alcohol has been closely intertwined with the LGBT+ community, with bars and nightclubs still among the main safe community spaces where we can go to meet others like ourselves and explore and shape our identities. LGBT+ bars and clubs have played a central role in our communities – and often a positive one. These community spaces are often owned and managed by LGBT+ community members and have played active roles in protest movements (e.g. the Stonewall riots) and public health interventions (especially during the AIDS crisis).
But there’s a darker side to our community’s relationship with alcohol. In part because of the predominance of bars and clubs as our primary community safe spaces, and in part due to other factors including the stress and trauma we experience as a result of historic, and sadly resurgent, LGBTphobia and the significantly worse mental and physical health outcomes that result – our community experiences far greater levels of alcohol harm than the rest of the population. So I am far from alone in my experience.
More recently, there’s been a newer kid on the block. Along with many other industries and organisations, as public attitudes towards LGBT+ people began to shift towards greater acceptance, the alcohol industry was also along for the ride.
As we entered the new century, alcohol companies began to drape themselves and their products in the rainbow flag, to ‘include’ us in their adverts and marketing campaigns, and attend, fund or sponsor our Pride events, charities and community groups. And how brilliant to see them join so many others in being so accepting and inclusive of LGBT+ people, no?
Well, that’s where it becomes a lot more complicated – or even perhaps quite seriously problematic.
Alcohol companies will say that they are genuinely committed to being LGBT+ accepting and inclusive and that representing us in their marketing, or sponsoring our events, charities and community groups shows a genuine commitment to those ends. They may even implement LGBT+ inclusive policies and practices internally, and have openly LGBT+ staff working for them (though in recent months we’ve seen companies of all shades roll back on these commitments as LGBT+ rights have come under sustained political attack across the Western world).
However, research led by Dr David Whiteley of Glasgow Caledonian University cast doubt on this narrative of genuine commitment to inclusivity and acceptance. In ‘Performing Solidarity: a scoping review of alcohol marketing to sexual and gender minorities’ he and his research team uncovered a complex web of alcohol marketing targeting the LGBT+ community on multiple fronts.
Venue based marketing on the commercial gay scene also exploits the industry’s dominance of community spaces, so that alcohol marketing ‘saturates’ the LGBT+ community.
The research found that the industry appropriates LGBT+ iconography and sponsors community events in order to forge ‘public facing personae of solidarity and acceptance.’ In other words, they want us to believe they’re our friends and they have our backs.
LGBT+ Voices
Well, according to the LGBT+ community members we spoke to, they haven’t succeeded. In Alcohol Focus Scotland’s recent report, ‘Community Not a Commodity: The LGBT+ Community’s Views on Alcohol Marketing’, participants expressed views from scepticism to outright offence at the alcohol industry’s targeting of the community.
In particular, some participants found the industry’s appropriation of symbols representative of the struggle for human rights, like the Stonewall riots, exploitative, inappropriate and offensive.
They broadly felt that alcohol marketing within the community reinforced the notion that alcohol is central to queer culture and social life, and that this contributed to pressure and exclusion for those who either chose not to drink, or who are in recovery.
Participants expressed particular discomfort with alcohol industry presence and sponsorship of Pride events, questioning whether these partnerships are aligned with the values Pride is meant to represent.
Finally, in views echoing research currently being undertaken by PhD researcher Beth Meadows, participants expressed frustration at a lack of alcohol free queer social spaces.
Our report is based on a relatively small sample size, but its findings are consistent with a wider body of other research and reports. Like many of those, we recommend further work and research should be done to deepen our understanding of the views of the LGBT+ community on this topic, and help initiate further discussion.
It’s probably worth recognising that Prides across the UK are under major financial pressures, with funding sources drying up – perhaps influenced by the prevailing hostile climate in which the LGBT+ community currently finds itself. The community in different parts of the UK has also been vocal in calling for Prides to divest from other corporate sponsors who they feel don’t uphold the values of Pride – with principled decisions sometimes causing real problems for Pride organisers.
We should remain sensitive to that, but also mindful of evidence in other areas that where organisations switch from alcohol sponsorship, there are often plenty of other sponsors happy to step in to fill the void. Research on alcohol sponsorship in sport has certainly suggested this.
Public health organisations and campaigners will continue to lobby government for alcohol marketing restrictions, and with both the UK and Scottish Governments battling ballooning healthcare expenditure, record alcohol deaths and forecast explosions in liver disease and cancers (in which alcohol plays a massive role), governments would be wise to enact them.
Starting a conversation about reconsidering the relationship between Pride and alcohol companies might not only be beneficial for the health of the LGBT+ community, but a wise way of future proofing Pride events from the impact of much needed public health legislation.
Written by David Barbour, Senior Coordinator, Communications, Alcohol Focus Scotland.
All IAS Blogposts are published with the permission of the author. The views expressed are solely the author’s own and do not necessarily represent the views of the Institute of Alcohol Studies.