Dictating Content

The commercial marketplace also offers an agora for LesBiGays. From the perspective of the closet, it is progress for the LesBiGay identity to be pitched in advertising, pictured in film, portrayed in television programs, and projected in corporate hiring goals. Where once the public sphere silenced LesBiGays, it now broadcasts LesBiGay speech, albeit commercial speech. Moreover, the commodified identity is itself a form of "voice." As LesBiGay identity is talked to, and as it talks back, LesBiGays essentially speak their way into being, at the very least a commercial being. Whereas LesBiGays once shared "the Love that dare not speak its name,"⁹⁹ they now share a commercialized love that never shuts up.

Engaging in dialogue within the marketplace, LesBiGays have found a real opportunity to exert some new control over their identity formation. Capitalism constructed the earliest identities of American LesBiGays, and typically outside of their influence. LesBiGay identities are now, and will likely always be, commercially constructed. The important difference, however, is that LesBiGays today increasingly participate in the construction of their commodified identities, whether as discerning producers or as discriminating consumers.¹⁰⁰ In other words, in turn for being commodified, LesBiGays may become commercial agents in their own right. In this sense, LesBiGays have discovered that the modern commercial marketplace functions as an important site of social contestation. And this is a contest that they appear to be winning.¹⁰¹ LesBiGay cultural images are less pathetic, more admirable; less hateful, more lovable; less unalike, more equal; less perverse, more "normal."