Whether for its aspirational or regulatory purposes, mythmaking plays a definitive role in the commercialization of LesBiGay identity, too. The marketplace manifests that LesBiGay identity may be as desirable as any other commodity. In fact, it may be more desirable because it has a unique exchange value. Commercial culture critic Alexandra Chasin puts it succinctly: LesBiGay "coming-out stories now appear as plots, [their] styles as the styles, [their] stuff as the stuff to buy."¹⁰⁶ Aspirationally, the marketplace promises LesBiGays that their commodified identity will stretch the cultural canvas in creative and compelling ways, that they will get to push the parameters for the commercial culture. Not only will LesBiGays transform the culture, the myth goes, but they will also consume it as fully in/vested American citizens. By the mythmakers' efforts, then, the LesBiGay path to political enfranchisement and social acceptance is paved by consumer sovereignty.

In its regulatory operations, the marketplace myth is just as confining for LesBiGays as for American society in general, and perhaps with more worrisome effects. Commercialization pulls LesBiGays back from the fringe and into the mainstream, wrenching out of them any real potential for social transformation. Writing in New York magazine in 1996, Daniel Mendelsohn asserted that "the heterosexualization of gay culture" is the most astounding assimilationist phenomenon of our time.¹⁰⁷ Commodification of their identities renders LesBiGays less powerful as a countercultural force, and simultaneously more profitable as a cultural force. Queer Nation's cri de coeur, "We're here, we're queer, get used to it," might once have had social revolutionary purpose, but the regulatory mythmakers ensure that it will be no more than another commercial jingle, singing "We're here, we're just like you, don't worry about it."¹⁰⁸ Through such cultural appropriation, the mythmakers thus control and limit the possible scope of identity LesBiGays can invent for themselves.