Gays Who Mean Business : Retailers’ Association Seeks to Market Laguna Beach to Homosexual Visitors

Gay retailers in this seaside town, seeing support for homosexual causes lag among city officials and fellow store owners, are starting to use their recently formed business group to market Laguna Beach as a gay and lesbian resort.

The Laguna Beach Community Business Assn. Inc. plans to cash in on marketing strategies that other cities and some major airline and travel companies have used to target the well-heeled demographic group.

Douglas C. Reilly, who founded the organization in February, wants its 20 members to pool their marketing funds and buy cooperative ads in national gay publications to promote Laguna Beach as a gay tourist destination.

But the group’s efforts are not being warmly embraced by some business neighbors and the city.

“They fear that being associated with gay and lesbian clientele is going to drive away other customers,” Reilly contends.

Indeed it has, say some retailers, but there are other reasons why a city long known for its tolerance of homosexuals--it is the only city in Orange County to ban discrimination based on sexual orientation--is responding tepidly to the plans of Reilly’s group.

City officials and business owners alike say the group’s goals are exclusive rather than inclusive.

“It’s the broad base that makes the fabric of this town,” said Wayne J. Baglin, a city councilman and former mayor. “We don’t want to see one group take position above another. That’s what people object to.”

The City Council, for instance, refused to endorse the second annual Laguna Pride Weekend in early May to avoid any appearance of favoritism. Baglin said anti-homosexual sentiment plays no part in such decisions. “Citizens don’t count on me to tell them how to live their lives,” he said.

The Laguna Beach Chamber of Commerce and Civic Assn. also declined to endorse the Pride event because “we had a lot of flak from our members,” said Joseph Orsak, the chamber’s president. He said three members told him their businesses suffered during last year’s event because heterosexual patrons stayed home.

Reilly’s gay business group wants to convert Laguna into something it isn’t: a gay community, asserts Sheila Bushard Jameson, co-owner of Bushard’s Pharmacy.

“Reilly feels they are discriminated against,” she said. “He wants to prove to the world they have equal rights. That’s their mission. That doesn’t go with the mission of the Chamber of Commerce.”

Bushard Jameson, a former chamber director, said the Community Business Assn.’s efforts to stand apart undercut its stated objective to increase tourism. If the group wants to increase tourism, she said, “let’s do it together.”

Reilly founded the business association as a gay-oriented alternative to mainstream business organizations, particularly the chamber and the city-subsidized Visitors Bureau and Information Center.

His resolve to create the group was sparked by the bureau’s rejection last fall of a proposal to include Laguna Beach in a joint gay marketing effort by Palm Springs and West Hollywood.

“It doesn’t occur to them to go after the gay market,” Reilly, a real estate consultant who also serves on the city’s Planning Commission, said about operators of the visitors bureau.

Tapping into such a group would be a windfall for the city, Reilly believes.

Such a failure to reach gay tourists, he contends, shows how people discriminate “at the subliminal level.”

Business groups in Palm Springs, Provincetown, Mass., and Key West, Fla., jointly buy advertising in such national gay-oriented publications as the Advocate, 10 Percent and Frontiers. “All these places do this except us,” Reilly said.

The visitors bureau, spun off from the chamber two years ago, spends about $10,000 on ads in Sunset magazine and Sunday travel sections of general-circulation newspapers, said a spokeswoman for the bureau, who declined to be identified. The president of the bureau did not return telephone calls seeking comment.

The bureau--with a $186,000 marketing budget, half of it from city taxes--attempts to lure high-spending overnight tourists to the city’s 1,200 hotel rooms during the off-season. In the summer months, day-trippers to the city’s beaches and art festivals clog streets and don’t buy much. They also drive up police costs and leave more trash that has to be picked up, putting a drain on the local economy.

But the bureau’s efforts fall far short, as far as the Community Business Assn. is concerned.

The Community Business Assn.’s 20 members, including such long-established gay enterprises as the Coast Inn hotel and the Boom Boom Room disco, picked up $5,000 from last month’s Laguna Pride Weekend, which it sponsored. Reilly said the group will meet soon to decide where it will put its advertising dollars.

Other resorts have found that it pays to cater to gay customers by providing welcoming environments.

“We’re not concerned about sexuality but whether they have money to spend,” said Murrell D. Foster, executive director of tourism in tourism-dependent Palm Springs.

Several of the desert city’s largest mainstream hotels host two national events every year that attract gays. The so-called White Party attracts 15,000 gay men for a four-day spring break, and the Dinah Shore Golf Classic attracts 25,000 lesbians.

“Those hotels are very happy to have the business,” Foster said.

Such marketing successes also proved alluring to mainstream marketers such as American Express, Lufthansa German Airlines and Club Med, all of which once shied away from openly courting gay and lesbian travelers for fear of ostracism by mainstream customers.

“Five years ago we couldn’t get an airline to sponsor the International Gay Travel Assn.,” said Wayne J. Whiston, a member who is managing editor of the gay travel magazine Our World in Daytona Beach, Fla. Now, the gay travel group is being courted by such companies as Qantas Airways and such organizations as the Netherlands Tourist Board, Whiston said.

“Any aggressive travel marketer has realized the gay market has value,” said Billy Kolber, editor of Out and About, a gay travel newsletter in New York.

Laguna Beach’s laws and policies reflect the influence of its gay population, which is estimated at 30% of the city’s total. Besides the ban on discrimination, the city spends about $25,000 annually on AIDS-related causes, something few cities do. With 260 deaths from AIDS and 120 residents suffering from the disease, Laguna Beach has the nation’s highest per-capita concentration of AIDS victims, according to the National Centers for Disease Control.

Robert F. Gentry, a former mayor and one of the nation’s first openly gay elected officials, said the fear of AIDS contributes to the reluctance of the city and some business owners to market the city to gays.

“Why aren’t we jumping on this bandwagon? The answer is: There is a hesitancy to have any more gay and lesbian activity in Laguna Beach than is already here,” said Gentry, who quit in November after 12 years on the council. “It’s classic homophobia, but put in such a way that it’s politically correct.”

Some retailers predict that, despite resistance to the gay group’s plans, the marketing push by the Community Business Assn. is likely to pay off.

“Everyone would benefit, not just gay-owned businesses,” said Hugh M. Kinsellegh, who opened the Laguna Colony Co. on Forest Avenue this spring.

Marketing experts also predict that success will win over reticent business owners. David Mulryan, a partner at Mulryan/Nash, a New York agency that specializes in gay marketing, said that “the power of money overcomes a lot of people’s inhibitions.”