An Ally’s Guide to Letting LGBTQ+ Ideas Lead Creativity

These changes prompt non-queer people, comprising the bulk of our industry’s talent and leadership, to finally ask, “What more can I do?” However, some marginalized people in the industry—LGBTQ+ people included—are understandably tired of the burden inherent to educating their oppressors on the very nature of that oppression. Some of us are increasingly replying, “Google it. Good luck!”

Y’all, that’s tense.

I am by no means disregarding the work we’ve done as LGBTQ+ communities to make ourselves known and heard, but the effort hasn’t lessened the learning curve for allies. Empathy is warranted and essential—which I recognize as someone who has ongoing work to do in understanding other multicultural communities. For this reason, I understand our allies’ daunting responsibility in changing society and marketing specifically: They have massive work cut out for them.

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Cisgender, heteronormative (cishet) folks, especially those who are white, live in relative privilege because of decades of heteronormative, systemic, pervasive cultural trappings. The world has long been shaped toward cishet favor; certainly for as long as advertising has been an industry, heteronormative thinking has acted as the default gatekeeper. Allies have to learn and unlearn—yet, when they turn to people inside a marginalized community, they risk tokenizing them. If they turn people outside of the marginalized community in question, they get wrong answers and too often enter an echo chamber. Maybe they should read? But they could be reading their whole lives! I spend hours each week reading to understand gay culture, and I’m gay!

Let’s say a hypothetical ally learns a coworker’s pronouns, they/them—shortly after, perhaps the fluid colleague is she/her. The ally learned but has to learn again?! To this ally, we might say, “We relearned your last name when you got married, then divorced.” This isn’t snark; these real-world tensions have variable scale.

If I play one broken record as a queer person in this business, it’s this: You chose the industry of problems. You’re supposed to love problems. You are compensated, honored, awarded on the magnitude of the problems you solve.

Consider two dynamics as you further your allyship in adland. First, in a world where “queer” is “mass,” a lot of the most creative solutions to address societal problems will necessarily come from a queer perspective. Second, and maybe most important: This industry has never known how to effectively, dependably put queer people and ideas at the forefront. Allies, for all their genuinely good intent, were never taught how to put us first when we need to be first. Cishet and even sometimes conservative allies must remind themselves why they chose a business of tension. And by reinventing the creative process, they’ll rediscover why they even chose this career.

Queer culture has an outsized impact on popular culture, so LGBTQ+ creativity will often need to take the lead. So let’s innovate, shall we? Progress from ally to accomplice—that means, be ready to give something up, especially your comfort. What’s needed is action and a creative process that consciously, effectively, fairly and respectfully elevates queer ideas. What’s needed is the personal change that empowers this process. If you feel like you’re being “canceled” along the way, don’t worry, you’re not. Breathe.

Let’s look at the brief

If your directive was designed to include multicultural perspective, we’d already have multicultural solutions. Inclusion isn’t occurring naturally, so we need to build a nursery where queer ideas can grow up. 

Consider, for example, how most every brief still begins with an age demo built in, and no one has room to question how inherently ageist that is—and it is. Is your brand for surfers aged 18 to 34, or is it for surfers? Why are you dividing your consumer base?

There are similar problems with LGBTQ+ representation. How many briefs request outdated gender identification? How many allow for the defiance of boxes versus the checking of boxes? Why wouldn’t LGBTQ+ perspectives guide the reinvention of this framework?

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Change is hard. It takes time. Amid hectic timeframes, no one wants to be the squeaky wheel to question the process. Who has time, when the campaign is due in a week? Answer: You do, accomplice. Make the time to properly account for the humanity of your audience. It’s a business imperative, not a nice-to-do. 

Inherent in this is embracing active unlearning and deconstruction of process. Welcome queer people to audit your brief. Let them tell you where our communities look accounted for in your neat document and where they don’t. Hell, let them share constructive critique in front of the agency. The critique will make you nervous, but just listen. This could lead to more inclusive brief standards that more effectively reflect the identities of next-gen consumers.

Let’s look at ideation

Fear as a tension can spark creativity, but fear as a culture is creative quicksand.

Picture a brainstorm around brand positioning for family minivans: LGBTQ+ people in the room might have different definitions of family, including polyamory, open relationships and chosen family, but they might not volunteer these perspectives, or even express their own queer identity, because it’s not verbatim requested in the brief. In the same room, an ally might wonder if they can bring up questions about queer families, or whether that’s appropriate to ask. More likely, they’ll lean into traditional definitions of the heteronormative family, because why risk the discomfort when you can focus on the creative? 

Why? Because marketing brilliance lives on the other side of the discomfort. 

Cishet allies in the room fear saying the wrong thing in the same room as a queer person afraid to state their identity. That results in a lot of talking with no real communication, both remaining effectively silent for fear of having their career canceled. Good news: Your job is not to be flawless. Creativity demands risk-taking and mistakes.

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Don’t let fear ruin your process. Don’t tell me what you know is true because you have a gay cousin—but do let experiences with your gay cousin be the reason you pose a question. My community has heard too many well-intentioned allies with gay cousins declare when they should have suggested. Let the discomfort originate from you asking something you couldn’t have known. It’s a far better process than the discomfort of silence or erroneous assertion.

Allies, accomplices, we love your intent, but if it’s not manifesting in action, it does us no good. Show a little ignorance; feel micro-canceled for a day because you asked a “bad question.” Breathe. Dive back in. In the business of problems, we can be daunted by an angry tsunami, but we should see expectedly choppy waves as an exciting course. The key is to stop pretending you understand the entirety of the ocean. The currents are changing, and hell, maybe a queer mermaid can teach you something.