Are There Gay Cars?

I found this really interesting article from the New York Times, "Gay By Design, or Lifestyle Choice?". Basically, they are wondering if there is such a thing as a gay car. Check it out.

RON GEREN, an actor in Los Angeles, commutes to auditions and jobs throughout
Southern California in a sleek black Mazda MX-5 Miata convertible. But for a
recent date with a woman, he rented a Cadillac Escalade because he was so used
to friends saying his Miata is “gay.”

Martina Navratilova in a 2001 ad
for Subaru, known to some as “Lesbaru.” “Guys say, ‘Hey, that’s cute,’ ” Mr.
Geren, 40, said, adding that the comments come from gay as well as straight men.
“You have to fend off that perception.”

A few years ago, Meghan Daum, an
op-ed contributor to The Los Angeles Times, wrote about a promising first date
with a man that never led to a second one because, she later learned, the guy
saw that she drove a Subaru Outback station wagon and concluded she must be a
lesbian.

And when Joe LaMuraglia, the founder of Gaywheels.com, an
informational site modeled on the likes of Autoweb.com, told his partner he
wanted to buy a Mini Cooper convertible, the boyfriend joked that he would not
be seen in it because the couple “would look like such a gay cliché,” Mr.
LaMuraglia said.

Cars are no more straight or gay than cellphones,
office chairs or weed whackers. But in recent years that truism has not stopped
a perception among some motorists that certain cars can, in the right context,
be statements about a driver’s sexual orientation.

At a time when car
makers are marketing aggressively to gay consumers and mainstream culture has
become more literate about stereotypically gay tastes through television shows
like “Will & Grace” and “The L Word” (on which one of the main characters,
Alice, drove a Mini Cooper), it may not be surprising that some people make such
assumptions about motorists based on their cars.

Indeed, the extravagant
displays of muscle car machismo and sensuous, high-design femininity on display
this week at the New York International Auto Show at the Javits Center would
seem to cry out for deconstruction along gender- and sexual-identity lines.

But to some people, such stereotyping is homophobia, pure and simple. A
poll seeking to determine the most gay automobiles, conducted by a South African
Web site, was a topic of heated interest last December on Gizmodo, the New
York-based technology blog, where one reader wrote: “Since when are cars gay or
straight? We’re really polling people’s prejudices here.”

Others,
though, including gay theorists, say many gay motorists happily embrace certain
cars as reflections of identity.

“People presume you want to throw off a
stereotype,” said Judith Halberstam, a lesbian who is a professor of gender
studies at the University of Southern California. She drives a black Mazda 3
hatchback that she considers “butch.” But, she said, “If you are a masculine
woman, you might not feel bad about it, so you might become excited about
knowing how to fix your pickup, or driving a ’68 Mustang.”

“Not all gays
want to present an image that is normative,” she said.

Ramone Johnson is
a gay journalist and former Saturn engineer who compiles an annual “Top 10 Gay
Cars” list for About.com, which is owned by The New York Times Company. Mr.
Johnson said that “traditionally we are used to being defined by others.”
Driving a stylish car can be a way of “taking control back” and saying “this is
who I am,” he said.

Mr. Johnson maintains that “soft lines” and a
“vibrant personality” — say like those on a Volkswagen New Beetle — are typical
attributes of a gay man’s car, and fashion-forward red gauges and other styling
cues, for example, make the Pontiac G6 more of a gay car than its sibling, the
Grand Am, because the features express a taste for freedom and fun.

Neither automobile manufacturers nor dealers compile statistics on the
sexual orientation of buyers.

Frank Markus, who is gay and the technical
director for Motor Trend magazine, said auto companies tend to associate gay
consumers with higher disposable incomes since fewer have children (one reason
many are free to opt for less practical cars, like two-seaters or convertibles,
as well). Tellingly, when the American Family Association, a conservative
Christian group, pressured the Ford Motor Company to pull advertising from gay
publications like The Advocate in 2005, the ads were for Land Rover and Jaguar,
two high-end brands owned by Ford.

Subaru has been the most prominent
company to embrace the gay market. As long ago as 2000, the automaker created
advertising campaigns around Martina Navratilova, the gay tennis star, and also
used a sales slogan that was a subtle gay-rights message: “It’s not a choice.
It’s the way we’re built.” Little wonder that many lesbians refer to their
Outbacks as “Lesbarus.”

Even General Motors recently began to include
questions about sexual orientation on some internal market surveys, although
data are not yet compiled, said Adam Bernard, who tracks the product strategies
of G.M.’s competitors and who also coordinates an advocacy group for gay
employees at the company called GM Plus. Since 2003, he said, the group has
consulted with marketing executives at the company about increasing sales to gay
consumers.

Lacking a precise portrait of its gay car buyers, the company
still has taken increasing strides to break into this market, Mr. Bernard said,
advertising its Cadillac, Saturn and Saab divisions in gay publications and Web
sites like PlanetOut.com.

Company executives, he said, do not seem to
feel skittish about losing market share among straight consumers if gay buyers
suddenly seize on a particular model. “I don’t think internally we ever asked
the question, ‘If we put Cadillac in The Advocate, are we going to lose straight
Cadillac buyers?’ ”

“Frankly,” he added, “the money’s all the same
color.”

Mr. Markus of Motor Trend said clichés about gay drivers tend to
collapse on close inspection, like the gay man who is a “gym bunny” and
gravitates toward Jeeps and convertibles “to show off his hot body.” But, he
added, “If you could actually push a button and see what every gay person
drives, it’s probably not too different from what the average person drives, but
it might skew higher in price.”

On Gaywheels.com, one indicator of
actual gay buying trends is the list of vehicles most frequently researched. As
of last October, the Toyota Yaris, a $12,000 economy car, led that list,
followed by the Toyota Camry, which was the No. 3-selling car in America last
year.

It would be hard to find a more conventional automobile.

Great, now we have to worry about cars, along with music, clothes, cologne, shoes and everything else defined as "gay." What do you all think?