Let me begin by admitting that the issue I’ll be discussing is not limited to the American Black/Latino gay community. Lack of financial support affects people of all races and countries. However, I want to narrow this topic down to specific groups in order to better illustrate the point and possible solutions.
When I surf the Internet, I see many official web profiles for gay men or their entrepreneurial, artistic and/or humanitarian ventures with thousands of supporters. From Twitter to Facebook to YouTube to Bandcamp to Tumblr to Instagram even to BGCLive, we see that the Internet can make a person a “black gay celebrity” in the country almost overnight. But do those thousands of Twitter followers and millions of YouTube views translate into revenue for Black/Latino gay men? If not, why not?
Admittedly, I’m not a journalist. So this will not be an exposé built on six months of research, however I did do quite a bit of research and will try my best to lay out enough of a foundation for discussion and a possible call to action for change.
Money. It’s the driving force to everything. Having money can give individuals and organizations a great deal of power and freedom. When you consider the idea of pooling of money from multiple people in a community, this power and freedom is doubled tenfold. What if the black gay community employed this tactic?
Think about it, there is a shortage of quality gay-oriented media, music, websites, organizations, events, festivals, etc. Talk to anyone behind the creation of the previously mentioned ventures and they will tell you that when it comes to getting financial support for gay Black/Latin themed work, it’s beyond an uphill battle.
According to an analysis by Witeck-Combs Communications and Packaged Facts, the estimated buying power of the entire American LGBT community in the year 2010 was $743 billion. Yes, billion with a “B”. With that kind of financial power, the gay community could start its own welcoming versions of discriminatory organizations like The Boy Scouts of America as Octavius Williams has argued in the past.
Anyone Black in America is well aware of the Montgomery, Alabama Bus Boycott. It lasted over a year, beginning December 3rd, 1955 and concluding on December 20th 1956. More than anything, the boycott demonstrated the power of one community’s “dollar.” At the time, the black population of Montgomery represented three-fourths of the public transportation riders. Once their revenue was eliminated from the local economy, the city’s income took a big hit until the segregation ordinance was changed (after a historic Supreme Court decision).
Even more impressive, the local black community banded together in order to ensure the boycott would last. Carpool services were created to help get boycotters to work or school. Black taxi drivers lowered their fares to a flat fee of 10 cents, the cost of bus fare at the time. Homemade food was sold at mass boycott meetings with 100% of the proceeds going to lengthen the efforts. It was an extremely impressive coordinated endeavor for a just cause.
Imagine that same cohesive financial support and power being used by the Black community today? Hell, imagine that financial power and support being used by the Black/Latino gay community? While the misuse of economic strength can arguably be applied to many different groups of people, for the sake of this essay, we’ll focus on certain gay men of color.
THE PROBLEM
When it comes to the Black gay community, there is a justified perception that their financial priorities are in the wrong places. Many of us casually spend money on superficial and immaterial things while ignoring the projects, endeavors and causes that really matter and are longer lasting. Even I’m guilty of this.How many of us have awaken on a Sunday morning to discover a large chunk of money in our bank account has frivolously evaporated from clubbing, drinking, dining, smoking, shopping and/or traveling the 48 hours before? We will quickly drop $10.00 on parking, $20.00 on the cover charge and $10.00 plus tip on one cocktail (or more) in a club but turn our backs on the talented gay musician, filmmaker, blogger, journalist, novelist, painter, etc when they ask for as little as a $5.00 donation to keep providing us content for free. On top of that, many of us have the nerve to complain when we don’t get said free content on a specific timetable or level of quality.
Swerve, breh.If anyone reading this can’t see the insanity in that, you’re living in denial. Let’s break out some math. There will be a lot of it in this essay but I will do my best to make it simple, please bear with me.
ADTV’s Derrick L Briggs has nearly 12,000 YouTube subscribers and 1.2 million video views. His work on his video-blog/interview series has helped and entertained a lot of young gay people in the world over the years. If he were to start charging his subscribers merely .25¢ per video on 24 videos per year, that would be over $70,000…not only would that enable him to focus 100% on ADTV, he could improve on video/audio production, locations and guests. That’s only $6.00 for a whole year from each fan! But would his audience actually support him if he asked them to open their wallet/purse? Is spending a quarter really too much for an episode of ADTV?
How about the many talented gay musicians like Kaoz, Lasto, Thrilla Minx, Kin4Life and Baron? Would all of their thousands of Twitter followers pay $5 to $10 for their independently produced albums? This would allow the artists to produce more music on a faster schedule. But are their “fans” really fans, willing to put their wallet where their “Twitter follow” and “Facebook Like” is or are they fans in name only?Many Black/Latino gay themed websites (such as ours) are forced to turn to Porn advertisers for revenue to remain operational and free to the public. We don’t see an inherent problem with that except this business choice not only makes most Black/Latino gay websites “Not Safe For Work” but it also reinforces the stereotype about gays being overly obsessed with sex. How can we in good conscience have articles about safe sex and “positive gay imagery” next to graphic advertisements for bareback porn and extra large dildos?Even BGCLive, the “sex hookup” social dating site primarily targeted to gay men of color, unsuccessfully tried to eliminate porn advertising from their website. In a May 2009 message board post, the administrators made this announcement to the members:
“BGC is trying to phase out porn ads as we announced last year. In addition to not accepting any new porn advertisers we have successfully phased out all porn ads from the top header. Just one more step in cleaning the site up.
You can do your part by keeping your nude images private and stop the petty behavior in the forums. The public nude images only make it harder for us to survive financially because we have to hire people to do nothing but review images and that is very costly. Reducing porn ads means reducing our revenue potential as well so if you guys want to see less porn ads, you should start following the rules.”
The BGCLive members apparently did not “follow the rules.” Four years later, porn advertising is even more integrated into the website than it was before. Can we blame them? The operators of the website are providing a service to gay men for free (for the most part, some members pay for “premium membership access”), how else can they keep it operational?
If BGCLive were to shut down permanently tomorrow, those same non-paying regulars complaining about the porn ads would be screaming for its immediate return. Or would they? Gay men seem to be fickle and quickly move on to something new when they get bored or can’t get it for free.
THE POSSIBILITIES
Let’s play a game of “What If” for a moment.According to the United States Census, there are roughly 315 million people in the country. By 2010, it was calculated that 50 million were Latino and 39 million were Black. For the sake of this discussion, let’s assume that 7% of those people were lesbian/gay/bisexual (based on Market Research’s reasonable and broad range of population samples of US adults that identify as LGBT). That’s approximately 6.2 million adult Latino and Black homosexuals and bisexuals in the country (for the sake of this theoretical exercise).Now let’s subtract the exaggerated number of 50% to eliminate hypothetical gay people who have no desire to outwardly support the gay community. That still leaves 3.1 million theoretical Black and Latin lesbian/gay/bisexuals in the country who would financially support gays in some form or fashion. If each of those people donated just $5.00 to a savings account once a month for a year (only $60 total, per person), the balance on December 31st would be $186 Million. What. The. Fuck.
And remember, we’re not even including the donations that would come from the many generous Caucasian gays out there who want to support diversity in the community. Also, not even including people who could afford to donate more than the initial $60 investment per person, per year. This $186 million would all be money from “brown” people, so to speak. So even if we gave our lesbian and transgender sisters half of that for projects, that would leave over $93 Million for endeavors from gay Black and Latino men. Even if each project/event/organization was only given $100,000 that would be enough to fund over 930 separate endeavors that year alone! Considering there were only TWO gay themed feature films by Black and Latino men released in 2012, that’s a lot of projects!
Now imagine that was done over 5 years. That would total $930 million, just under a billion dollars invested back into the Black/Latino gay community. For those not in the know, this whole concept is called crowd-funding.
Okay, let me wake up, because odds are this will never happen. But it does look damn good when you see it all laid out like that. So why don’t I feel anything like this would happen? For starters, let’s take a look at the gay men who are already way ahead of me on the crowd-funding idea front.
THE GUINEA PIGS
Many people have heard the news that the producer of the cancelled CW series Veronica Mars launched a successful Kickstarter fundraiser to finance a feature film version of the series. He was able to raise $5,702,153. That comes to 185% more than the initial $2,000,000 goal that he had set. What. The. Fuck. And this was for a show that had been CANCELLED and off the air for FIVE years!!! Surely gay content creators and organization founders can expect the same kind of financial support. Or not.
In an interview with new-media blogger Aymar Jean Christian, the creator of the well-made web series Drama Queenz, Dane Joseph, stated, “Financially, we’ve been fortunate enough to have a few “angels” believe in us and keep the show going, but (assuming for some un-Godly reason we can’t get some sort of TV deal) we do have a plan to just go the DVD distribution route and just make a few quick bucks (hopefully).”
Why just a few quick bucks and why hopefully, though? The YouTube channel for Nova Novus Productions, which brings us Drama Queenz, has over 8,000 subscribers and over 1.1 million views. The show is well written, acted, shot and edited with single episodes getting well over 100,000 views.Considering those numbers (more math), if only half of their subscribers gave $5.00 each to fund another few episodes, that would be over $20,000. Not a Hollywood budget but definitely a good start and it would be content made “for us” and “by us”, so to speak. So again, I ask why a successful guy like Dane Joseph would say “hopefully?” The answer is possibly deeper in the numbers.
Why just a few quick bucks and why hopefully, though? The YouTube channel for Nova Novus Productions, which brings us Drama Queenz, has over 8,000 subscribers and over 1.1 million views. The show is well written, acted, shot and edited with single episodes getting well over 100,000 views.Considering those numbers (more math), if only half of their subscribers gave $5.00 each to fund another few episodes, that would be over $20,000. Not a Hollywood budget but definitely a good start and it would be content made “for us” and “by us”, so to speak. So again, I ask why a successful guy like Dane Joseph would say “hopefully?” The answer is possibly deeper in the numbers.
When the creators of The D.L. Chronicles, Deondray Gossett and Quincy LeNear, initially set out to bring the series back, they launched a “you gotta it raise all or get nothing” Kickstarter fundraising campaign with a goal of $125,000. At the time, even I thought this was very ambitious, but again compared to Hollywood budgets, this was very modest. The filmmakers likely did the same type of number crunching as I and deduced that they could easily reach their goal given the YouTube views and projected number of fans out there (5,071 YouTube Subscribers and 738,815 views, at the time of this writing).
They got $42,804 in pledges, which is very impressive in itself. But they didn’t reach their goal of $125,000 so they couldn’t keep any of the donations, none. When they re-launched their fundraiser with the new lower goal of $30,000 (on a different website, indieGoGo), they only managed to raise half of that number, $15,186. It was far from the $42,804 in promised support that they saw before. However, this time they were able to actually keep that money and used it to make Episode Thomas.
During our interview with the filmmakers, Deondray Gossett confessed, “Its so hard to fund LGBT themed media. It’s extremely difficult. Its one of the most difficult genres of media to fund.”
Let’s take another great example. Prolific gay Black filmmaker Patrik-Ian Polk had produced two successful feature films and two well known seasons of a television show (Noah’s Arc) before he launched his $30,000 all-or-nothing Kickstarter campaign for his newest feature film The Skinny. It failed miserably, only raising $4,967 in pledges towards the reasonable $30,000 goal.Again, he was not able to keep any of these donations. Fortunately, Polk was able to acquire the funds from another source, but it speaks volumes that the public gay support just wasn’t there for someone as accomplished as this. (Note: Polk is currently in pre-production on a new film entitled, Blackbird. So all is not lost.)
More recent example: Let’s look at the Lamont Pierre created web series Freefall, a show that we quickly admit is becoming very popular in the Black gay community. The series’ YouTube channel has over 3,000 subscribers with over 162,000 views with just 4 episodes released. However he was only able to raise $1,270 in a fundraiser with a low $3,000 target for a new season of episodes.This is less than half of his goal. What. The. Fuck. Even if all of the show’s fans only donated $1.99 for a whole “season pass” (less than the cost of a bag of Doritos and drink), the filmmaker would have easily surpassed his goal and then some. But the real, cold-hard-cash support just wasn’t there.
Another recent example? The new gay web series No Shade from Sean Anthony has a YouTube subscriber count of over 3,100 with over 93,000 views and only 5 episodes. A fundraiser for $5,000 was launched April 10 and now 3 weeks later has only raised $219. Total. Seriously?!Anthony’s fifth episode of the series has over 11,000 views alone, so imagine if each view cost .99¢ for the viewers? Again, he could have already received revenue well above his goal, enabling his cast and crew to produce more episodes. (There’s still more time to DONATE if you want to support this project!)
If this is depressing, let me lift your spirits a bit. New York City Dominican director Gary Terracino launched a Kickstarter fundraiser in 2010 for his film Elliot Loves. A film that we loved so much we named it the Best Gay Film released in 2012. His fundraising goal was set for $5,000 to finish the film, he managed to raise $9,000. Terracino is a success story but he seems to be an exception to the rule.Maybe the lack of support has to do with skin color. The Caucasian creators of the gay themed series Husbands (Brad Bell and Jane Espenson) and DTLA (Larry Kennar) both had very successful fundraising campaigns. Husbands raised $60,000, well over their $50,000 goal. DTLA not only raised $33,525 (above their $25,000 goal), they also secured a distribution deal on the Logo television network.What about the many gay organizations and gay causes that look to give free counseling, STD tests and temporary housing for Black and Latino gay men? Many of these entities rely on donations, pledges and fundraisers to stay operational when corporate sponsored support dries up. One such organization is the Atlanta based endeavor called The Evolution Project.
According to the website: The Evolution Project features a drop-in community center for young black gay men between 18 and 28 years of age. This is a safe space that helps young black gay men to connect, develop strengths and skills, support each other, have fun and achieve positive goals. The program staff assists these young men to enhance their HIV and STD risk reduction skills by utilizing the will, talent and vision of the members themselves.
Now that we’re all adequately bummed out, let’s examine possible reasons for the lack of financial support in the Black/Latino community as well as some solutions to our overall problem.
CLICK HERE for PART TWO:
The Reasons and The Solutions
