Nov 02, 2007  |  By: KATHERINE VOLIN  | COMMENTS     

If you don’t work on or near the Mall, it’s easy to forget that tourism is Washington’s second largest industry, coming in right behind government work, and according to a recent study, D.C. is one of the top-10 gay destinations in the country. 

Victoria Isley, senior vice-president of marketing for the Washington D.C. Convention & Tourism Corporation, says that 15 million people visit D.C. each year. Since 1999, Isley’s organization has worked to make sure that a significant portion of that group is gay, making D.C. one of the first American cities to court the gay tourist.

D.C. in some ways is unique as a gay destination, because although the city itself has a prominent gay population and gay-friendly city policies, it lacks some other attractions that would drive gay tourism specifically, like a very active nightlife or a beach.

In fact, Travel & Leisure magazine named D.C. as having one of the worst nightlife scenes of the 25 cities polled in its recent America’s Favorite Cities 2007 survey. The same survey ranked D.C. right in the middle in terms of gay-friendliness. Another recent online consumer-driven study by Community Marketing ranked D.C. as the No. 9 most-visited destination by gay consumers.

“One of the ultimate responses you can get is to be named one of the top-10 gay and lesbian destinations,” Isley says.  She and the WCTC re-launched their efforts to reach out to gay tourists in 2003 through a new web site, www.PrideInDC.org, and an advertising campaign in gay publications.

“If you look through a lot of the gay and lesbian travel publications there’s a tendency to have a ‘shirt-off’ approach to promotion,” Isley says. “We were advised to really have a sense of humor about ourselves, but also be true to the product.”

That meant maintaining the sophistication that Isley says she sees in D.C.

“A perfect example will be our theater community,” she says. “We have an extremely sophisticated theater community and we have several theaters that have artistic directors who happen to be gay or lesbian.”

Despite the focused approach toward the gay market, the city does not keep track of the number of gay tourists visiting the District.

“Gay people when they come here obviously don’t identify as gay, but at the same time, we get at least our share of gay tourism here,” says Bob Witeck of Witeck-Combs, a gay marketing company. Witeck points out that D.C. will likely never have the sort of gay tourism appeal of a place that “has a beach,” but says that gays probably account for 5-10 percent of the local tourism market.
 
FORT LAUDERDALE, FLA., is a city that knows the number of gay travelers — 800,000 — who contribute $1 billion annually to their local economy, according to Richard Gray, who serves as vice chair of the Broward County Tourist Development Council.

The Community Marketing survey ranked Fort Lauderdale as the fifth most-visited U.S. gay destination, and the November issue of Out Traveler magazine names the city its “Favorite Gay Resort Town” based on a readers’ choice survey.

Ten years ago while serving as the vice president of the International Gay Travel Association, Gray noticed that Fort Lauderdale was attracting little attention.

“Nobody was really interested in Fort Lauderdale at all, and I wanted to let people become aware that it really was becoming a gay Mecca,” Gray says. A decade later, business is booming, although recent anti-gay remarks from Jim Naugle, the city’s mayor, threatened to put a damper on gay tourism there.

Naugle announced this summer that the city should spend $250,000 to install automatic flushing toilets to prevent men from having sex with other men in public restrooms. A public outcry ensued, but rather than apologize, Naugle fanned the flames by making more homophobic comments. Eventually, the town’s tourism council removed him from his position in their organization.

“They were disappointing,” Gray says about the statements made by Naugle, whom Gray has known since 1993. “And absolutely certainly not what the destination was about. So it was definitely just one lonely voice, I think. Disturbing, but we weathered the storm.”

The Bay Area Reporter, a San Francisco gay publication, published an editorial calling for a boycott of Fort Lauderdale, and though that doesn’t appear to have materialized on a large scale, the Florida tourism market was impacted, Gray says. Any long-term damage hasn’t yet been fully assessed, but some silver linings do exist, he says.

“It’s kind of united Fort Lauderdale’s residents more on a political level,” Gray says. “As a destination, we have a strong business alliance  — we had never really been political, locally.”