Those "Gay and Lesbian Chambers of Commerce" seem to be established in every US-town with more than 50 thousand inhabitants... There is even a "National Gay & Lesbian Chamber of Commerce" in the USA, with "national" the fellows of course mean US-American. :roll: The phenomenon is not entirely clear to me: what do those folks actually have in mind?
This seems to be a peculiar blend of Gay Nationalism and US-American Nationalism. On the one side, the Chambers are supposed to unite LGBT enterprises under their roof (assumingly in the opposition to "normal" chambers), on the other hand they are actually very assimilationist in their strategy. Or does "Gay Chamber of Commerce" mean those are businesses united to stripe the gays of their money most effectively?
In fairness to the "North Texas GLBT Chamber of Commerce," they do not lay claims to "national" anything. They don't even wish to lay claim to all of Texas. What such such organizations generally have in mind is the promotion of their own collective interests -- business interests. Collectively they are able to marshal greater advertising campaigns. They might also imagine that collectively they might have greater political influence, though I have not observed this to be the case. Some of the terminology might resemble nationalism of some flavor or another, but they are essentially very weak merchant associations. I've only had the 'pleasure' of witnessing two meetings of chambers of commerce; the entire enterprise looked a whole lot like a fine veneer of social and corporate respectability wrapped around an excuse for a dinner party.
Such associations undertaken by GLBT businesses of course CAN be remarkably assimilationist; after all, these businesses exist within the matrix of the greater culture. The self-promotion that such chambers of commerce usually do is more usually aimed at the gay market than the general population. If you wish to secure the services of a gay or lesbian plumber, it is most likely a gay chamber of commerce ad that will lead you to him or her, and that ad will have been crafted to secure gay custom, not the patronage of the populace at large. In the end, these ARE businesses united to strip the gays of their money most effectively.
Politically, they are worth paying attention to, especially the larger ones. They are of a sort with the semi-mysterious non-profit organizations that have so effectively seized absolute control of the majority of Pride (TM) Parades around the world. They may even be the same people. There are "powers-that-be" in the gay community who are
not the alphabet-soup lobbyists or the ivory tower academics.
