Illustration by Creative Circle candidate Jose Mora.

Indigenous rights can be a touchy subject for American* colonizers. Looking back at the messy history of rape, illness, slavery, and genocide over the ownership of massive swaths of land, as well as an array of treaties that have been broken again and again. Furthermore, independence for European colonies across the Americas did not usually mean independence for the native populations.

During Guatemala’s grueling decades-long Civil War (1960-1996), Rigoberta Menchú grew into a young activist, an intelligent organizer, and a fierce defender of her people in El Quché, as well as indigenous groups all over Guatemala. Born into a family of community leaders, her parents settled on mountain land after being unable to sustain themselves on the land left to them after the Spanish conquest of Guatemala. Her father was an activist in his own right and was killed in the 1980 Burning of the Spanish Embassy. Her mother was later kidnapped, tortured, and killed by the Guatemalan Army.

To add some context, Guatemala, along with Honduras, was known as a “banana republic.” The Civil War began as a result of a 1954 coup d’état that was supported by the CIA, a common occurrence in the Cold War era. The instated president Carlos Castillo Armas was assassinated three years later and replaced with slew of military leaders that committed suppression, assassination of opponents, and a range of war crimes. When guerrilla groups rose up against the military regime, extreme violence pervaded the country, particularly targeting indigenous populations who were harshly discriminated against in all facets of society.

Despite her tragic early life, Menchú rose up and became an international advocate for the indigenous resistance in Guatemala. She fled to Mexico, began advocating on behalf of her people to the international community, and joined the United Nations Working Group on Indigenous Populations.

In 1982, she narrated a book about her life and the life of her people titled Me llamo Rigoberta Menchú y así me nació la conciencia, which was translated to five language including I, Rigoberta Menchu, An Indian Woman in Guatemala in English. She opens the book with “I’d like to stress that it’s not only my life, it’s also the testimony of my people,” as not all the stories come from her personal and family experience, but the experience of other indigenous Guatemalans.

She also spoke heavily of traditions and teachings from her Mayan mother from the interdependence of nature, to gender roles in Mayan culture, to the significance of the sun, as well as birth and death rites. Menchú noted how her mother encouraged her to speak out as an equal throughout the struggle for human rights:

“I don’t want to make you stop feeling a woman, but your participation in the struggle must be equal to that of your brothers. But you mustn’t join as just another number, you must carry out important tasks, analyze your position as a woman and demand a share. A child is only given food when he demands it. A child who makes no noise, gets nothing to eat.”

She attempted to return to Guatemala in 1988 but was threatened with jail time and instead has to stealthily visit for very short periods of time. In 1992, Menchú won the Nobel Peace Prize. She opened her lecture with the following:

“I consider this Prize, not as a reward to me personally, but rather as one of the greatest conquests in the struggle for peace, for Human Rights and for the rights of the indigenous people, who, for 500 years, have been split, fragmented, as well as the victims of genocides, repression and discrimination.”

She goes on to call for social justice and the implementation of human rights in Guatemala, outlining the struggles of the indigenous population — which include exile, poverty (and the malnutrition, infant mortality and lack of education that come with it), and persecution by the army — and women’s struggles in particular.

To paint the picture of context once more, this was a woman in her early 30s, who was living in exile of her home country after her immediate family were all killed, speaking with grace and poise about how to move forward and protect humanity’s most vulnerable populations from her home country to South Africa to the Middle East to Southeast Asia.

Menchú brought several heads of state to trial in Spain (and later in their homeland of Guatemala), including Efrain Rios Montt who despite being convicted of masterminding indigenous genocide and sentenced to 80 years in prison, never served any actual jail time. He was the first head of state tried for genocide in his home country.

Her international activism continues as a UNESCO Goodwill Ambassador, president of Salud Para Todos (Health for All), Nobel Women’s Initiative, PeaceJam, and Foundation Chirac. In her positions, she has advocated for shortening the patent life of AIDS and cancer drugs to increase availability, advocated for women’s rights around the world alongside fellow Nobel Prize winners, mentored youth, and otherwise promoted world peace.

To this day, she continues to speak out against inequality, climate change, and injustice, most recently focusing on the turmoil in Venezuela. Her remarkable resilience, courage, and compassion remain an example to humanity of the potential of a single life.

May her legacy continue to inspire movements.

AWARDS + HONORS

1992 Nobel Peace Prize
1992 UNESCO Goodwill Ambassador position
1996 Peace Abbey Courage of Conscience Award
1998 Prince of Asturias Prize
1999 asteroid 9481 Menchú was named in her honor
2010 Order of the Azetex Eagle
2018 Spendlove Prize

*As in those who settled in North, Central and South America and the Caribbean

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About the author.
Alessandra is the mentor, educator, and writer behind Boneseed, a private practice devoted to deep self-inquiry through a range of physical, energetic, and mental modalities. She has over 500 hours of yoga, mentorship, and facilitation training and can be found slinging knowledge on her website, newsletter, and @bone.seed.

A visionary Surrealist, Remedios Varo’s fantastical paintings of androgynous creatures engaged in alchemy, magic, and the occult arts continue to confound and inspire.

Her work often depicts her sitting at a desk, engaged in mystical work, going on a journey to reveal true meaning, or seemingly disappearing into the background environment that envelops her. Bodies merge with objects and animals to assume captivating new hybrid beings. In Creation of The Birds (1957), the central figure is a human-owl hybrid who is painting birds that animate and fly off the page, with paint from a nearby machine that resembles an insect that deposits colors onto her palette. These dreamlike creations became part of Varo’s modernist mythos — she, along with the rest of the Surrealists, invoked occult imagery to test viewers’ understanding of their reality. Weaving in themes of witchcraft, which has continued to make a comeback as a counterpoint to our tumultuous times, Varo’s magical paintings continue to resonate powerfully today.

Salvador Dalí. Man Ray. Marcel Duchamp. Rene Magritte. Max Ernst. Hans Arp. Yves Tanguy. The names most often associated with Surrealism are (surprise, surprise) all men — making the re-emergence of female Surrealist artists’ work all the more important. A learned naturalist, alchemist, and seeker of knowledge, Varo’s dreamscape paintings were introspective depictions of her reality. She created her profoundly intuitive and magical works in the hopes of inspiring more individual balance in an increasingly interconnected world. Varo was a deep admirer of Hiëronymus Bosch, whose mysterious surrealistic paintings pre-date Surrealism by about 500 years. While her work is steeped in depictions of spirituality, many of Varo’s figures are based on a subject close to the artist — her body. Many of her characters are approximations of herself, and when Varo painted women, they were typically strong and self-determined, depicted as heroines or mythical characters, in charge of their own mystical destinies. They populated symbolic worlds inhabited by machines, magical hybrid creatures, where objects come to life.

Born Maria de los Remedios Alicia Rodriga Varo y Uranga in 1908, in Spain, Varo played a vital role in the Mexico City-based Surrealist movement. Her enigmatic paintings of androgynous creatures and strange humans engaged in alchemy, magic, and occult arts also included architectural features that show off her expert drafting skills, which she learned from her engineer father.

Varo was raised in a well-educated family — her father, a hydraulics engineer, recognized her artistic talent early on and taught her technical drawing when she was young. Because of her father’s work, the family moved to different locations across Spain and North Africa before finally settling down in Madrid in 1917, where she attended Catholic school and later pursued art at the Royal Academy de Finas Artes de San Fernando, graduating in 1930 with a degree to teach art and drawing.

It was in the mid-1930s, when living in Barcelona, that Varo became involved in Surrealism, joining the avant-garde artists’ group Logicophobista. In 1936, she met the Surrealist poet Benjamin Péret. Together, they fled Spain for Paris and married in 1937. They were soon drawn into the Surrealist world there, and Varo exhibited her art at shows with the group and published work in French Surrealist publications.

The couple fled again, in late 1941, to escape Nazi-occupied France — this time to Mexico City, where they connected with local writers like Octavio Paz, along with other exiled artists, among them Gordon Onslow Ford, Wolfgang Paalen, and Leonora Carrington, who became Varo’s best friend. Her first pursuits in Mexico City were in commercial art, costume design, and pre-Colombian pottery restoration. She only began to devote her time wholly to painting in 1953, after she had separated from Péret and became romantically entwined with Austrian businessman Walter Gruen, who supported her art-making.

The close friendship with Leonora Carrington, another Surrealist, was a deeply important one. They were tuned into a shared ancestral and evolutionary feminine consciousness that informed their desire to free women from repressive patriarchal systems, often depicted in Varo’s work through the repeated motifs of a cage and tower, or figures bound to machines or contraptions. Their work is rich in similarities, though Carrington was the better-known of the two. Both relished themes steeped in the occult, mystical worlds, and anthropomorphosis (humanization of animals) — and their artworks have even been misattributed to one another. The two wrote fairytales, invented Surrealistic potions and recipes, and influenced one another’s work. They sometimes engaged in elaborate pranks, like putting ink in tapioca pearls to serve as caviar at soirees, to guests like the renowned poet, Octavio Paz.

Carrington’s friendship provided security for Varo — who was often uneasy and superstitious — and reflects an inherent desire in female artists to create supportive networks. Reflecting Varo’s popularity beyond the art world and among the general public (at least in Mexico), her work has taken on an extensive cultural life.

Even the iconic Madonna is inspired by Varos. Her Surrealist paintings are the inspiration for the pop star’s legendary 1995 Bedtime Story video. Madonna says the following about the video (the second most expensive ever produced after Scream by Janet and Michael Jackson):

My “Bedtime Story” video was completely inspired by all the female Surrealist painters like Remedios Varo and Leonora Carrington. There’s that one shot where my hands are up in the air, and stars are spinning around me. And me flying through the hallway with my hair trailing behind me, the birds flying out of my open robe — all of those images were an homage to female Surrealists.

The Bedtime Story music video director, Mark Romanek, recounts his first encounter with Madonna. At the time, she was redecorating her home and living in a hotel. The only thing that she had taken from her house to the hotel was a single piece of surrealist art by a female painter. He didn’t mention which artist or painting, only that it was purple — but from that moment, he knew that he and Madonna had to create a music video that paid homage to the artistic influence of the female Surrealists.

Remedios Varo created the bulk of her work in the last ten years of her life, which was cut short by a heart attack at 54. It was not until the last 13 years of her life — after having fled war-torn Europe, finding a home in Mexico with other displaced Surrealists — that she finally became free of the financial yoke that had previously kept her from painting full-time. Varo had a well-received solo exhibition premiere in Mexico City in 1956, continuing to exhibit after that.

Varo and her art became legendary in Mexico following her death. Mexican art critics of the publication Novedades called her “one of the most individual and extraordinary painters of Mexican art.” A major art book, Obras de Remedios Varo, was published following the first retrospective of Varo’s work and sold all of its three subsequent printings, becoming a highly coveted collector’s item. Her haunting and iconographic work is now in the collections of major museums like the Museum of Modern Art in New York and collected by the likes of Madonna. Remedios Varo is now considered among the most eminent and influential Surrealist artists of the 20th century — her haunting and mystical work continuing to strike a powerful chord.

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About the author.
An award-winning creator and digital health, wellness, and lifestyle content strategist — Karina writes, edits, and produces compelling content across multiple platforms — including articles, video, interactive tools, and documentary film. Her work has been featured on MSN Lifestyle, Apartment Therapy, Goop, Psycom, Pregnancy & Newborn, Eat This Not That, thirdAGE, and Remedy Health Media digital properties.

As many of us spend more of our days alone, apart, and isolated, we perhaps have found space to step away from the screen and sit with ourselves. Maybe we’ve found moments to reflect on our relationship to control or our lack thereof. Maybe we’ve found a reconnection with art as a way to express the roiling waves inside us. Or maybe that sort of confrontational stillness has eluded you. If so, perhaps learning about the mother of American modernism will inspire you.

As a student, Georgia Totto O’Keeffe almost gave up on painting until she studied the philosophies of Arthur Wesley Dow which emphasized personal design and invited the painter to “fill a space beautifully” instead of trying to copy classical painters. She sent several paintings to a friend of hers in New York who then showed them to renowned art dealer and photographer Alfred Steiglitz. She moved to New York in 1918 and began her career as a professional artist at Steglitz’s request, eventually marrying him in 1924.

She garnered recognition and acclaim for her depictions of the New York skyline, and eventually her extreme close up flowers. Many have commented on the sexual nature of her flowers, particularly ones like Red Canna (1924), to which O’Keeffe maintained, “they were talking about themselves not about me.” She explored color, form and shape, going so far as to create a series of Jack-in-the-Pulpit paintings deconstructing different elements of the flower.

In 1929, O’Keeffe started living part-time in the southwest. She fell in love with the New Mexican landscape and began focusing her art on the rock formations, sky, and, of course, the bones. She felt herself over the years coming alive in the sunshine and open skies of the southwest, which brought some reprieve from her strained marriage.

She painted her first skulls from a “barrel of bones” she collected her first time in Santa Fe. One of her more famous pieces Cow’s Skull: Red, White, and Blue (1931) was accented with the rest stripes to comment on the North eastern obsession with the “Great American Novel.” Adding her take on the Great America that exists past the Hudson River.

Much like her flowers, her bones were often misunderstood. As her flowers were seen as highly sexual, her bones were interpreted as an obsession with death. In O’Keefe’s words, “it never occurs to me they have anything to do with death. They’re very lively.”

When Steiglitz died in 1946, O’Keeffe moved to Santa Fe permanently — making her home at her Abiquiú property and spending her summers at Ghost Ranch. She truly lived her best life continuing a prolific career and traveling the world. She drew inspiration from new locations and showcased her art in galleries and museums across the globe. She never found a place she loved more than New Mexico.

She later took on a young assistant who helped her continue traveling and making art even as she aged. Her relationship with Juan Hamilton caused quite the scandal (much like her affair with Steiglitz before he divorced his previous wife) to which she would tell him, “Oh, for Christ’s sake, Juan, what do you care what they think? Just focus on your work.” With his help, she continued to paint even after losing her sight, until her death at 98.

In 2014, O’Keeffe’s Jimson Weed (1936) sold for $44,405,000 blowing the world record for female artists out of the water more than three times over.

Today, we can take some lessons from this exemplary artist:

“If I can’t work by myself for a year with no stimulus other than what I can get from books, distant friends, and from my own fun in living, I’m not worth much.”

O’Keefe understood the value of solitude. She wouldn’t allow her husband in the room when she painted. Her time to work was sacred. Some of us have plenty of alone time now. Some of us have less than ever with children at home. Whatever your situation, can you carve out true solitude? No phones. No excuses. Just you and whatever muse moves you?

“I put up a lot of pictures that I had done during the year and I could say, ‘well, I painted that to please so-and-so, and I painted that to please so-and-so.’ Go around the room and there wasn’t anything to please myself and I thought that was pretty dull. So I put it all away and started over again.”

Wow. Imagine honestly assessing your work in that way and solemnly swearing to please yourself with your art rather than everyone else. What can you create that is just for you? Many great artists assert that their work comes from the raw truth of their being. What does yours look like?

“I have been terrified every moment of my life and I have never let it stop me from doing a single thing I wanted to do.”

Courage comes from doing the thing we are afraid of inspire of our terror, not from fearlessness. Can we move forward with our fears? Even now?

“I can’t explain it any other way, that I get this shape in my head. And sometimes I know where it comes from and sometimes I don’t.”

This sounds like a deep trust in her intuition. But we need the aforementioned solitude to get there. In order to really listen.

“If you work hard enough you can get almost anything.. [After 10 years] I got [The O’Keeffe Home and Studio in Abiquiu] from the Catholic Church.”

O’Keeffe obtained her dream home 10 years after falling in love with it. Sometimes we need to play the long game to get where we’re going. Remember that when you feel like you’re not accomplishing enough in a day.

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About the author.  

Alessandra is the mentor, educator, and writer behind Boneseed, a private practice devoted to deep self-inquiry through a range of physical, energetic, and mental modalities. She has over 500 hours of yoga, mentorship, and facilitation training and can be found slinging knowledge on her website, newsletter, and @bone.seed.

After 110 years, the U.S. Navy finally has its first Black female tactical jet pilot! Her path was paved by the iconic Bessie Coleman: the first BIPOC female pilot, who saw aviation as a way to empower women and people of color in the United States.

Born to poor sharecropper parents in 1892, Bessie Coleman, one of 13 children, had a hardscrabble childhood in rural east Texas raised by a single mom — but she soared past her humble beginnings to become the first African-American and Native American female pilot. Known for performing daredevil flying tricks, she was dubbed “Queen Bess,” “Brave Bessie,” and “The Only Race Aviatrix in the World.” Her goal? To encourage women — especially African-American and other women of color — to reach their dreams.

Humble Beginnings

Her mother was an African-American maid; her father, a Native American sharecropper. When Bessie was 9, her father moved back to Oklahoma to try and escape discrimination. Bessie’s mother did not go with him, staying in Waxahachie, Texas. Childhood was what you might imagine for poor African-American children in the racially-divided South at that time. She walked four miles to a one-room schoolhouse that lacked the basic materials that most students take for granted today, and helped her Mom pick cotton and wash laundry to help earn extra money. But despite these humble beginnings, Bessie excelled at mathematics, and she finished all eight grades.

College, Chicago, and Falling in Love with Flight

By the time she turned 18, Bessie had saved enough money to attend the Colored Agricultural and Normal University — today Langston University — in Langston, Oklahoma, but completed only one semester before running out of money, and returning to Waxahachie, Texas.

When she turned 23, Bessie decided to move to Chicago, where she moved in with one of her brothers. She went to beauty school in 1915 and became a manicurist at the White Sox Barber Shop. Chicago is where she fell in love with flying; she would listen for hours on end to pilots’ stories about their adventures during World War I.

Her two brothers served in the military during World War I and came home with tales from their time in France — where French women were allowed to learn how to fly airplanes. This fueled her dreams of becoming a pilot. Bessie applied to many flight schools across the United States but received countless rejections; no school would accept her because she was both a woman and a woman of color. Her brother teased her, saying that women in France were better than those in the United States because they were allowed to fly. Bessie — determined to fly — decided to take her dream across the pond to France, where she could become a pilot.

Vive le France

With support from a local banker and famed Chicago Defender newspaper publisher, Robert Abbott (one of the first self-made African American millionaires), she took a crash course in French from the Berlitz language school so that she could complete her application, which needed to be in French. At long last, she was accepted at the Caudron Brothers’ School of Aviation — founded by sibling aviation pioneers René and Gaston Caudron, in Le Crotoy, in northern France. Triumphant, she set off for Paris on November 20, 1920, aboard the ocean liner S.S. Imperator.

She began a seven-month flight course, learning to fly in a Nieuport Type 82 — a fragile, 27-foot long biplane, with a 40-foot wingspan. Not the steadiest craft, Coleman had to inspect it tip to tail before every flight. She learned aerial maneuvers like tail spins, banking, and loop-the-loops, but also witnessed an accident that killed another student. On June 15, 1921, Bessie Coleman became the first African-American and Native American woman to earn an international pilot’s license, granted by the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale, an organization that oversees aeronautic sports, that gave her the right to fly anywhere in the world. After several months of additional training with a top French pilot, Coleman was ready to return home and fulfill her dream of owning a plane and opening her own flight school stateside.

Bessie Coleman: The Sky Kissing Sensation

When she returned to New York City in September of 1921, The Associated Press lauded her as “a full-fledged aviatrix, said to be the first of her race.” Coleman gave speeches and showed films of her airborne exploits in theaters, schools, and churches to earn money — but refused to speak anywhere that was segregated, or that discriminated against people of color. In 1922, Coleman performed the first public flight by an African American and Native American woman. She dazzled onlookers with her daring stunts — showing off her aerial skills by doing loop-the-loops, making the figure “8” with her plane, and became famous for walking on the wings of her plane while aloft or parachuting down while a co-pilot took the controls.

Her performances riveted people in both the United States and Europe. Her aerial exploits were widely covered by the press — particularly in black newspapers — and she became a glamorous sensation. Coleman toured the United States, giving flight lessons, performing in aerial shows, and inspiring African Americans, Native Americans, and women to learn how to fly.

A Plane of Her Own

Eventually, Coleman saved up enough money to buy her own plane: a military surplus Curtiss JN-4, known colloquially as a Jenny. She went to Santa Monica, California to pick it up. While there, Coleman was to perform at an air show — but instead ended up surviving her first major plane crash. As she was taking off to fly to the Los Angeles Fairgrounds, the site of her show, her engine suddenly stopped working, and she plummeted from 300 feet up to the ground. She destroyed her plane and sustained severe injuries, including a broken leg, several cracked ribs, cuts on her face — but was able to fully heal and went back to performing daredevil aerial stunts in 1925.

It All Comes Tumbling Down

By April 1926, Coleman had saved enough money to purchase another surplus Jenny plane. She scheduled an aerial show for May 1. On April 30, Coleman and her co-pilot, William Wills, took a practice flight in the new plane. Coleman sat in the passenger seat, unharnessed so that she could peer over the side of the plane once in the sky and find a good place for her parachute landing during the show. But at 3,500 feet in the air, a loose wrench got stuck in the engine of the plane, and Wills was unable to control the steering wheel. The plane flipped over — and Coleman immediately fell from the open plane and died instantly on impact. She was 34. Wills crashed the plane just a few feet from Coleman’s body; he also died. Her death was heartbreaking. More than 10,000 people came to pay their respects, with the journalist Ida B. Wells — famed for her crusade against lynching — leading the ceremonies.

She was never able to open her flight school, but many flight clubs have since been named in her honor. In 1931, the Challenger Pilots’ Association of Chicago began a tradition of flying over Coleman’s grave every year; in 1977, African American female pilots created the Bessie Coleman Aviators Club; and in 1995, the Bessie Coleman stamp was issued to honor her accomplishments. At a time when flights are largely grounded due to COVID-19, we remember Bessie Coleman, who saw aviation as a way to empower people of color in the United States.

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About the author.
An award-winning creator and digital health, wellness, and lifestyle content strategist — Karina writes, edits, and produces compelling content across multiple platforms — including articles, video, interactive tools, and documentary film. Her work has been featured on MSN Lifestyle, Apartment Therapy, Goop, Psycom, Pregnancy & Newborn, Eat This Not That, thirdAGE, and Remedy Health Media digital properties.

This past year, we’ve seen individuals and organizations alike using their voices to speak their values. But such moves are not without controversy. Only a few years ago, the Kellogg Foundation drew ire for funding support of BLM and an ad for Cheerios featuring a mixed-race family faced a deluge of hate comments. Advertising that depicts LGBTQ folks has also garnered criticism. This comes from both detractors and the communities represented themselves.

Advertising can play a role in advancing social justice. Through greater public representation and funding support for strategic initiatives, businesses can help.

Gay Money Talks

LGBTQ purchasing power in the US hovers around $1 trillion. Globally, that number is around $3.7 trillion. Yes, the advantage of affluence in the community disproportionately benefits white cis gay men. But we are undeniably a huge market segment. Queer folks want to see messages of support and representation in advertising.

On the flip side, it was widely publicized in 2012 that Chick-fil-A Foundation donated to two anti-gay organizations. Their mostly conservative fanbase doubled down on their support. They were met with kiss-ins and ridicule. Perhaps it was their expansion into more liberal cities — rather than protests and education efforts — that led to an end of that funding support. Right wing pundits criticized the switch.

When social movements reach a tipping point of public support, advertising can make what was once radical into something mainstream and apolitical. Activists routinely criticize corporate sponsorships at pride events for creating a sanitized “corporate pride.” In the landmark book, The Revolution Will Not Be Funded, the authors caution that social movements for liberation can be co-opted by nonprofits, foundations, and corporations in support of the status quo.

The shift in public perception can lull people into complacency. Those at the margins of the LGBTQ community — people of color, trans folks, the poor — are too often left out of the conversation. While advertising featuring the gay community continues to grow, devastating policy can seem to undo the incremental changes made.

That said, representation does matter. Seeing our relationships and families represented in commercials, rainbow flags splashed in storefronts everywhere, gender fluidity in fashion ads, and countless other examples, does play a part in shifting the public narrative. And it can sometimes lead to positive political change.

The Early Adopter: Absolut

Absolut, the Swedish vodka sold by Pernod Ricard, is not afraid to take risks in their advertising strategy. Absolut began promoting the brand in gay publications back in 1981! The vodka, sold at Studio 54 in the 80s, led to an encounter with Andy Warhol. That initiated their legendary print advertising collaborations with artists. Here’s a sample of 10 of those ads speaking to the LGBTQ community, created by the ad agency TBWA Worldwide.

The Quiet Supporter: Subaru

Lesbians love to joke about our affinity for Subarus. But before the targeted ads of the 1990s, the company’s marketers identified lesbians (as well as hikers, teachers, and others) as fans of their all-wheel-drive vehicles. Those marketers took a risk at a time when other companies were pulling their ads from the Ellen sitcom (after she came out). Subaru promoted the brand to gays and lesbians in ads created by Mulryan/Nash. Sometimes the messages were “coded” to the community. That gamble paid off. The unassuming car manufacturer won lifelong dedication from the tribe.

The Turnaround: Target

Long before boycotts for “promoting gay lifestyles,” a former Target CEO made a sizeable donation to an anti-gay politician. But we’re a forgiving bunch. Target made strides as allies by standing up for marriage equality (see this ad featuring gay dads). They publicly came out to welcome trans employees and shoppers. These days, we love their campy aesthetic, their Pride clothing section, their inexpensive housewares, and their open support for the community.

In Our Own Words: It Gets Better Project

The LGBTQ community has long wielded the power of advertising approaches to lobby for change to policy and to shift public consciousness. The “Kissing Doesn’t Kill” campaign for ACT UP during the height of the AIDS epidemic was unprecedented. It was politically charged, clever, and wildly influential.

The “It Gets Better” Project was launched in 2010 by columnist Dan Savage and his husband Terry Miller. It features videos made in response to high rates of death by suicide of gay teens and youth perceived to be gay. It is strategic storytelling at its finest. Google Creative Lab created a spot highlighting the campaign the following year and leveraged it to show the power of the web for good.

Trans/Genderqueer Visibility: Secret

It’s not the first ad or product geared towards the trans community. But this spot for Secret deodorant features androgynous queer model Karis Wilde. Ending with the tagline, “there’s no wrong way to be a woman,” it’s understated and sweet. Parent company Proctor and Gamble (P&G) has garnered criticism, however. The spot affirms the right to use a bathroom aligned with one’s gender identity. But the company doesn’t defend those rights for their own employees or more broadly.

LGBTQ POC Visibility: Spotify

The 2014 “Can’t Find the Words?” commercial from Spotify is a sweet, subtle take on that feeling of butterflies in your stomach when you’re interested in someone. This time, the characters are two Black men and we watch as those three dots indicate waiting for a response. LGBTQ people have always been well represented in the arts, so it’s only fitting that a music streaming app would take this approach.

It’s hard to deny the role that advertising can play in social change, whether it leads the way for other brands or simply follows the trend. It can show support for our communities, advance our causes, and help shift culture. Companies that take those risks show support for their own diverse workplace, earn social capital, and cultivate brand loyalty. Happy Pride!

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About the author.
Jess Powers writes about marketing, food, and wellness. She has experience in nonprofit communications and emergency management. Follow her @foodandfury.