How Philadelphia welcomed gay and lesbian tourism

One winter afternoon in 2003, in a conference room overlooking the Ben Franklin Bridge, six marketing strategists met to devise a slogan that would revolutionize the city's tourism industry.

The target audience represented fewer than 10 percent of Americans. But this minority had time and money, considerably more than the average citizen, and Philadelphia needed the business.

The city was missing out on its share of the $54 billion that gays and lesbians were spending yearly on travel.

The slogan the marketers dreamed up that day - "Get your history straight and your nightlife gay" - was the city's first come-on line in a $1 million, three-year courtship of LGBT tourists.

The campaign "was a calculated risk," says Jeff Guaracino, vice president of the Greater Philadelphia Tourism Marketing Corp.

Not only might straitlaced tourists be put off by the suggestion that "City of Brotherly Love" was meant to be taken literally, but conservative legislators also might be incited to take aim at the city.

At the time, cities such as San Francisco, New York, and Miami were the "it" places to go. Philadelphia wasn't even in the running. Then the national television commercial featuring a gay couple in colonial costumes hit the air.

At first, the reaction was mixed. About 300 people responded to the ads, two-thirds disapproving.

Then, in 2005, State Rep. Daryl D. Metcalfe (R., Butler) sent letters to fellow House members complaining that tax dollars were being used to "promote immoral behaviors."

"We should not ask constituents to fund behavior that is against their religious and moral beliefs," he wrote.

Metcalfe said his constituents "would object to even $1 of their tax dollars" being used to advance a gay and lesbian lifestyle. The legislature, however, did not take up his cause.

Meanwhile, the get-your-history-straight slogan was catching on. In 2004, The Daily Show sent fake correspondent Rob Corddry to interview Meryl Levitz, Guaracino's boss. The four-minute segment made Philadelphia seem cool and amped up the campaign.

In 2010, Philadelphia became one of the top 10 LGBT destinations in the United States, according to Community Marketing Inc., a company that tracks gay and lesbian consumer trends.

"It's the power of the invitation," Guaracino explains. "People won't come to dinner unless you invite them."

One of the chief architects of the campaign, Guaracino, 38, is an Eagle Scoutish presence in the city's marketing clan, relentlessly promoting the area's virtues.

"Everybody in the whole wide world should come and see the Liberty Bell and Independence Hall and have a cheesesteak," he says. "Everybody should be in Philadelphia for New Year's Eve."

The bookcases in his office, across from Liberty Place, are filled with art books, thick loose-leaf binders of charts and studies, and Miss Manners' Guide to Excruciatingly Correct Behavior.

"Manners," Guaracino says. "That's always important, right?"

He came to the marketing corporation in 2001 from the Franklin Institute, where he was director of communications. A year later, he joined business and community leaders to form the Philadelphia Gay Tourism Caucus. The shared objective brought together several strong-willed players, among them the "elders" of the gay community - archrivals Mark Segal, the brash publisher of the Philadelphia Gay News, and Malcolm Lazin, a lawyer and Log Cabin Republican.

In Guaracino's book, Gay and Lesbian Tourism: The Essential Guide for Marketing, he describes the group's struggle to reach a consensus. Once it did, the group set up partnerships with government, hotels, merchants, Enterprise car rental, Orbitz, and Southwest Airlines.

The caucus promotes LGBT events such as the current Q Fest, one of the largest gay-and-lesbian film festivals in the country. This year, it also helped draw the U.S. Mr. Gay Competition, the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association convention, and the lesbian softball World Series.

"I'll be playing," says Tami Sortman, shaking her bandaged hand defiantly.

The night before, Sortman, 48, a former president and a founding member of the Philadelphia Gay Tourism Caucus, had been injured practicing with the Philadelphia Women's Baseball League.

Sortman is director of marketing for LundyLaw, a personal-injury law firm. For 20 years, she worked at the Altus Agency and was one of the six who helped hatch "Get your history straight."

Giving a tour of Center City's gayborhood, she talks fast, moves quickly. A curtain of blond bangs falling over one eye, she points out the landmarks. Here is Giovanni's Room, the nation's oldest gay bookstore now that Oscar Wilde has closed in New York. Across the street is ICandy, a new club with a roof deck. Next door, Spruce Street Video, the source for gay porn, hanging on despite Netflix. Catty-corner is Knock, a restaurant started by the former owner of the landmark gay bar Woody's.

Everywhere she goes, Sortman runs into friends. She stops to talk to John Cochie, a caucus founder and innkeeper of the Alexander Inn, a gay-owned bed-and-breakfast. Then Mel Heifetz, a real estate investor who has offered the city $1 million for the building occupied by the Boy Scouts, which excludes openly gay members. If he succeeds, Heifetz says, he will give it to a nonprofit that does not discriminate.

The gayborhood's boundaries - Chestnut to Pine, 11th to Broad - are tagged with rainbow markers underlining the street names. The signs were one of Sortman's accomplishments as caucus president.

Her successor as caucus president, Carlos Estela, took over in January. The caucus' job now, he says, is to build on its success.

By day, Estela is vice president and marketing manager for Citizens Bank. He volunteers for nonprofits, mentoring gay teens and doing political advocacy work.

"When I'm dead," he says, "I want someone to remember Carlos was someone who helped others."

Promoting LGBT tourism in the city might not seem like altruism. But it is, he says, if it helps make Philadelphia a safe and welcoming place for gays and lesbians and anyone else who feels like an outsider.

"It's a way to help people understand that they're accepted," he says. "I'm a businessman. But I want to do it in a way that's beneficial."

Go on a

tour of the gayborhood with Tami Sortman and Carlos Estela: www.philly.com/

gaytourism

EndText

Inquirer staff writer Angela Couloumbis contributed to this article.