Impact of outrage
Groups are considering a boycott of Hillsborough County after the gay pride controversy. Sometimes these movements are devastating. Sometimes they go virtually unnoticed.
By STEVE HUETTEL
Published July 10, 2005
Rich Grant didn't recognize the first sign of an economic tsunami about to strike his state's tourist industry.
The spokesman for Denver's convention and visitors bureau was in New York City when reporters started asking his office back home about Barbra Streisand's call to boycott Colorado as a protest against voters approving a statewide anti-gay rights amendment.
Don't call back and let the story die over the weekend, Grant advised his staff.
"By Monday, they were all in my office: Dan Rather, NBC, ABC, McNeill-Lehrer, CNN," he recalls. "Until then . . . nobody saw it having any impact on tourism."
Within a year of the November 1992 election, when voters approved the amendment, Colorado lost 31 conventions worth $38-million. That doesn't count groups or tourists who wrote off the state without anyone knowing.
Other communities have felt the sting when groups use economic weapons to fight political battles. Black groups in Miami led a three-year boycott after politicians snubbed Nelson Mandela during a 1990 visit. Cincinnati, South Carolina and Virginia have also been targets.
Now, the spotlight has turned on Hillsborough County. Gay and straight activists quickly organized to fight the Hillsborough County Commission's decision last month to ban government recognition of gay pride events.
The wheels have begun to turn, but it's the nature of such socially driven movements that what's unclear today may be unclear forever: How much economic impact does outrage have?
Local activists have pressured business leaders to speak out against the ban. If they don't, a boycott could be organized or the idea might spontaneously combust as it did in Colorado, said Nadine Smith, executive director of Equality Florida, a gay and lesbian rights group.
"As long as leadership is challenging this . . . people will continue to wait and see," she said. "In the absence of progress, a boycott becomes inevitable."
That has businesses that cater to tourists on edge. Some 17-million visitors came to Hillsborough last year, spending an estimated $2.9-billion. Tourism is among the top industries in Hillsborough County and employs 42,000 people.
The Tampa Bay Convention and Visitors Bureau, which markets tourism in Hillsborough, has hired a public relations firm to map out a strategy for dealing with a boycott, said Karen Brand, vice president of marketing.
The bureau hasn't taken a position on the county commission's 5-1 vote requiring government "to refrain from acknowledging, promoting or participating in gay pride events."
It probably won't. The bureau's entire budget - $5.8-million this year - comes from a share of the county's 5-percent tax on visitor accommodations. County commissioners have the final say on how that money is spent.
"Obviously, it's a sensitive issue," said Brand.
Pinellas County, where tourism is undisputably the largest employer, presumably wouldn't be targeted. But tourism officials are concerned a boycott could spill over if visitors don't make the geographic distinction.
"We see ourselves as a distinct and different destination," said Wit Tuttell, spokesman for the St. Petersburg/Clearwater Visitor and Convention Bureau. "But we're linked at the hip."
Local gay and lesbian leaders don't support a tourism boycott now, says Michael Brill, president of the Tampa Bay Business Guild, an association of gay businesses with 215 members.
"It should be the last response," he said. "It's not good for business, not good for anybody." Gay-owned hotels and other tourist businesses would be among the hardest hit.
But "massive momentum" for a boycott is building across the country, wrote Scott Taylor, owner of a Tampa public relations firm, in an e-mail to county commissioners and tourism officials. News reports on the controversy have appeared in gay-related Web sites and news digests.
"It's a very big deal nationally," said Michael Cole, spokesman for the Human Rights Campaign, which calls itself the nation's largest gay and lesbian advocacy group with 600,000 members.
"It's a particularly heinous resolution that goes out of its way to be mean-spirited. We're in touch with state and local folks . . . and mindful the rest of the country is watching this."
Calls for tourism boycotts don't always work.
After Virginia passed a law last year prohibiting recognition of same-sex unions, two activists in Seattle tried to fight back with a Web site that satirized the state's tourism slogan, "Virginia is for Lovers."
The site, www.VirginiaIsForHaters.org urged tourists to stay away from the state and boycott products made by Virginia companies. The state's tourism marketing agency has found "no hard numbers of any impact" on tourism from the campaign, said spokesman Richard Lewis.
In 2000, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People called for a boycott of South Carolina to get the Confederate battle flag off the statehouse dome. The group succeeded later that year but maintained the boycott when the flag was moved to a memorial on the statehouse grounds.
The NAACP says the boycott is still making a difference. But hotel and motel tax receipts grew steadily over the five-year boycott, state officials told the Associated Press last month.
Still, when a campaign gains national recognition, "these trains run you over," said Bill Talbert, chief executive of the Greater Miami Convention and Visitors Bureau.
In 1990, Dade County elected officials refused to honor Mandela when the anti-apartheid leader came to Miami Beach on a world tour. Mandela had publicly embraced Cuban President Fidel Castro and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, and politicians feared angering Miami's Cuban and Jewish communities.
A prominent lawyer, H.T. Smith, called it an insult to the black community. He pledged to get one black organization each week to pull a convention out of Miami or take the city off its list of possible sites until Dade leaders apologized to Mandela.
When the boycott ended in 1993 - with pledges from the city and tourism officials to help build a black-owned hotel and provide minority scholarships - Miami lost at least $25-million in convention business, Talbert said. Boycott organizers put the figure at $75-million.
"At the end of the day, these blocks of business can go anywhere," Talbert said.
As Colorado officials found out, the taint of a boycott keeps away a wide range of groups. Among those that left were the U.S. Conference of Mayors, the National Education Association, Lotus Software and National Association of Social Workers.
"If it becomes a national issue, it can have a devastating effect," said Grant, spokesman for the Denver Metro Convention and Visitors Bureau. "You can't book anything with public funding or educational groups. It becomes nearly impossible to do business as normal."
The constitutional amendment, which decreed public entities could not adopt or enforce laws giving protected status based on sexual preference, never went into effect and lost every court challenge. It was struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1996.
A group that formed after the Streisand declaration, Boycott Colorado, estimated the action cost the state $125-million. Local economists called the effect negligible.
The impact of canceled conventions - worth $38-million - wasn't felt until years later, Grant said, because hotels charge steep penalties to back out of contracts for big blocks of rooms. But there's no way to know how many groups took Colorado off their short lists.
"It's the phones that aren't ringing," he said. "Six or seven years later, people are wondering why there's no business in town."
If gays and lesbian travelers feel unwelcome in Hillsborough County, plenty of other areas are rolling out the red carpet.
They travel more often, take longer vacations and spend more than the general population, said Tom Roth, chief executive of Community Marketing Inc., which advises companies and tourist organizations on marketing to gays and lesbians.
Gays have more disposal income and are more inclined to travel. "It's a lifestyle issue," says Roth. "If they're coming from rural America or communities where they're closeted at work or by family, it's a release."
American gays spend around $54-billion a year on travel, about 10 percent of the U.S. travel industry. Only one or two destinations marketed to gays a decade ago, Roth says. Now, it's between 50 and 80.
That includes tourism groups in the Florida Keys and South Florida and Visit Florida, the state's tourist marketing agency. The St. Petersburg/Clearwater bureau wants to spend $325,000 next year for ads and promotions at target audiences, including gays.
Fort Lauderdale attracted more than 800,000 gay visitors last year, about 10 percent of the area's total, said Nicki Grossman, chief executive of the Greater Fort Lauderdale Visitor and Convention Center.
"It's a lucrative market, an important market," says Grossman. "If there's a perception they're not welcome, that will spread through the traveling community."
Times staff researcher Cathy Wos contributed to this report. Steve Huettel can be reached at huettel@sptimes.com or 813 226-3384.