In the Nov. 12, 1981, issue of The Advocate, a national gay magazine, there was a tall, half-page ad featuring a sweaty, topless model.
It was for Absolut Vodka, a Swedish brand that was born in 1879 and introduced in the United States 100 years later. The ad was spare, just a photograph of a bottle of Absolut, its cap sailing off toward the heavens, and the words “ABSOLUT TEMPTATION.” — with a period — underneath.
It was hardly earth-shattering, and there was nothing gay about it, unlike the come-hither ad for a San Francisco drag night on the opposite page.
Yet Absolut’s decision to advertise in The Advocate 45 years ago planted a flag that helped lift the company from obscurity, and made it one of the earliest national brands to court the queer market.
This Pride Month, as L.G.B.T.Q. advertising and marketing spending has slowed and many corporations have cut back on or ditched Pride campaigns, Absolut’s queer beginnings shine a light on the difference in corporate America between treating the L.G.B.T.Q. market as a finger-in-the-wind opportunity and a steadfast bestie.
If Granddad’s spirit ads were sleepy mallards, Absolut’s were strutting peacocks: The company commissioned superstars in the worlds of art (Keith Haring, Kenny Scharf) and fashion (Marc Jacobs, Gianni Versace) to design prismatic artistic interpretations of an Absolut bottle. Andy Warhol’s 1985 ad is in the collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art.
Fast-forward to this month, when Absolut released one of its most high-profile campaigns in years. The ad features a repeated image of Madonna, wearing a tightfitting bodysuit and oversize sunglasses, against a field of blinding magenta. Text beneath the duplicated pop star — the repetition evokes Warhol silk-screens like “Triple Elvis” — blares “ABSOLUT ICON.”
In a statement, the singer referred to the brand’s history of championing “visionary artists” and L.G.B.T.Q. people. “They are a brand that always puts their money where their mouth is, and they have always supported the gay community,” she said.
Absolut isn’t a charity; if it had failed to capture gay consumers, it might have said “see ya” decades ago. And other major brands, including Levi’s, Subaru and MAC Cosmetics, have long maintained a close association with the L.G.B.T.Q. market. But in the TikTok era, when even Burger King has sought the queer dollar, it’s worth remembering that to advertise to the gay market in 1981 came with significant financial and reputational risks.
In the 1970s, the national companies that advertised in gay publications mostly sold so-called sin goods, like alcohol and cigarettes, or films and disco music — commercial products from brands that paid no mind to Religious Right outrage, and that were popular with gay men.
As AIDS began its deadly march in the early 1980s, national advertisers fled the gay market. But starting in the early 1990s, with AIDS no longer considered just a gay disease and the gay civil rights movement gaining steam in the Clinton years, more national advertisers started to dip their toes back into gay media.
In the social media age, queer marketing is less siloed, with many consumers considering queerness “more of a complex idea about identity, one of a number of reasons why people might buy one product over another,” said Katherine Sender, a communication professor at Cornell University and the author of “Business, Not Politics: The Making of the Gay Market.”
Recent controversies at companies like Budweiser that have teamed up with trans celebrities or celebrated Pride suggest that, even today, queer marketing has its limits. Richard W. Lewis, who led Absolut’s marketing in the late 1980s at the advertising agency TBWA, said he didn’t recall any pushback to an Absolut campaign, either from the public or inside Absolut.
He credited Michel Roux, the heterosexual president of Absolut’s importer in the 1980s, for championing the undervalued gay market.
“Michel’s attitude was, of course we’re going to be on their side,” said Lewis, who has written two books on Absolut’s advertising legacy and influence.
“We were the Pied Piper in magazines,” he said. “Everybody followed us, other brands that wanted to make inroads into the gay community. We put our brand out there.”
The keeping of Absolut’s history falls to Lovisa Severin Kragerud, the company’s in-house archivist who, from her office in Stockholm, oversees a collection of thousands of photos and films and around 1,000 bottles.
A separate facility four hours away in a climate-controlled mountain vault is where she keeps some 400 pieces, including dresses from Tom Ford and Stella McCartney, from its fashion collection.
“The worst part is, all the boots are in my size,” she said.
Neither facility is open to the public. But about half the archive is on display in “Absolut Absolut,” a new exhibition at the Spritmuseum, a small museum in Stockholm dedicated to Swedish drinking culture.
Among the 130 advertisements in the show is Absolut’s first fashion-focused ad: a photo of the model Rachel Williams in a silver minidress by the American fashion designer David Cameron. Kragerud said the ad had the company’s phone number on it, and thousands of women called to buy the dress. (It wasn’t for sale.)
Lewis said the ease with which companies now buddy up to the queer consumer made him proud to have helped Absolut break ground.
“All these things look easy in retrospect,” he said. “And they are not.”
