The North Texas GLBT Chamber of Commerce has recruited American Airlines as its first Platinum Corporate Member.
“We are very pleased to have such a dynamic company return as a corporate member of the chamber and become our first corporate member at the Platinum level,” said Sherry Briggs, president of the group. “American Airlines membership is essential to the chamber’s mission to empower, promote and support the economic development of the North Texas GLBT community and its supporters.”
American Airlines has been named the official airline of the North Texas GLBT Chamber of Commerce, and it will be the presenting sponsor of the chamber’s second anniversary dinner on March 12.
Betty Young, American Airlines’ national sales and marketing manager for the GLBT community, said the corporation is the official airline for many gay organizations, but the association with the Dallas group marks a special honor because it involves the airline’s hometown.
Well, V, you have to keep in mid that there is a certain amount of Yankee arrogance and navel-gazing when many of them use the term "National" in the name of an organization.
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.
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?