After 36 years of queer activism, I can rest my picket signs and turn in my button collection. Gays have arrived.

According to USA Today, queers should be losing no time in heading to some 75 destinations both here in the U.S. and around the world where we are being welcomed with open arms.

Those localities are rolling out the red carpet because we are the latest market niche. To be exact: A $55 billion tourism market that is being tapped by enterprising cities such as Philadelphia, my old home town. Philly, as we natives call it, started an ad campaign four years ago aimed at drawing the Will and Grace crowd to oooh and ahhh at the Liberty Bell and Independence Hall, not to mention spend lots of its so-called disposal income in local businesses and hotels.

The TV ads for the campaign featured a gay couple in colonial drag with the message: “Come to Philadelphia. Get your history straight and your nightlife gay.” It’s been successful in drawing gay men but not lesbians. So, the city is now doing special outreach to lesbians.

Other cities are understandably jealous and don’t want Philly to have all of that lovely dough, so they’re throwing together their own marketing schemes to bring in the “Queer as Folk” and the “L Word” bunch.

That gay men have more disposal income than any other group in our culture is an urban myth, but don’t tell that to the corporations pouring money into our community. Studies have shown that there are as many poor and working-class folks in our community as there are in any other.

Some may think it’s progress that Madison Avenue considers us a market to be exploited in the same way that babies and cats are. Unfortunately, it’s part of success in America. No disenfranchised group makes it into the mainstream without paying the corporate piper. Until you’re treated as another lucrative market, you’re loathed or ignored. As queers were, until that day in the late 90s when a light bulb went off in the head of some enterprising suit: “Ah, the gay market!”

For a long time, the queer movement had this vision of changing things so that social and economic justice were achieved by all. Maybe even a little redistribution of the wealth and resources. Marxism light. The dream evaporated with the dawning of the age of corporate ads in gay newspapers and liquor company sponsorships of gay pride parades.

Now it looks as if we’re destined to become just another group of badly behaved tourists with mini-cams, snapping up the local culture and demanding to be pampered as we drive and fly around the world in pursuit of the perfect photo album memory. We might even gain more acceptance, not because people realize that human sexuality is a wild and wonderful array of pleasures to be enjoyed by all, but because we too can buy overpriced souvenirs and stay at expensive hotels owned by conservative families that fund right-wing, anti-gay lobby groups.

Progress, American style.

Tommi Avicolli Mecca is a radical, southern Italian, working-class, atheist queer performer and writer with a webpage: www.avicollimecca.com