The audience is listening.

After years of indifference, radio stations are actively courting gay men - me more openly than others

Not so long ago radio's gay listeners scanned aimlessly up and down the dial in search of a place to call home. There was shock jock Howard Stern on one station, testosterone rockers Led Zeppelin on another, and never a place where gays felt welcome.

That is, until now. As dance music reemerges on the airwaves, stations across the country are targeting gay male listeners as a viable - and lucrative - consumer market. From New York City's number one station, WKTU, to Chicago's popular B96 to up-and-coming Los Angeles station Groove Radio 103.1, programmers are specifically courting gay men with the sounds and rhythms that have helped to define a generation of gay male culture: club music.

The phenomenon seems to have taken off with WKTU. Last February the station embraced what's known in the trade as a "rhythmic pop" format. Playing music that ranges from nostalgic '70s Donna Summer hits to red-hot tracks from new club groups such as La Bouche and Real McCoy, the station shot to the number one position in the hypercompetitive New York market almost overnight.

Although its target audience is broadly defined, WKTU has taken both subtle and overt steps to win gay listeners. Aside from its gay-friendly playlist, the station has made a strong bid for gay ratings in choosing its most famous on-air personality, RuPaul. After guest-hosting the station's morning drive-time show for a week last spring, the drag diva signed on as full-time DJ for the morning slot - a crucial time period for listener ratings. Executives at WKTU insist that RuPaul's presence on the airwaves appeals not only to gays but to straights as well.

"RuPaul is a phenomenon," says the station's promotions director, Jim Furgeson. "Hiring him didn't start as an effort to say, 'Let's target gays.' We just wanted him. He's a New York-style celebrity who fits with the whole mood of the station."

Despite his celebrity status outside the gay community, RuPaul seems to know who his listeners are. "Honey, WKTU asked a big old black drag queen to wake up the tristate area every morning," comments the superstar turned DJ, whose radio show reaches fans in New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut. "I think that says it all. But the station's commitment to have me as the morning host sends a message to everyone - not just the gay listeners - that WKTU is not afraid of the future. It is helping to spread the message that the days of exclusion and closed-mindedness are coming to an end."

This inclusivity may have more to do with the bottom line than with the newfound open-mindedness that RuPaul refers to. When a series of 1994 market-research surveys claimed that many gay men have a substantial amount of "disposable income," those findings may well have hit home in the profit-driven business of radio marketing. "Ultimately the number crunchers don't care where the money is coming from, as long as it's coming," says Larry Flick, dance-music editor for the music-industry wade magazine Billboard "That fact is being more openly recognized by a slew of people in the music business."

Although WKTU recognized its gay audience early on, it wasn't the first station to pick up on the power of the gay dollar. Chicago's B96 has played dance-pop music since 1988, garnering some of the best ratings in the city. Part of its strategy has always been to play to the gay community.

"Dance music isn't the only kind of music that gay people listen to, but it's a big part of their culture," says Erik Bradley, B96's music director. "Because of that our station does very well with gay listeners."

But B96 does more than just play gay-friendly music to attract its listeners, Bradley notes. It participates in community outreach programs, including sponsoring a float at the city's gay pride parade and holding events at one of the city's most popular gay clubs, the Vortex. However, Bradley is still reluctant to portray his station as specifically targeting gay demographics. Instead he prefers to talk about issues of mass appeal. "Gay listeners are important to B96," he says, "but mostly as part of our wider audience."

If there's one station that fully acknowledges its reliance on the gay community, it is Los Angeles-based Groove Radio. When it launched last June - out of the ashes of a zero-rated "adult contemporary" station - Groove Radio captured its gay audience simply by playing the music people heard in gay nightclubs, from Robert Miles to Orbital to Love Tribe.

"The gay community was on our radio station out of the box," says Peter Nichols, Groove Radio's marketing director. "We play so much music that is familiar only in the gay community, and obviously the audience that knows that music followed along and caught on to us first."

Playing the music that gay men dance to is only part of Groove Radio's winning strategy. Like B96, the station has also begun to sponsor a variety of gay events, including AIDS fund-raisers, pride parades, and cross promotions with gay nightclubs.

And like WKTU, Groove Radio is reaching out to gay audiences with the help of its own on-air transvestite. Womina Wells, a local nightclub performer, serves as the sidekick to DJ Tony B! on the station's evening drive-time show. Wells has been so successful that, in addition to his rush-hour stint, he now has his own Sunday afternoon show as well as a late-night show during the week.

Groove Radio is also the only L.A. station to have aired a series of controversial gay-oriented safe-sex public-service announcements that were created by AIDS Project Los Angeles. In addition, the station's morning drive-time call-in show, Mornings With the Poorman and the Love Doctors, features advice on topics ranging from gay sex to gay relationships. "A lot of radio stations participate in gay events - that's nothing new," says Nichols. "I think we do a great job in serving the gay community. Would I say it's more than other stations? Yes, I would."

As dance music reemerges on radio as a successful format, "rhythmic pop" stations are set to appear next year in such cities as Nashville; Dayton, Ohio; and Savannah, Ga. Unlike Groove Radio, though, those stations might not be ready to identify themselves so closely with their gay listeners.

"I think the push into gay marketing will certainly be part of the strategy for stations in smaller markets than New York or Los Angeles, but I think it will be much more silent there," says Hick "If you talk to the programmers of those particular stations, I don't think they'd tell you they were courting gay audiences." But beneath their silence how many of those stations will court gay dollars? Flick doesn't hesitate to speculate: "I think they all will."

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