Marketing Weed is Queer Indeed: Grasslands' Content Strategist Meghan O'Dea on Cannabis Culture and LGBTQIA+ Identity

As a teenager growing up in the foothills of Appalachia, there were two subjects I knew better than to bring up in polite conversation—smoking weed, and not being straight. I never would have predicted that 20 years later I’d be out and proud on the Front Range, writing about cannabis full-time. 

Growing up bi in the Bible Belt, I knew that both my stoner persona and my sexual identity cast me as morally suspicious to many of my friends’ parents and other adults, even in our relatively liberal college town. Today, however, I work for a company where this facet of who I am isn’t a liability. Rather, my queer identity is an informative lens through which I view my work as a content strategist at Grasslands.

Of course, cannabis has a very queer history. The roots of the legalization movement are firmly planted in the activist response to the 1980s HIV / AIDS epidemic. We wouldn’t have the right to recreational consumption in states from California to New York if it weren’t for medical cannabis advocates who worked hard to combat stigma on two fronts. Agitating for the LGBTQIA+ community also meant agitating for access to the plant that provided comfort to many who received palliative care during the plague years.

The Parallel Fights for Gay and Trans Rights and Legal Cannabis

The affinity between cannabis and the fight for queer and trans liberation goes deeper than simply ameliorating the ills of the prohibitionist War on Drugs, however. The two fights for access and acceptance have leapfrogged one another since I was 10 years old, when in 1996 California voters legalized medical cannabis.

In 2004—my senior year of high school—same-sex marriage was legal in just one state, Massachusetts. Just over 10 years later, the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges ensured that same-sex marriage would be legal in all 50 states. One decade after that milestone, however, the conservative backlash is in full swing. These days, the headlines are less “love wins” and instead filled with far-right groups targeting Pride events and red states like Florida encoding a fresh wave of damaging, dangerous anti-LGBTQIA+ legislation. 

Advances in the cannabis industry have followed a similar two-step forward and back trajectory. Colorado and Washington were the first to legalize cannabis for recreational use in 2012. In 2023, however, Oklahoma voters rejected the opportunity to greenlight adult-use cannabis and expand the state’s five-year-old medical market. More states than ever are going green—including massive markets like New York—but federal lawmakers continue to drag their feet over basic legislation like the SAFE Banking Act, which would make financial transactions less risky for business owners in legal states.

Respectability Politics in Cannabis and Queer Culture

Not only have queer liberation and cannabis legalization maintained mirrored timelines, the two movements also feature parallel rhetoric. For example, many people within the marginalized communities targeted by the War on Drugs, whether LGBTQIA+ and / or BIPOC, are familiar with respectability politics. 

Repudiating stigma by adhering to dominant cultural values is a tale as old as time. 

The same-sex marriage movement of the aughts sought to gain legal protections for queer couples that adhere to heterosexual models of two-partner relationships and nuclear family structures. As Yuvraj Joshi wrote in the Columbia Human Rights Law Review in 2012, “The challenges posed by such recognition include dissonance between one’s public and private selves, and fueling moralism and entrenching divisions between different queer constituencies. The onus … is not on others to accept difference (as is the case with respect), but rather on oneself to cease to be unacceptably different.”

As someone who spends much of each day steeped in cannabis brand messaging, I see similar trends in cannabis as the overarching culture transitions from classic stoner tropes to something more inclusive and, yes, traditionally respectable. 

Cannabis companies are often eager to convey that their products don’t impede productivity or turn you into a “couch-locked” giggle factory without professional ambition or the capacity for domestic responsibility. This rhetoric, designed to appeal to the “cannacurious” who make up the industry’s total addressable market (TAM), is sometimes at odds with actual consumer habits like prioritizing max-percent THC in purchasing decisions.

In a similar vein, the fight for same-sex marriage hinged not on generating widespread acceptance for varied models of queer family-making, but on the ability of gay couples to form stable nuclear families and integrate into “typical” communities. The fight by gay parents to adopt children in decades past has since evolved into the battle for even heterosexual, heteronormative and cisgender parents to provide gender-affirming care to their trans and nonbinary children. 

Simultaneously, a conversation around the role of cannabis in family life has sprung up for parents of all sexualities and community structures. Families that are not visibly white, heterosexual or monogamous and participate in cannabis possession or consumption certainly experience deeper suspicion and stigma than those that adhere to the traditional nuclear family model. But discourse around both queer or gender-nonconformist parenting and cannabis-inclusive parenting speaks to a larger cultural reimagining of what it takes to be a positive and attentive presence in the lives of children and the community at large. 

Weed, Wellness and Queer Culture

Discourse, too, around mental health and self-care has been driven in no small part by the increasing visibility of queer voices in online spaces and mainstream media. Today, that visibility has helped transform “wellness” into a multi-trillion-dollar industry. The relatively niche intersection of cannabis and wellness alone represents millions, if not billions, of dollars in potential revenue. 

One can’t realistically discuss the total addressable market of cannabis consumers without acknowledging the queer demographic within that TAM. After all, the LGBTQIA+ community experiences anxiety, depression and other mental health conditions at a greater rate than the general population as a direct result of the discrimination and stigma we face day to day. 

To put it another way, if you’re asking people to consider cannabis as a treatment for various mental health diagnoses, you can’t do so without acknowledging which population segments are at greatest risk for these conditions. Talking about cannabis in the context of health and wellness demands acknowledgment of the real toll that prejudice and stigma take on vulnerable populations, including BIPOC and the LGBTQIA+ communities. 

I can offer some anecdotal evidence to this effect. When I first consumed cannabis, part of the appeal was relief from the severe anxiety and depression I developed as a queer teen at a conservative, all-girls Southern preparatory school.  It would be disingenuous, however, to say that I initially approached this plant from a medical perspective. When I took my first puff, I was simply excited to try something new and make a choice for myself.

Don't Dream It, Be It

Cannabis appealed to me then and now for the same reasons I was first attracted to countercultural classics like The Rocky Horror Picture Show, the poems of Baudelaire, Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, and bands like Bikini Kill. Some introductions just take longer than others. However you slice it, though, I view my cannabis consumption as inextricable from my queer identity. The Reagan administration might have asked if I was bisexual because I smoked weed. To paraphrase High Fidelity, however, I would counter that no—I smoke weed because I’m queer.

Throughout my adulthood, I’ve turned to cannabis to manage symptoms of CPTSD as well as for recreational purposes. At the end of the day, it’s enough to feel copacetic. I spent a decade earning bylines in a variety of journalistic niches from tech to travel before I was drawn to writing about cannabis. When I did start writing about weed as a freelancer for Oregon’s Willamette Week and later for national outlets like Lonely Planet and Nylon, I wanted to express the ways this plant can enhance all the experiences that make life worthwhile.

Today, I’m proud to help people who are passionate about cannabis communicate the value that their products present. I know the difference they have made in my life and countless other people—queer and heterosexual, trans and cis. 

Cannabis culture has always been a little bit queer, both in the original sense of the word and the meaning it’s taken on as gay and trans liberation has blossomed and reclaimed it. People naturally drawn to question cultural norms or who have experienced systemic prejudice have always been some of the first to explore alternative perspectives like those provided by cannabis and psychedelics. 

That isn’t going to change anytime soon. Instead, cannabis brands can embrace the rich culture of cannabis that exists past, present and future. Today, I’m proud to work for a company that honors that truth, and the full personhood of LGBTQIA+ people. 

It’s important to present cannabis consumption as a viable, acceptable possibility for mainstream audiences and end stigma across the board. It’s equally important to open the closet door behind which queer cannabis consumers have long stood—and give them a place of honor in today’s diverse cannabis culture.