New York City business journalist Michael Wilke has charted the emergence of gay marketing and advertising since 1992. He is credited with coining the popular term "gay vague" — which appeared in articles he wrote for Advertising Age from 1994-1998.

In 1998, he won a GLAAD Media Award from the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation for his work covering gay marketing and in 2001 was named one of OUT magazine's OUT 100. He has also written about gay advertising and media for The New York Times, The Advocate and Brandweek. Mr. Wilke has appeared frequently on major news networks, "Entertainment Tonight" and "Extra!" as well as on CNN and the BBC to discuss the subject.

Mr. Wilke now devotes himself fulltime to the non-profit Commercial Closet project, launched in May 2001. Its web site CommercialCloset.org has handled over 1.5 million visits since its launch and contains over 1,000 gay-themed ads spanning the globe and the last 85 years.

Mr. Wilke currently also writes a syndicated twice-monthly advertising column carried by gay.com, the Gay Financial Network (gfn.com) and leading gay newspapers.

He also travels frequently with The Commercial Closet video presentation, which first appeared at the New York Lesbian & Gay Film Festival in 1997 and has since been seen across the U.S. and overseas in countries including Brazil, Italy and Switzerland. The program has also been shown at universities including Columbia, Princeton, Duke and Yale Universities, Notre Dame and Wharton Business School as well as corporations like American Express, JP Morgan Chase, Hewlett-Packard, Motorola, AT&T, Lucent, and IBM.