is for the Mafia.  The economic exploitation of homosexuals has involved a painfully protracted courtship, a romance complicated by the fact that, in the early part of the century, another set of venture capitalists had already cornered the market -- the Mafia, which, for its part, felt no qualms whatsoever, about taking advantage of the business world's uneasiness with this potentially profitable group of untouchable outcasts.  The shrewd bosses of organized crime were the first investors to recognize the economic viability of the gay market as a distinct social entity with its own special needs, an undomesticated cash cow that they milked dry by establishing an unregulated monopoly on gay bars and bathhouses, a stranglehold they relaxed only in the 1970s.  Mobsters were the first pioneers in the century-long campaign to win "gay dollars," beating out by several decades the Calvin Kleins and the Kenneth Coles.  The assimilation of the gay market into the overall economy began at the lowest level of the financial food chain, with its parasites and its bottom feeders, the opportunists who had no reputations to protect and, because they were accustomed to serving clients even more disreputable than homosexuals, weren't afraid of ruining their good names.