The present dissertation critically examines how sexual and racial identities are being articulated through capitalist brands and labor. It strives to gain insight about what notions of both difference and recognition, to which Western economies recently seduce particularly LGBT people and other minoritized groups into, do unfold in commercial contexts. As a basis of analysis, we elaborated an ethnographic case study on Visibly Hot, a Brazilian fashion enterprise, which asks its sales employees to work on their individual identities in creative and sexually attractive ways. As it turns out, most salesclerks enthusiastically identify with the slogan “be different”, that is, the brand’s promise of difference in diversity. “Here I can be who I am”, as Carol, a 20-year-old salesclerk who tattooed the brand's logo on her forearm, maintains. Carol experiences her coming of age as a young lesbian – the present argument and theoretical discussion hold – as an intrinsic part of affective labor. Affective labor draws on emotional as well as somatic stylizing of the self, and it mobilizes two entangled processes. On the one hand, it is directed at affecting consumers in sales interaction through informal sales techniques. On the other hand, affective labor encompasses the individual efforts in handling social controversy about the (mis)recognition of “different”, that is, of lesbian, gay and black identities. Given these fatiguing and precarious work conditions, the present study finally investigates if and how the young employees in question challenge the constraints that arise from the promise of incorporating a “sexy” and authentic “different” subject.