15 years ago, advertising was a straight man’s world. Now, gays are inescapable.
Although we might be inclined to rush to the consensual conclusion that this is merely a testimony of social integration (after all, advertising is often an ephemeral snapshot of the society it was created in), the reality is overtly more cynical.
Marketers love gays for their welcome differences. Advertisers are often keen on capturing their attention for they boast more buying power and discretionary time than their heterosexual counterparts. They even found a word to describe their ludicrously lucrative potential: “dinks” (dual income, no kids).
Because the very delimitation of this demographic relies on an antagonism (you cannot be defined as gay and straight at the same time - otherwise, you would qualify as bisexual), it’s almost trivial to stress that the prevalent theme infusing almost all the following adverts is one of difference - or lack thereof.
This has for long been private territory of militant organisms that were recurrently hard pressed to assert that gays and straight people were born equal towards love, lust, sins, boring couple routines and, especially, sickness (given the amplitude of the phenomenon within the gay population, AIDS awareness campaigns usually consist of a two-faced tactic: one targeted towards straight people, the other one for gays).
Aides | Live Long Enough to Find The Right One – Gay Version
See the straight version here.
Aides | The Plane
Tagline: “The good news is that Bernard and Patrick had protected sex”.
Mainstream advertising has been much clumsier in its approach of the gay community. And the harsh backlash that surrounds odd-inspired or ill-advised attempts acts as a bitter reminder that gay advertising is still considered more-thorny-than-horny territory.
This is not bad advertising. And most of the times, it isn’t intentionally homophobic advertising either; but advertising that tackles the gay issue from a straight vantage point.
In the same spirit with which adolescent boys might be prone to engage in homophobic verbal attacks to affirm their straight manliness; advertising often refer to gays to emphasize a contrast, an opposition. This is unfortunate but normal, since our culture places such a high value on masculinity-over-femininity ideal; and homosexuality is viewed as the ultimate betrayal of this unspoken rule.
This results in a series of – sometimes genuinely funny – gay-themed commercials that treat homosexuality either as a straight man’s nightmare, a mistake imputed to mismanaged testosterone, an uncomfortable misunderstanding, or just plain insecure fear (which is why the sound of a soap dropping on the floor of a public shower will usually be similar to one of a nuclear explosion). In the end, all of them end up selling a taboo more than the product itself.
Virgin Atlantic | How Deep is Your Love
Tribeca Film Festival | Transvestite
The fact that advertising is a short medium doesn’t help either. Ideas have to be sold in less than 30 seconds (packshot included). Characters drawn in three lines. We don’t have time for subtlety. Advertising thrives in stereotypes. After all, what would be the point of having a gay man if his role is not to be a flamboyant drama queen you can laugh at?
Delta Llyod Insurance | Booming Car
Conscious of the dual nature of their audience (and the key trendsetting role that gay men can play), fashion and luxury advertising enjoys blurring the lines between straight and gay men, with advertising where ambiguously lascivious boys like to hang around naked in the locker room with their friends (who are also light on cloth). Strikingly enough, the fact that every single gay man is pictured as a six-packed Adonis with low self-esteem introduces a latent ambiguity around every man pictured as such.
MTV and Levi’s were two of the first brands to subtly embrace both sides of their audience. After all, advertising for gays is not just a question of targeting, but one of representation. In the following commercials, gayness is treated as a non-issue.
This is probably how gay advertising looks like when it’s done properly: not just as a source of jokes, but as part of a larger whole (the difference is in the “w”).
Levi’s | Change - Gay Version (see the straight version )
Vodafone – I’m Gay (also see the rest of the campaign)
Banner credits: Beautiful and Aymeric Giraudel
