![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
zoetheThe front page of Yahoo has a Valentine's Day ad showing a couple embracing. A man has his back to the camera, the roses he has obviously just flourished draped around his shoulders in the hand of his...
ambigously-gendered partner. Woman? Man? I really can't say. And I think this is the idea.
Congratulations to the gay community. This is the biggest stride forward in acceptance you have ever made.
In the U.S., rights are things we grant to those who make us sqeamish, long before we grant them acceptance. Despite the continuing lag in accepting homosexuals as appropriate legal life partners, we have afforded as much protection as is legally practical. And yet gays and lesbians have remained on the fringe in the minds of the average American.
Why? Because nobody mainstream markets to them. The U.S. is all about commerce, mainstream, Target/Wal-Mart/Costco commerce. Every radical idea eventually gets stirred into the slumgulleon stew of America and made palatable to the average Joe Sixpack. Music is the greatest example. Rap may still be the angry music of the people, but we also sell stuff with watered down versions of it. And everything in America that becomes mainstream eventually enters the selling machine.
Ads aimed at a demographic are the ultimate acknowledgement that it exists. Mainstream huckstering for the gay dollar has begun.
Welcome to the front of the bus.
ambigously-gendered partner. Woman? Man? I really can't say. And I think this is the idea.
Congratulations to the gay community. This is the biggest stride forward in acceptance you have ever made.
In the U.S., rights are things we grant to those who make us sqeamish, long before we grant them acceptance. Despite the continuing lag in accepting homosexuals as appropriate legal life partners, we have afforded as much protection as is legally practical. And yet gays and lesbians have remained on the fringe in the minds of the average American.
Why? Because nobody mainstream markets to them. The U.S. is all about commerce, mainstream, Target/Wal-Mart/Costco commerce. Every radical idea eventually gets stirred into the slumgulleon stew of America and made palatable to the average Joe Sixpack. Music is the greatest example. Rap may still be the angry music of the people, but we also sell stuff with watered down versions of it. And everything in America that becomes mainstream eventually enters the selling machine.
Ads aimed at a demographic are the ultimate acknowledgement that it exists. Mainstream huckstering for the gay dollar has begun.
Welcome to the front of the bus.
