Shot in the foot

Thursday, March 3, 2005

You know, the new Gay.com ad campaign is very clever with it's double entrendre; but the problem is the combination of its imagery and its stated purpose.
Of course, we all know that Gay.com is the place to go for casual, anonymous sex. It's not where you go to assert your civil rights and generally behave as a responsible adult.
So, the imagery of two shirtless, intimate men wrapped in the American flag is already titillating; with addition of the tagline "Come Together," it just becomes borderline porno.
If Gay.com wants to make a statement of a more responsible sort, why not put some clothes on the guys and remove the double entendre? Without the nudity and sexually-related tagline, this campaign would have made sense in the arena of civil rights; as it stands, it's just sexual titillation.
Of course, we know that the Gay.com agenda is, as always, to use sex to bring in subscribers. That's all well and good; but when they use sex in this way -- ostensibly to send a message that "gay people deserve to love, to be together and to enjoy all the ideals and privileges that the American flag represents," according to Lowell Selvin, chairman and CEO of PlanetOut -- they're cheapening that admittedly high ideal. What they're really doing is playing right into the hands of the fundamentalist right wing, who will simply send this imagery unedited to their intolerant base, asserting that gay people only think of sex, igniting more hatred... and probably generating another wave of "flag protection" legislation.

Anyway, those guys are really hot.