aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South

Tuesday, March 28, 2006

Fairy meanness

Augusto calls this Dodge Caliber add homophobic, ”I thought the ad was not nice:”

It appears a “fairy” is trying to give a queer eye to the tough car, and the fairy is bumped to the sidewalk for trying to do so.  Even language is used, a guy points to the fairy and laughs: “You silly little fairy!” Not nice.  The fairy turns him gay as a revenge I guess.

I looked to Commercial Closet for an opinion. None yet. My guess is it will be:

Gay people are shown in this collection as classic gay stereotypes, including leathermen, sissies and queens, and Liipstick Lesbians, but are otherwise accepted by characters in the ad. While some in the gay community now accept these depictions as “diversity” and “reality”—others remain sensitive to them and do not. These ads do not meet Commercial Closet’s Best Practices.

I note that they played the Dodge ad during Desperate Housewives. Do these marketers have a clue about who’s watching???

Meanwhile, TBS sent this ad [WMP] parodying the Lord of the Rings suggesting I link to it. It looks like they want to appeal to the gay people in their audience rather than risk offending them.

UPDATE: GayWheels.com gives the Caliber a good review and says Dodge is a Gay Friendly car company. BMW, on the other hand, they call a hypocritical car company.

ANOTHER UPDATE: This post continues to attract traffic, while my later post, No fun with fairy, which looks at the Commercial Closet rating for the ad sits unread. Please check it out.