aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South
Wednesday, May 03, 2006
On Gay Ads in Straight Places
James Joyner points to Jeff Harrell’s reaction to the new Apple ad campaign and observes:
Two gay guys holding hands. He reads some age issues into it that wouldn’t otherwise have occured to me. His friend in the advertising industry thinks he’s reading too much into it.
I don’t much care, in that I’m not in the market for a new computer, let alone a Mac. I do, however, wonder why advertisers would employ gay themes when designing ads not specifically targetted to gay audiences.
I happen to live in the ‘Ew, gays are icky’ South but I watched all of the ads and there was nary a homosexual overtone to be found. (Macworld apparently missed it too.) It took some time to even find the guys holding hands (duh, networking) but, going with it for a moment, I would see such an association for Apple as a positive one.
Living here in rural Georgia I’m not nearly so plugged into this dynamic as I once was, but in my day everyone knew that gay people were the leading indicator of which was the hot club, the best restaurant, the most promising neighborhood, the latest trend and the highest style in town.
Richard Florida wrote the book that documented and quantified the phenomenon, The Rise of the Creative Class: Why cities without gays and rock bands are losing the economic development race. My first encounter with his thinking was this 2002 Washington Monthly article:
[I]n 1998, I met Gary Gates, then a doctoral student at Carnegie Mellon. While I had been studying the location choices of high-tech industries and talented people, Gates had been exploring the location patterns of gay people. My list of the country’s high-tech hot spots looked an awful lot like his list of the places with highest concentrations of gay people. When we compared these two lists with more statistical rigor, his Gay Index turned out to correlate very strongly to my own measures of high-tech growth. Other measures I came up with, like the Bohemian Index---a measure of artists, writers, and performers---produced similar results.
Talented people seek an environment open to differences. Many highly creative people, regardless of ethnic background or sexual orientation, grew up feeling like outsiders, different in some way from most of their schoolmates. When they are sizing up a new company and community, acceptance of diversity and of gays in particular is a sign that reads “non-standard people welcome here.”
A gay association works only to enhance and affirm Apple’s association with style and leading edge technology. If it affirms people like Joyner’s antipathy to Macs that’s no great loss.
Now I hasten to add that I take Joyner’s point on the Dolce & Gabbana ads (his post has the whole series) in GQ and Esquire and raise him one: these ads do not represent me or my lifestyle and do a disservice to gay people.
I am a big advocate of the notion that gay is not just about sex. That ad is merely the gay equivalent of a “Chicks dig guys who drink Miller Lite!” ad, but placing it in straight publications only serves to affirm stereotypes that I would like to move away from.
NOTE: be sure to read the comments on Joyner’s post. Very interesting back and forth.
