Spark In Darkness

A fair few companies at the moment are producing adverts with *gasp* actual GBLT content, whether it’s JC Penny’s and their gay families or Oreos and their rainbow cookies or some bank suggesting 2 men are buying a mortgage together – we’re starting to creep into this field.

And it is a big deal. That gasp alone says that. It is unusual. After all, including us at all instantly sets of a shit storm from the usual suspects who are outraged, OUTRAGED that you acknowledge we exist. Just ask this spokesperson from One Million Moms



Quite.

So including us has been and still is risky – and since the very nature of advertising is to get as many people to open their wallets as possible, it’s not been a risk many people have taken. In fact, advertising is one of the most GBLT erased media forms out there unless it is specifically aimed at and appearing in GBLT media (only a little ahead of children’s media and, probably, computer games I think). Reduction of erasure is generally good (though not enough – and in some cases a bad portrayal is worse than no portrayal at all) simply because there is such a push to deny our existence and deny our place in society. So, yeah inclusion is a positive.

And it’s a positive that these companies are willing to risk the wroth of the haters, either because they genuinely want to do a good thing (*urk* oops, sorry, my cynicism just tried to strangle me) or because they think that GBLT people and people who like us have more buying power than the haters.

These are positive things.

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You really can't have a more tame, less explicit, more gentle depiction of love. And yet, it's obscene, offensive, unsuitable to children and has to be taken down! SAVE THE CHILDREN FROM GENTLE SWEET HUGGING! The gentle sweet hugging will scour their innocent little minds! And so this ad, that was on bus stops in Brisbane, was taken down

47 members of the Australian Christian Lobby were so overwhelmed with Christian love that the mere sight of such affection made their heads explode (probably being confronted with real love for the first time and they were scared by something so alien to them).

Wendy Francis, a member of the ACL described the picture as some kind of foreplay. A hug? That's foreplay? Oh honey, we've gotta talk if that's your idea of happy fun bedroom activity, you're doing it wrong. Someone get this woman a GBF, a reality check and some decent porn. (This also puts the lie to her later claim that it's about a condom)

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