Gay PDAs :: Not Ready for Prime Time
From throwing bricks at Stonewall to holding hands at the mall: Gay men have come a long way in 40 years.
So why can’t a website with a few million to blow spend it on a Super Bowl ad which depicts a man-on-man makeout session? That’s what the folks at the gay dating/hookup website ManCrunch.com were wondering after CBS rejected their commercial.
While we usually dissect Super Bowl commercials the day after (Nielson says 51% of us tune in just for the ads), ManCrunch had its day in the sun throughout this past week - as the spurned commercial went viral and shined a light on the fact that America still isn’t progressive enough to welcome same sex affection between men into the cultural fold.
Times may be changing, but it seems the suits at CBS don’t think the global audience of TV’s most watched event is ready for a gay-themed ad (broadcast in the midst of a sport which was once famously likened to "a homosexual ballet").
So why is Straight America still so queasy with public displays of affection between two people of the same sex? We’ll get to that momentarily. But first, the ManCrunch incident.
Not up Broadcast Standards
In a statement sent to ManCrunch by CBS, the network declared they "reviewed your proposed Super Bowl ad and concluded that the creative is not within the Network’s Broadcast Standards for Super Bowl Sunday. Moreover, our Sales Department has had difficulty verifying your organization’s credit status."
Noel Biderman, from ManCrunch, says they offered to pay cash - so the credit issue was a stall tactic meant to deflect attention from the relatively innocuous content of the ad itself. "What CBS can’t handle is the nature of the service behind the commercial."
What’s more, ManCrunch is burned by the fact that the network will air an anti-abortion ad which has garnered its share of pre-game publicity: "CBS seems to be comfortable taking one kind of semi-political advertising, but not ours. If you reject others who want to express something, they’re actually politicizing themselves. They have a license to broadcast that we as a society gave them." As for the ads you do see, "They’re glorifying alcohol use, and airing erectile dysfunction ads. If all those things are OK, tell me how same sex dating service is not OK." Story continues on following page,
In case you missed it, the controversial ManCrunch ad:
