The history of gay porn cinema.

[mikk33]

great posts on the new stonewall movie, which I have yet to see.
shelter is correct however, when he talks of another 'Stonewall (1995)' made by a gay British director Nigel Finch. this is fictionalized account of the cirstances leading up to the 'riots' and is based on a memoir by Martin Duberman.
In any context Finch's films are good, he worked on British tv for years on an arts programme called 'arena'.
Finch's film is a drama with some comedy based around a growing up and coming out story of a young man in New York.
It's a good film from an outsider perspective of British gay man and what stonewall meant in the UK for LGBT people.

 

[W!nston]

And there is another STONEWALL-film. A film from 1995 by Nigel Finch. Here is IMdB with 7,2 stars.

This is actually my favorite Stonewall film. Probably because the protagonist is a young, very hot, sexy, hunky, full-frontal-nudity-in-a-steamy-shower Frederick Weller.

iMDB Page

This movie is posted here: Stonewall (1995) and the FileFactory link actually still works! I'm downloading it now hehe

 

[gorgik9]

Thanks a lot Sniffit! I haven't seen the 1995 Stonewall but I'll immediately start downlading! And also thanks a lot to Shelter & mikk for making me aware!

 

[haiducii]

Is Macedonia A Part Of The Rainbow?

''MACEDONIA closes border with Greece to migrants [...] Police brutality allegations at MACEDONIA migrant border crossing [...] Hungarian police arrive in MACEDONIA to help control flow of migrants [...] MACEDONIA builds 10ft razor fence along border with Greece ahead of spring migrant influx.'' How many times have you heard the word "Macedonia" over the last six months? I bet you've heard about this word a thousand times. But how much do you really know about Macedonia? For example, did you know that during the time of Alexander the Great, the Kingdom of Macedonia was the most powerful state in the world? Another interesting feature about this country is that Macedonia is the only country that got independence from Yugoslavia without shedding a single drop of blood. But I'm not here to talk politics, I'm here to talk about the LGBT community and the problems which sexual minorities in Macedonia face today.

Macedonia is a country characterised by gross violations of human rights and discrimination against the gay community. A research questionnaire, conducted in March 2009 among 1.600 respondents, showed that the majority of citizens disapprove of homosexuality (91.6%). Although the former Yugoslav republic of Macedonia decriminalized homosexuality in 1996, every third participant in the survey (33.7%) shared the position that same-sex relations should be considered a criminal offense, and still, twenty-five years after the removal of homosexuality from the list of diseases by the World Health Organization, 48% of the interviewees still viewed homosexuality as a disease. (Note: The Republic of Macedonia does not have any official data which would present the concrete situation with human rights violations and discrimination of sexual minorities. None of the human rights institutions maintain a permanent monitoring of these problems in a systematic manner.)

The years following 1996 and the beginning of the 21st century were marked by the first attempts to organize an LGBT movement and start a public discussion concerning sexual minorities. In 2004 the first officially declared LGBT organization - the Macedonian Association for Free Sexual Orientation (MASSO) - was established and the first gay ''coming out'' was made on national TV.

Macedonia, a candidate country for EU membership, least respects the rights of the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transsexual community, of all the countries in the Balkans. By contrast with other countries in the region, Macedonia has not yet adopted an inclusive law prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. Homosexuality is a taboo subject across the largely conservative and patriarchal societies of the Balkans, where many people view it as a deviant lifestyle choice or at best as a mental illness.

The Law for Protection and the Prevention of Discrimination was adopted in the beginning of 2010, preceded by a very controversial procedure and debates imbued with a high voltage of homophobic rhetoric. The homophobic discourses reached a peak when the representative of the ruling party, a specialist in gynecology and obstetrics, embarked on ''scientific'' elaborations on inter-sexuality as a ''pathologic condition'' that should be cured, continued to talk about transvestism as a “form of mild psychological disorder,” and stigmatized transsexuality as ''a very difficult psychological disorder'', only to conclude that ''homosexuality is a disease that should be cured''. The version that was adopted in the Assembly, and the one submitted by the Government, excluded sexual orientation from the prohibited grounds of discrimination.

The Law on Labor Relations and the Law for Protection of Patients’ Rights are the only existing laws in Macedonian legislation which explicitly provide protection from discrimination on the ground of sexual orientation, which covers protection from discrimination of homosexuals and bisexuals.

Several debates also took place in ''elite'' academic circles, in reaction to the attempts to raise public awareness of the problems of homosexuals, debates that were initiated by published texts and statements made by professors at the Institute of Philosophy. The first text was written by an assistant professor at the Faculty of Philosophy, Risto Solunchev, as a reaction to the public campaign of the Center for Civil and Human Rights. One of the main arguments the author uses in the text is a commonplace in homophobic discourses in Macedonia. Specifically, Solunchev claims, first, that there are no homosexuals in the country, and at the same time demands the public outing of those who are homosexuals, an appeal very often made by conservatives in the country. A second, also common, argument used in the text is what could be called the ''Westernization of homosexuality'', or to be more precise the claim that homosexuality is a Western European phenomenon that is not appropriate for the Macedonian nation.

In 2014, Macedonia's main Sts Cyril and Methodius University in Skopje has decided to establish a new "Institute for Family Studies" that will teach courses such as ''Family Values and Morality'', ''Family and Social Deviations'', ''Family and Religion'' and ''Family in Antiquity''. A new studies program teaches that homosexuality, divorce, and drug addiction are ''socio-pathological problems'' and deviant behavior that can and should be prevented with strong family values. ''We have a moral vacuum, with an increased number of divorces, prostitution, alcoholism, and drug addiction all lowering moral values. We intend to restore family values through these studies'', said sociology and religion professor Zoran Matevski, who helped create the curriculum.

Apart from the academics' articles, homophobic discourses could have been noticed mostly in columnists' texts written by Church representatives or right-wing authors. The political and ideological influence of the Orthodox Church and the strong tradition of a rooted gender asymmetry were becoming increasingly strong. Religion has figured as a distinct ethno-national marker and the ultimate moral authority. The culture of nationalism, which has become stronger in recent years, has either neglected the political relevance of gay rights and issues, or represented gay rights as a phenomenon that threatens the national welfare and the national reproduction embodied in the nuclear heterosexual family.

One of the best-known homophobic journalists in the Macedonian media is Dragan Pavlović Latas, currently editor of Macedonia's national Sitel TV and of the daily newspaper Vecer. In September 2007 he published an article titled Faggotology in the daily newspaper Vecer, where he wrote that ''faggots are nothing else but people who commune with those like themselves. A closed circle. They are afraid of those who are different.'' In 2006, on the International Day against Homophobia, MASSO declared him the most homophobic public person of the year under the motto of ''Homophobia is Gay''. The council of honor at the Association of Journalists of Macedonia distances itself from this text reminding once again that the basic standards of the profession as well as the key ethical postulates such as advocacy for human rights and freedoms, nurturing the spirit of tolerance and fighting discrimination of any kind are the foundations of professional and responsible journalism.->READ MORE

WATCH: A mob attacks an LGBT center in Skopje



In this homonegative culture, activists also complain about frequent remarks by ministers and government officials that they see as discriminatory. For example, in February 2009, Georgi Ivanov, the presidential candidate of the main ruling party, the conservative VMRO DPMNE, said in an interview for Spic daily that homosexuals were not discriminated against but just being paranoid. The presidential candidate of the opposition Liberal Democrats, Nano Ruzin, said Ivanov's comment showed a typically Balkan way of thinking.

In October 2012, four LGBT organizations and the Macedonian Helsinki Committee for Human Rights announced law suits against the Macedonia’s Social Affairs Minister, Spiro Ristovski, for harassment and discrimination, after he said that only heterosexual couples can ensure a ''healthy nation''. They accused the minister of marking down homosexuals as ''unhealthy'' in his description of a healthy nation. These claims are scandalous and represent a ''polished attitude of homophobia'', said Slavco Dimitrov from the NGO Coalition for Promotion and Protection of Marginalized Groups Health and Sexual Rights.

In the period since 2011 what can be noticed is a remarkable shift of transmission of information related to LGBT issues from the region, mostly gay parades and the events surrounding the parades. Although quantitatively most media provide information on the current events regionally and internationally, qualitatively there cannot be emphasized any specificities since most of the news covered is based on translations of already internationally published news, thus reproducing news from international information exchange, with non-qualitative analyses, journalistic comments, opinions, and critique.

The latest annual report, ''Rainbow Europe Index 2015'', by the International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Intersex Association, ILGA–Europe, puts Macedonia at the bottom of the Balkans when it comes to legal protection for the community. ILGA-Europe is an international non-governmental umbrella organisation bringing together 331 organisations advocating human rights and equality for LGBT people at the European level. ''Although Pride events took place without violence for the first time in Skopje in June 2013, LGBT activists were the victims of an organised attack on a cafe in October 2014. No progress could be noted in a climate of general hostility towards LGBT people created by mainstream press, most of the political establishment, and society at large. Institutions and laws preventing discrimination still exclude sexual orientation and gender identity from their scope. Police forces and the judiciary both continued to display active indifference to hate speech and hate crime. Finally, the government initiated amendments to the Constitution, specifying that both marriages and registered partnerships were strictly unions between a man and a woman'', report says.

Instead of becoming more liberal as their country moves towards EU accession, Macedonians appear to be moving in the opposite direction. The country is becoming more conservative in its social attitudes with thumping majorities backing religious education in schools and opposing gay rights. Ilija Aceski, a sociology professor at Skopje University, said poverty and a more nationalist atmosphere lie behind the perceived shift towards conservative views. Macedonia is among Europe's poorest countries, with an unemployment rate of over 30 percent and every third person living below the poverty line. ''Societies that are poorer generally turn back to conservative views and see 'progressive' ideas as a threat to their world'', Aceski added.

Poverty and unemployment give birth to social frustration. When people have no money, they try to find somebody to blame. In Macedonia's case, ethnic groups (Albanians make up at least 25 percent of Macedonia's 2 million people) blame each other for their misfortunes. Poverty and nationalism could yet form an explosive mix. ''It's a recipe for disaster'', said a senior Western diplomat, who declined to be named. Damn, I almost fell into a political trap again. Phew, thank god I decided to finish my post.

 

[gorgik9]

The Balkans is a part of Europe I don't know much about, but having you as my and everybody elses brilliant teacher on GH I hope that I'm learning more and more!

One of the more interesting things to note in my opinion is what kind of people are the leaders of the vanguard of homophobia in different countries: in the US today there's mainly the christian fundamentalists (and remember! not all christians are fundamentalists), but in the 1950s-60s you had the broad majority of psychiatrists, psychoanalysts, psychologists, but also so many leading members of Congress.

As far as I know, in contemporary France the Lacanian psychoanalysts and their followers have been among the most fierce opponents of marriage equality. (Lacanian= follower of the extremely influential french psychoanalyst and philosopher Jacques Lacan, 1901-1981))

So I think it's very interesting to note, that university professors of philosophy and sociology seem to be the ones to drive the train of homophobia, so to speak...

Also nationalist ideology seems to be one of the more important sources of modern homophobia.

Once more thanks for a brilliant post!

 

[W!nston]

Thank you haiducii for this erudite essay. The Balkans are a mystery to me. That's why I read every one of your posts on the subject.

Do you believe there is hope the backward social and political trend against Gay Equality will be reversed in your lifetime?

We in the West should not take our successes in the campaign for Gay Equality for granted.

 

[haiducii]

Do you believe there is hope the backward social and political trend against Gay Equality will be reversed in your lifetime?

No, I don't see that happening for a long time. The reports show that LGBT people continue to face discrimination, threats and violence in the Western Balkans. Major occurrences of intolerance against LGBT people, including threats and attacks, are noted in Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia, Turkey, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Kosovo. For example, holding hands with someone of the same gender in the street of Sarajevo (Bosnia), will probably result in physical violence from other civilians. These countries are patriarchal societies still dealing with the legacy of war in the 1990's, a war that was started on religious and ethnic grounds. Millennials in the Balkans grew up knowing violence and, through a combination of nationalism and war mentality, certain gender norms...

 

[gorgik9]

Stonewall, Part 2.

Basically I already said in Part 1 what I hade to say about Roland Emmerich's "Stonewall"-movie (2015) in general and the way he pictures the first Stonewall riot on Friday 27 / Saturday 28 June 1969.

But here comes the big "BUT" you've all been waiting fore: BUT there are other things outside the portrayal of the first riot night that makes me sad and angry. It's about the way Emmerich portrays the Pre-Stonewall gay movement in general, and his demeaning and belitteling picture of Frank Kameny in particular.

This will be my proceedings: First I'll discuss and give a detailed analysis of the two short sequences centered on Kameny.

Second: to make you understand my anger I'll have to present Franklin Edward Kameny (1925-2011), his work and position in the modern American gay movement.

Two Kameny-sequences.

First sequence: Kameny's speech in Mattachine Society of New York.

It's a short sequence from 1 hour 4 minutes 35 seconds to 1 hour 7 minutes 15 seconds, and what's most important is the first half where Kameny is up on the podium giving his talk to the members of the Society.

I'll look at the central sentences in Kameny's speech.

1) "more and more we're seeing that homosexuals will no longer tolerate discrimination";

2) "people will recognize that gay is good; the American people will start to understand that firing us for being gay is plain wrong";

3) "we must fight in a peaceful way" & "resist the radicalism that I see start taking hold in some quarters";

4) "wearing a suite and tie will make them understand that we're just like them".

I'd say that anyone who's actually read some of Kameny's speeches and publications will find, that this is a speech with very little Frank Kameny in it. You don't hear his powerful voice and you don't get in touch with his central topics as a gay activist.

The basic problem with Emmerich's portrayal of Kameny is of course that Kameny was the very definition of gay radicalism in the American 60s, and letting the phony movie- "Kameny" warning people for "radicalism" is like letting Kameny warn people for - Kameny ~X(X_X Just silly...

Second sequence: from the end of the movie.

1 hour 59 minutes 52 seconds - 2 hours 2 seconds.

Subtext: "FRANK KAMENY worked tirelessly to overturn federal sodomy laws and was the first to bring a gay rights case before the Supreme Court."

This is a pretty akward text since while it's true that Kameny engaged in trying to overturn the sodomy laws for the District of Columbia in 1963, besides the sodomy laws for the US Military and the D.C., all other sodomy laws were state laws, not federal laws. Kameny had his try in 1963 and it failed.

Otherwise overturning sodomy laws wasn't part of Kameny's big project as a gay activist. It feels strange that Emmerich's fails to even mention neither of the two political and judicial topics at the center of Kameny's gay activism in the 1960s and 70s:
First: fighting the Civil Service Commission (CSC) as the federal authority responsible for purging the federal sector from homosexuals after president Eisenhower's Executive Order 10450 from April 1953;

Second: fighting the American Psychiatric Association and it's classification of homosexuality as a mental disorder, more particularly under the category of sociopathic personality disorders, published in the first edition of Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) 1952.

It was to be a very long and tough fight, but in the end Kameny prevailed.

Frank Kameny: Gay activist radicalism in pre-Stonewall USA.

Frank Kameny was born in a Jewish family in Queens, New York, in 1925 and his great passion for the universe and stargazing developed early on and he seemed to be destined to become an astronomer, but before he could begin studying astronomy at Harvard University, a thing called WWII came in between. He enlisted in the US Army 1943 eighteen years old and fought for two years until the war ended.

So he got an MA in astronomy in 1949 and a PhD in 1956 - both from Harvard - and in 1957 he was hired by the US Army Map Service. But in October the same year he was hit hard by his own personal past and Eisenhower's Executive Order 10450 and was unceremoniously discharged as a homosexual security risk from his prestigious federal job.



It seems Kameny as a young man was pretty naïve and thought his case was a matter of individual mistakes which would be corrected if he took his case to court, and he was even prepared to go to the US Supreme Court and petition for certiorari. In this process, however, Kameny's thinking took a very abrupt turn as he started understanding that his misery rather was a consequence of being discriminated by the US Government as a member of an oppressed minority, the homosexual minority.

The Supreme Court denied Kameny's petition, but the legal brief he wrote in 1960 could be looked upon as nothing less than the Magna Charta of modern civil rights based gay activism. Kameny took much inspiration from a couple of other writers before him - like Donald Webster Cory and Harry Hay - articulating similar ideas, but what was uniquely Kameny was that he took this language of homosexual civil rights and made it the bedrock for all judicial and political action.

Mattachine, Mattachine and Mattachine.

No I haven't started stuttering, but the thing is that there were several different gay organizations in the 1950s and 60s using the name Mattachine Society, which can get pretty confusing, so I follow the lead of historian Martin Meeker make clear distinktions in the names of the organizations. Here we go!

Mattachine Foundation was started in 1951 by Harry Hay (1912-2002), Dale Jennings and a few other gay men in Los Angeles in response to the vitriolic federal governmental homophobia unleashed on the State Department by Joseph McCarthy and others.

Here's some pics of Harry Hay!

Hay and Jennings had both been members of the US Communist Party for a period and their experiences of the USCP pu its stamp on the Mattachine Foundation. It became an extremely secretive, hierarchic and not particularly democratic organization, and it seems that it crumbled under strainous internal contradictions within a couple of years: on the one hand ordinary members got more and more dissapointed that it became almost impossible to get in touch with the leaders of the organization, and on the other hand there will always necessarily be a limit to how secretive an organization can be if it wants to connect with ordinary gay people.

So in the autumn of 1953 the Mattachine Foundation was a dead duck and replaced by the Mattachine Society with Hal Call (1917-...) and Don Lucas (1926-...) as its dominant leaders.

Here's a pic of Hal Call!

Hal Call would soon start using his vast professional knowledge as a jurnalist, publisher and printer to the benefit of the Mattachine Society, where everything should center on communication and publishing. He started the Society's own journal Mattachine Review, appearing for the first time in February 1955. (There already was a gay magazine, ONE Magazine, published by ONE, Inc., from 1953 on, so Mattachine Review wasn't the first but the second gay journal.)

Mattachine Society under Hal Call and Don Lucas was about connecting people, but not only about connecting gay people with each others. It was also about connecting the gay movement with society at large. The Society and it's journal talked a lot about educating people and disseminating new scientific research and so did - a bit later - the lesbian group The Daughters of Bilitis (founded in 1955) and its journal The Ladder, launched in 1956.

At the same time this meant that these organizations wasn't explicitely and actively trying to change American society. Soon a very different voice wpould be heard from Washington D.C., the voice of Frank Kameny.

Frank Kameny & The Mattachine Society of Washington D.C.

So the US Supreme Court had denied Kameny's petition for certiorari in 1960, and - then what?

He founded a gay organization in 1961, the Mattachine Society of Washington D.C. - and now the total "Mattachine confusion" will strike.

The thing is - first - that the National Mattachine Society under Call and Lucas and headquarters in San Francisco had collapsed.

But there had - second - been regional chapters of Mattachine Society in different parts of the US ever since the mid 1950s. One of the more well known was the Mattachine Society of New York, founded in 1955, but there also was a Mattachine Society of Washington DC founded about the same time, but had become defunct in the early 1960s and had ceased to exist.

So what Kameny did together with his co-founder Jack Nichols (1938-2005) and their followers was to use the old name - Mattachine Society of Washington D.C. (MSW) - but it was an organization totally independent of the old Society and in many ways something different.

Some pics of Jack Nichols and his lover and life partner Lige Clarke!

(Lige to the left, Jack to the right)

It was unique in that it was the first Gay group dedicated exclusively to gay and lesbian political rights. Kameny and the MSW was out to actively challenge the US Government and to change US legislation and the American society, and - of course - if that's your ambition you will not find only friends, but also a lot of foes...

It seems to me that 1965 in many ways was a decisive year when many veterans of the older gay organizations started muttering that Kameny, Nichols and their hangers-on were crazy while at the same time getting new younger followers from other groups.

"Does Research Into Homosexuality Matter ?"

Let's look at some of the most important points! In 1965 Kameny had become friends with the new editor of the lesbian magazine The Ladder Barbara Gittings and her partner Kay Tobin Lahusen and they had been "converted" to Kameny's perspective on gay activism.

Pics of Barbara and Kay with Lige Clarke to the far left of Barbara and Jack Nichols to the right of Kay Tobin Lahusen.

Gittings invited Kameny to write a long dense article for "The Ladder": "Does Research Into Homosexuality Matter?". This article was published in the May edition and proved to be very controversial. Kameny gave a mostly negative answer to the question in the title of his own article: No medical/biological research into the causes of homosexuality doesn't really matter in any positive constructive way.

There was a close connection between this discussion weather the gay organizations should write so much about new scientific research into the causes of homosexuality and Kameny's total dismissal of the American Psychiatric Association's categorization of homosexuality as a mental disorder, and it is a central part of Kameny's aim to start his biggest intellectual and political fight agains American psychiatry.

Since we live in the modern world we also use labels like "science" and "scientific" to legitimize the things we want to legitimize, and so of course did the APA, so they said it was lots of first class science behind homosexuality as a mental disorder.

Being the bonafide scientist he was, he was also used to analyze and evaluate scientific theories and results, and what Kameny did was to look into the psychiatric discussions without finding much more than moralisms, pseudo-theologisms and general blabbermouthing. The so-called "scientific research" wasn't much more than rubbish cloaked in the typically modern rhetoric of science, but the substance of science - clearcut methodology, well defined concepts, data - was nowhere to find.

Then why on earth should gay journals and magazines willingly open up their pages to - at best - worthless rubbish, and - at worst - worthless homophobic rubbish? The members of gay organizations also had to do their bit: If you as a gay person honestly believe that homosexuality isn't any kind of illness or sickness, or more generally any kind of problem, then the honest reaction when professor X want's to talk about the causes of homosexuality would be: - Be gone you charlatan, go and do something useful!!!

This kind of harsh talk didn't sit well with everybody in the gay movement, but MSW made Kameny's perspective on psychiatry its official position in 1965:
" The Mattachine Society of Washington takes the position that in absence of valid evidence to the contrary, homosexuality is not a sickness, disturbance, or other pathology in any sense, but is merely a reference, orientation, or propensity, on a par with, and not different from, heterosexuality."

This declaration made Hal Call (S.F and Curtis Dewees (N.Y.) state that Kameny's position was wrong and dangerous to the gay cause, while younger newyorkers like Julian Hodges and Dick Leitsch wanted to radicalize in Kameny's direction.

On the picket line, 1965-66.

It was Randy Wicker who organized the first gay picket in November 1964 in New York with, among other participants, Craig Rodwell, Nancy Garden and Renee Cafiero.

Kameny and MSW organized the second gay picket on 17 April 1965 outside the White House, and they had a number of pickets following the first in 1965 and 1966. Among the other pickets were outside the Pentagon, outside the State Department, the CSC and several more outside the White House.

The fact that the MSW picketeers have been considered non-radical, assimilationists and generally meek and mild just because they - during the picket, mind you, not always and everywhere - followed a strict conservative dress code is utterly stupid and nonsensical.





First: Kameny's fight had its roots in having been sacked from his job as astronomer. Demanding that competent gays be employed in the federal sector presupposed that they would look employable.

Second: Kameny and his friends had the idea that the publick watching the picket should notice the message the picketeers were trying to communicate more than the picketeers themselves.

Norton v. Macy: the final victory over the CSC, 1 July 1969 - Stonewall Week!

Kameny's personal struggle started against the US Government for sacking people in the federal sector just for being gay, and he took this struggle into the gay movement in the guise of the MSW:

He started early on to become a consultant for people who had experienced a destiny equal to his own, and helped them fight the Government in the legal arena. In 1965 Kameny and MSW got the first important victory against the CSC when the US Court of Appeals decided in favour of Bruce Scott in the case Scott v. Macy, and four years later - in the very week when the Stonewall Riots happened - the US Court of Appeals handed down the decision in Norton v. Macy, the case which in due time would put an end to the Eisenhower era policy against homosexuals in the federal sector.

The CSC did their best to oppose the courts decision for several years, but on 3 July 1975 Frank Kameny finally got the hot awaited phonecall from the new CSC director, that it wouldn't be CSC's policy anymore to sack gay people from the federal sector.

********************************

Every lesson has to end sometimes and somewhere, soooo...here endeth the lesson.

 

[haiducii]

Gay Advertising

The Super Bowl may be the most-watched event in America, but the ads have their biggest moment after the game. I know, sitting through commercials sucks. But there are always at least a few ads worth checking out; and some real stinkers. Each year, there’s at least one juicy morsel that sparks a good controversy. In 2010, CBS Television have rejected a commercial for the Toronto-based gay dating site ManCrunch, "where many many many men come to play". ManCrunch accused CBS of discrimination saying: "If the ad showed a man and woman kissing it would have been accepted." Needless to say, these folks also know that getting rejected from the superbowl commercials saves you money and creates more viral buzz than actually paying for and having your commercial show during the game.



From the perspective of advertisers, the gay audience is not to be ignored. The combined buying power of the U.S. lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) adult population for 2014 was estimated at $884 billion, according to analysis by Witeck Communications. Although this buying power does not necessarily mean that gays are more affluent than the general public, gay men may have greater disposable income, in part because they are far less likely to have children. Moreover, gays are twice as likely to have graduated from college, have an income over $60,000, and, even more surprisingly, are twice as likely to have an income over $250,000. In 1997, Wilke indicated that over 28% of gay households have incomes greater than $50,000 and 21% have incomes over $100,000.

Establishing the actual size of the gay population is difficult, but a 2011 report by The William's Institute estimated 3.5% of adults in the United States identify as lesbian, gay male, or bisexual and 3% of adults are transgender. Even at 3%, the consumption potential is substantial from a marketing perspective. Therefore, one obvious conclusion is that advertisers should market to the gay audience.

Several advertisers have recognized the potential for the gay audience, and the practice of placing ads directed to gays in mainstream media is increasingly common. Occasionally, these ads contain an overt, but subtle, gay theme. For example, IKEA, a Swedish home furnishings retailer, was one of the first companies to use such advertising. The 1994 TV commercial showed a male couple shopping together for a dining room table. It is important to note, however, that ads like this one rarely contain any homoerotic sexual tension.



American marketers became interested in gay and lesbian consumer segments in the late 1990's. Several marketing studies have revealed that, at least statistically speaking, homosexuals form a potentially very lucrative market segment. Previously invisible in the commercial sense, the homosexual community was soon labelled a ''dream market''; better educated, higher than average incomes and (often) no children, and also willing to spend their substantial disposable incomes on personal luxuries such as shopping, cosmetics, dining out and travel. However, and not surprisingly, as the recognition of the size and buying power of the homosexual market has become more known, marketers interested in reaching the homosexual consumer have found a growing number and variety of media. In 2006 it was estimated that marketers in the USA spent over $223.3 million in the homosexual print media.

What we call as gay market today did not emerge all of a sudden. It was shaped by marketers who were observant enough to notice the potential of a profitable group whose visibility has begun to increase towards the end of the 20th century, decade by decade through a process of liberalization. To identify this process, firstly we shall focus on 1960's; an era, in which individual expression was encouraged, tolerance for new ideas and equality of rights were adopted, thus the way to the removal of sexual and moral prejudices was paved. Some of the most striking features of the decade can be listed as; civil rights, feminism, gay liberation, underground and counter-culture, etc. Whilst these were all happening simultaneously, most important ones, in the context of formation of the gay market, were of course counter-culture, underground, freedom chasers and steps towards gay liberation. As Theodore Roszak, one of the greatest minds of the 20th century, says in his 1969 classic The Making of a Counter Cultur: ''One of the most remarkable aspects of the counter culture is its cultivation of a feminine softness among its males. It is the occasion of endless satire on the part of critics, but the style is clearly a deliberate effort on the part of the young to undercut the crude and compulsive he-manliness of American political life.''

Based on this statement it seems quite possible to say that, by the help of counter-culture, not only the stiff, rigid structure of the western society began to come apart, but also males of this society began to become ''softer''. This softness opened the way to accept the ''unacceptables'' more easily and coherently worked as a gadget for the freedom chasers on their goals. At this point we shall speak of gay liberation. Gay subculture was still underground in 1950's but small groups of organizations and magazines were being formed in a sense of closed communication. In the following years, students began to add up to these organizations fighting for dignity and equality. Towards the end of 1960's, as a result of convergences, resistence to opression became inevitable and ocular. Probably the most monumentalized resistence is remembered as Stonewall. This resistence transformed itself to become a milestone in the history of gay liberation. In the meaning of gay rights, gay cause, self-expression and visibility, it triggered an atmosphere of self reliance which played an important role in gay movement throughout the 1970's and 1980's.

After all the achievements of the gay movement, it did not take too long for marketers, advertisers and brands to spot this visibility and to designate it as a new profitable segment. Market researches and trade press coverages began to be made. In the late 1980's and early 1990's shaping of gay market reached its maturity. Of course in this process, both out and proud and in the closet gay marketers, gay publishers, gay designers, gay artists, gay photographers, gay singers, gay actors and gay company owners worked in chorus, not necessarily consciously. Gay TV channels bagan to appear, gay websites began to offer dates, gay magazines became prevalent, gay TV programmes began to be presented, gay TV series began to be produced. All these, provided a wide range of venue for advertisement.

One of the most effective ways to reach gay consumers is via mainstream media. More and more, research suggests that gay-themed advertising in mainstream media plays a more important role than advertising in gay media. For example, only a small proportion of lesbian consumers read gay media, while more than 80% of lesbians reportedly read mainstream magazines such as Newsweek, Time, People and National Geographic.

For some mainstream advertisers who wish to appeal to multiple audiences, the task is to appeal to gays in such a way that they interpret meaningful and pleasing images, while nongays perceive the same images as meaningful and pleasing. In other words, the tactic is to provide erotic stimulation that is simultaneously pleasing to gays and nongays. Such advertising may involve eroticism with a vague suggestion of a romantic theme or embedding it in a narrative, both of which are often employed in Abercrombie & Fitch catalogs. These catalogs are compelling exemplars of androgynous marketing - homoeroticism framed in a context so as to be palatable for several audiences.

In 2005, Oakenfull and Greenlee examined how marketers may target gay consumers in mainstream media without alienating heterosexual consumers. The study treated gay males and lesbians as a single consumer segment and examined responses of both heterosexual and gay consumers to advertising content that includes mainstream imagery, implicit gay male and lesbian imagery, and explicit gay male or lesbian imagery to provide advertisers with an understanding of how to effectively cross over into mainstream media with gay-targeted advertisements. The results of this study show that gay consumers respond equally well to either explicit or implicit depictions of gay imagery and prefer both types of imagery to mainstream imagery.

Of course, many ads exist in which homoeroticism is strikingly obvious. Consider one such ad for American Express that appeared in New York Magazine. In this ad, two men are positioned so that the older one on the right is staring longingly at a younger man on the left. It may be obvious that the man on the left is the other's object of desire. Although it would appear that marketers may benefit from reaching out to homosexual consumers, there is also the widely held assumption that an association with homosexual consumers may result in a strong negative reaction from many heterosexual consumers. I hope you still remember the decision of major automobile firms such as GM, Ford, and Chrysler to withdraw their scheduled advertising from the "coming out" episode of The Ellen DeGeneres Show.

It appears that today's marketers are faced with a dilemma. If they choose to advertise to the potentially lucrative homosexual community using only homosexual media, they will miss the vast majority of the market who do not regularly consume this type of media. However, if they place homosexual-oriented advertising in the mainstream media, they may realize both a positive effect on homosexuals' brand attitudes and purchase intentions and a negative effect on the same outcomes for heterosexuals. Finally, if they simply choose to use mainstream advertising in mainstream media, they will not be able to capitalize on the potential for developing higher levels of brand identification and loyalty among homosexuals.

All marketers know that they need to be ahead of the trends, anticipating the next big things. As the gay market was shaped successfully, it needed to be extended in order to reach more men, who were not necessarily gay. Heterosexual men too were needed to be urged to shop, thus came the metrosexual market. Metrosexuals become bigger marketing targets, as marketers have started appealing to more aspects of life, including personal care, outer looks and inner health, topics that used to be taboo or not manly enough. ''Metrosexuals are the creation of capitalism's voracious appetite for new markets,'' wrote Mark Simpson in his essay ''Here Come the Mirror Men: Why The Future is Metrosexual'', published on November 15, 1994, in The Independent. Nothing lasts forever, as the saying goes, and the same is true of metrosexual. The metrosexual is dead. Long live the ''spornosexual''!

 

[W!nston]

Awesome post haiducii!

I have come to expect nothing less from a charter member of Gay Heaven's 'Think Tank' :thumbs up:

 

[gorgik9]

Maybe some witty MarkSimpsonisms on Sporno as an ad-on to haiducii's great post? Anon URL

What is Sporno? Well, if Metrosexuality is the male desire to be desired, then Sporno is the desire to be desired - gone hardcore.

 

[gorgik9]

Hello haiducii & all followers!

I think I'll have to make some critical comments on two paragraphs in your gay advertising post. It's the two paragraphs about the 1960s, and in particular the American counterculture; to put it simple: my view of the counterculture and the American New Left in general in the 1960s seems to be much more negative than yours, and my ambition is to try to explain why this is the case.

Now there emerged a great many groups, organizations and movements from about the mid 1960s on, that could be named the New Left in the broadest sense of the word: Students for Democratic Society (SDS), Yippies (Jerry Rubin, Abbie Hoffman), and even if it maybe wrong to classify the feminist movement (NOW, Betty Friedan) and the radicalizing black movement (Black Panthers, Huey Newton, Eldridge Cleaver, Bobby Seale) as actual parts of the New Left, they were all deeply influenced by New Left ideology and countercultural rhetoric.

Following historians Michael Trask and Van Goss I think that the answer to the question what was the strong glue holding all the always bitching and infighting groups together is something very sad: fierce homophobia.

In the eyes of countercultural writers and ideologists the goal to strive for was transparency, authenticity and determinacy in words and in actions, but the reality of federal bureaucracy and established academia and academic culture was the definite opposite: obscurity, opacity, inauthenticity.

Counterculturalists and New Leftists used queer people and queer life as a poisonous analogy or a train of metaphors for bureaucratic establishment, and sometimes gayness & gay people are looked upon the internal truth beneeth the polished established surface. You can read - let's say - Norman Mailer, EL Doctorow and Thomas Pyncheon to understand that a man who wanted to be straight forward in words and actions just had to be - straight.

And according to Betty Friedan, lesbians were - The Lavender Menace!!!

So no, I really don't think the New Left & the counterculture did much to better the situation for gay people, I really don't think that's the case...

 

[haiducii]

^ I just wanted to point out that the counter culture movement of the 1960's changed the identity of Americans through protests and the yearn for reform. Gay rights were also becoming more apparent during this time. The counter culture movement marked the beginning of the homosexual rise for equality and acceptance. However, sometime in the late 1960's, the revolution did happen and ''everything changed.'' According to Toby Johnson what changed were mostly styles: carrot cake became a staple of the American diet; tofu appeared in local grocery store. But some of these style changes were permanent and deep: the sound of music, the moral values, the social structure of the family,.., and the visibility of gay men and lesbians.

 

[W!nston]

I have to agree with gorgik on this point. The Free Speech movement and the "New Left" were born from the seeds of the anti-war movement. Instead of liberating and enlightening the culture it resulted in revolution and division. It was "Us" and "Them" more than ever before. Some of the changes that came about as a result of the revolution and division may have led to minimally positive changes in American culture but at what cost?

I was suckered into believing the "hippie" movement was about love and peace but eventually I realized the "hippies" never wanted to liberate the downtrodden. They wanted to take power from the older generation and that led to more greed and avarice than had ever existed on earth. That generation took over Wall Street and the party hasn't stopped yet. Even after the recession of the 80s and the near depression of 2008.

It's a shame on my generation of Americans.

 

[gorgik9]

@ haiducii & Sniffit (& everybody else)!

Of course lot's of things changed in America just as in Europe in the 1960s, but to analyse the discrete socio-cultural causes to why a particular phenomenon changed in a particular way - that's very, very, very difficult. Another difficult question is about the consequences of change, for whom, according to whom?

Was it the counterculture ideologist specificly, or was it the New Left organizations in the broad sense? And did the counterculture writers and ideologists change the visibility of gay people and gay life as much as the big illustrated articles published in the biggest magazines (Life, Look, Time, Esquire) from 1964 on? I really don't think so. I don't think the counterculture came even close to the visibility effects the big american magazines had. A great read on this particular topic is Martin Meeker's "Contacts Desired: Gay and Lesbian communications and community, 1940s-1970s."

And haiducii, please don't get me wrong : I think your gay ad post in general is brilliant, but just not these two paragraphs about the 1960s...

Specifically @ Sniffit : I tried hard to remember the name of this organization before the SDS, and of course: The Free Speech movement! Thanks!

 

[gorgik9]

The Gay Emperor of Commercial Art: JC Leyendecker

This an early version of the "Arrow Cpllar Man", a brand made by commercial artist JC Leyendecker (1874-1951) for Cluett, Peabody& C.

The Arrow Collar Man became the first icon of masculine beauty and American manliness in commercial art for a quarter of a century 1905-1930, and in its turn secured Leyendecker's position as the most successfull and influential commercial artist in the US. Leyendecker already had lucrative commissions for cover art for the big general interest magazines when he got in touch with the advertising director of Cluett, Peabody & C Charles M. Connolly in 1905 to explain his vision to make an unique male symbol for the company's products:

"Not simply a man, but a manly man, a handsome man...an ideal American man."

There's an important thing to state from the beginning of this post: The creator of the Arrow Collar Man was a gay man, and the guy who worked as the model for the Arrow Collar Man was also a gay man; he was a hunky Canadian named Charles Beach (1886-1952) and he would become JC Leyendecker's lover and partner for almost half a century.

Industrial capitalism, advertising and the integration of national and global markets.

Long before printed advertisements in newspapers became the dominant method for advertising, there were other more ancient methods, such as loud cries from vendors in the streets, painted signs outside shops and advertisements painted on exterior walls of houses in the cities.

You could find newspaper ads as early as in the 17th century, but it didn't become the dominant method for advertising until the arrival of the mass press in Europe, with Emile Girardin's "La Presse" starting in 1836.

These early newspaper ads were text messages only, without any pictures.

Ads with small xylographed pics (Xylography: wood engraving) emerged in the 1850s, to become more common from the 1860s on:

From the 1870s on, you could get much more colourful advertising, though not in newspapers. The key to big size colour advertising was posters printed on zink plate lithography:

But what definitely changed the situation for all kinds of picture printing in books, newspapers and magazines was the invention of halftone printing plates in the 1890s, when photos finally could be printed together with text at the same time.

Integration of markets.

At the same time - 1880s to 1890s - there were more basic changes happening: the integration of national and international markets in consumer goods, and one large scale phenomenon important to this particular end and very typical for its time was the Universal Exhibitions from London 1851 to Paris 1900.

The Chrystal Palace in London 1851:

Paris 1889 with the recently erected Eiffel Tower:

There's no question about what became the most important vehicle for national advertisning in the US when nationally integrated markets started emerging : the new general interest magazines like Munsey's, McClure's, Collier's Weekly and Saturday Evening Post.

Here are a few examples of advertisements in Munsey's around 1900:

Traditional ad agencies had never been anything but "space brokers", i.e. selling advertising space in diffrent newspapers to advertisers, but the agencies had nothing to do with designing and making the ads, which was the advertisers own business. The new type of agencies - the full service agencies - became more and more common at the turn of the century 1900, and in the middle of all this change was the man often called the inventor of modern advertising, Earnest Elmo Calkins (1868-1964), who started his own agency Calkins & Holden in 1902.

Here's a pic of Calkins and an ad for his agency:

Advertisments produced by Calkins & Holden in 1905-1917 was instrumental in changing the look of American advertising, and one of the talented artists who took Calkins bait was - of course - our gay hero, Joe Leyendecker.

Joseph Christian Leyendecker : A biography.

In the city of Montabaur, Rheinland-Pfalz, Germany, Peter and Elisabeth Leyendecker had their third child in 1874, a son named Joseph Christian. They had an older son Adolph in 1869 and a daughter Augusta Mary in 1872; in 1876 they got their fourth and last child, a third son, Franz Xavier.

A photo of Joe:

A small portrait of Frank, painted by Joe:

Below is a doentary video about JC Leyendecker made 2006 in connection to the exhibition in the Hackin Museum. Some facts in this docu isn't necessarily correct and I'll talk more about some difficulties in Leyendeckers biography in the next chapter of this post.


Peter and Elisabeth and their four kids emigrated from Germany to USA in 1882 and settled in Chicago.

Joe became an apprentice in 1889 with J. Manz engravings in Chicago, and in 1894 he made 60 Bible illustrations to be published by Powers Brothers Company, and this also made Joe realize he needed to get some formal education in art, and so he decided to take three evening classes weekly at the Art Institute of Chicago with John H. Vanderpoel as one of his professors.

Vanderpoel soon sensed he had an extraordinary talent in his evening class and started talking young Joe into going to Paris, France, to study art at the Académie Julien under William Bouguereau.

So off he went to Paris to study there for almost two years, and he actually managed to pay for the education for another brilliant talent, his own kid brother Frank.

Back in Chicago in autumn 1897 the brothers hired studios in the Chicago Fine Arts Building and stayed there until 1900, when the brothers accompanied by their sister Mary decided to move to New York.

The period 1900-1907 was important for both brothers, in particular for Joe, first because he met Charles Beach in NY in 1903, and second because it was in this period he decided to move into ad art.

Later years & some problems with Leyendecker's biography.

This is the case: when Joe started to get old (remember Charles was 12 years younger than Joe) he made Charles promise to destroy all letters and photos when he had passed away. Joe didn't want friends and relatives get in trouble because of his gayer writings and pictures.

Charles did what he had promised Joe, which also meant future generations of biographers and historians lost tons of important info. And this causes trouble for people like me, and for you reading what I'm writing.

There are a number of cases were there are differing alternatives to what the correct date was when something particular happened, but without any possibility to decide what the correct date was: did something happen in 190X or in 190Y or 190Z? Sometimes the differance isn't very important, but sometimes it is, and let me point to one of the most interesting cases when the difference in date is of central importance:

Did Frank and Mary leave the Leyendecker mansion on Mount Tom Road, New Rochelle, in 1921 or 1923?

Let's move on with the biography!

In 1907 the brothers had moved their NY studio to a new more prestigious address in the Beaux Art Building on 40th Street and Bryant Park. At the same time they had bought a house on Pelham Road, New Rochelle, so they commuted dayly to their NY studio but didn't live there any longer.

In 1914 the Leyendecker's started building a grandiose mansion in another part of New Rochelle, Mount Tom Road, with a separate studio for Frank. Joe however continued commuting to NY where Charles lived.

According to Joe's latest biographers LS and JG Cutler, Charles Beach moved in to the mansion on Mount Tom Road while Joe still commuted dayly to NY, and I've got an ugly hunch that this paved the way for the emotional explosions that would destroy the Leyendecker family in the 1920s.

My ugly hunch is that Frank - who was just as gay a goose as big bro Joe - got too much time on his own with hunky Charlie while Joe was travelling to-and-fro every day.

Anyway, in 1921 - says the Cutler's, the video says 1923 - Joe stopped using the Manhattan studio and started working exclusively from home. What happened next was that Frank and Mary in full anger and fury decided to leave Mount Tom Road for good to let Joe and Charlie live one their own.

The tragic finale came in 1924 when Frank decided to end his own life.

After Joe's fatal heart attac on July 25 1951, Charles did what he had promised, but he didn't survive Joe with more than just about a year.

They had been an item for 48 years. Almost half a century.

Magazine covers and advertisements.

It was through his cover atr Joe originally became famous, but I think his work in advertising was in many ways more important and more unconventional.; hence I'll put the stress on his ad art in the following.

Magazine Covers.

Advertisements illustrations.

Arrow Collars & Shirts.

A handful large size Arrow Collar ads from the 1910s:

A necessary piece of historical info: from the late 19th century, a red tie had become a visual code for queer men in New York. Another artist using the red tie code was Paul Cadmus; here's a couple of Cadmus paintings from the mid 1930s!

Ivory Soap.

From 1917

From 1918

Kuppenheimer Clothes & Interwoven Socks.

******************************

As you all know: every lesson has to end, and so must this also...

 

[W!nston]

^^ Bravo! Bon travail! ^^

Thank you, thank you, thank you!

I will read this again. I'm sure of it!

:thumbs up:

 

[haiducii]

@gorgik9: Amazing photos and great history lesson! The subjects which you choose for your posts are increase my knowledge about history. Thank you a lot. :thumbs up:

 

[Shelter]

Hello Gorgik and Haiducii - and I'm really serious about this: why don't you publish all this highly interesting stuff into a book. I would be the first one who would buy it!

Never ever before I've read so much and so very interesting things of gay-life and gay-history than here. Please reflect upon - and don't be reluctant to do it.

Anyway - big thanks to both of you who have given me the feeling not only to be gay - but to have a history together with so many others and so many very famous. It is a good feeling!

 

[gorgik9]

Thank a lot for the appreciation my friends!!! I hope it showed that I really loved writing about JC Leyendecker, and there's so much interesting material to get on the Internet.

I "met him" for the first time about 16-17 years ago & the result was instant love - hahahahaha!