Gay/Straight Ad Watch: They Just Can't Help It

Genius, inanity, or perfect brand positioning?

--Straight Guy

The Best of Gay 2008: Because Gay.Com Tells Me So

I meant to put this up last week. It's gay.com's Best of 2008 list.

Obama, Tina Fey, but no Milk.

Straight Guy, how much of this did you know about?

--Gay Guy

Giving Hope to Geeks, Too

The ceremony, the celebrations, the adoring throngs, the transfer of power...

But this has to be the one of the coolest things that happens to Barack Obama this month.

"When we heard that President-Elect Obama is a collector of Spider-Man comics, we knew that these two historic figures had to meet in our comics' Marvel Universe," says Marvel's Editor-in-Chief Joe Quesada. "Historic moments such as this one can be reflected in our comics because the Marvel Universe is set in the real world. A Spider-Man fan moving into the Oval Office is an event that must be commemorated in the pages of Amazing Spider-Man.

More details at Marvel Comics.

Better buy this one early, GG. They are only printing a "half run" to keep collectors on their toes. Still, better than the collector's plates I keep seeing on late night infomercials.

--Straight Guy

Joy of Sex: The Little Cookbook of Straight Life, Revised and Smoother Edition

Straight Guy,

A reader sent a link to this hilarious New Yorker review of the overhauled Joy of Sex. (The article has a graphic of a breast; it's completely benign, but you decide if it is NSFW.)

The new Joy of Sex, out in stores this week, updates what would seem to defy being updated. When it comes to sex, is there anything new for which to be joyful? (This is an example of a rhetoric question, SG. I don't really require an answer.) At least one thing is different: the male figure in the 1972 illustrations looked frightening --picture the Geico Caveman. The new man looks more like that nice looking guy who works down the hall in the finance office. Just with a better haircut.

Finding the Joy of Sex in my parents' nightstand drawer was worse than finding out that, well, that Dad ate the cheese and crackers we left for Santa.

--Gay Guy

Thanks, GG. I really needed a resource like this when I was growing up. Like many straight boys, I got wildly inaccurate information from my playground chums followed by gentle corrections from my mother. Once, while running a few errands with her, I asked what the word "genitalia" meant, and the floodgates of unwelcome information opened. We were probably only 5 minutes from home, but I'm sure she drove many miles out of her way, just to get it all out while I was a captive audience. I think I slept in the car that night.

As to the fact that Gay Guy left cheese and crackers (!) for Santa... of course he did. Sugar cookies are so... gauche. This year, he left a tapas sampler with microwave instructions as well as a chilled cava.

--Straight Guy

Gay/Straight Ad Watch: Campari, The Gay, Straight, or Androgenous Apertif?

Straight Guy,

Frequent reader and commenter Straight in Upstate read your January 4 post about Jessica Alba being "photochopped" for the 2009 Campari calendar and asked, "What is Campari?" I came online to get a description of Campari. In addition, I found this very intriguing commercial:



Don't worry Straight Guy, it looks like there is a Salma Hayek Campari ad just for you.

If I had known how much "chase me, chase me, change me, change me" I could wrench from a glass of Campari, I would have tried one sooner. Mostly, I wanted to cross it off my list of literary potent potables. Characters in novels by Virgina Woolf to Thomas Wolfe to the uber-macho Hemingway are always drinking aperitifs. FYI: Campari tastes like a combination of cough syrup, quinine, and chalk. I suspect it was created to ward off malaria.

Back to the commercial: I thought the two faun-like people were both women, so at least the dude offered some element of surprise. I'm a sucker for the tension between the hidden and the revealed. Sometimes the hidden is more exciting and the reveal is a let down. Which brings us back to our recent posts about gay/straight guys and their undies.

Straight Guy, I don't think gay guys really fall for the kind of titillation in this commercial. I fell for the aesthetic and the architecture of the location. Do Straight Guys find this stuff seductive?

--Gay Guy

"Yes" to Salma (check her out seducing Alec Baldwin currently on 30 Rock). "No" to everything else. Campari looks like the weird red syrup at IHOP to me.

-- Straight Guy

Gay Underwear/Straight Underwear: A Brief Post

Straight Guy,
Now that we’ve introduced the topic of gay underwear, straight underwear, I have to ask you a further question. Day time underwear vs. night time underwear: is this a gay/straight divide? Gays, is this a single/partnered divide? Is this a sartorial habit practiced only by people with too much time on their hands?

In a nutshell: When I get ready for work or during the day on weekends, I just grab whatever pair is on top in the drawer. Without too much detail, we’re talking white. When I get ready to go out at night – a date, dinner, any place where there is a remote chance that my underwear might become, ahem, visible to another man, I go for black. But never black during the day.

Have I reached a new level of lunacy or do straight men catalog their underwear by purpose, potential sighting scale, time of day or event? Fellow gay guys, do we band together on this?

--Gay Guy

Is He Gay or Straight?: Underwear Test

FROM STRAIGHT GUY: Ask the gentleman where he buys his underwear. If he buys them in 5-packs from Target or WallMart, he's probably straight. If he has no idea where his underwear comes from, or what brand he wears, he's probably straight, but taken. Once a momma's boy...

The stereotype is true. Once a straight guy is off the market and not trying so hard to get laid, the quality of his underwear becomes a non-issue. Unsupervised, we wear them until they disintegrate. And then for a few months more. Who likes to buy underwear, anyway?

Still laughing that someone took the time to create this helpful illustration. Are you happy with your "armholes," GG? (A lot of work only to misfire on the labeling for "crotch" and "fly". Note to young readers: Do not trust the SexEd diagrams at Visual Dictionary!) Ideally, if you're able able to use a computer to navigate to the site, you should already have the operational complexities of underwear all worked out.

FROM GAY GUY: A quick look around my gym’s locker room indicates that good underwear always has a name: Calvin Klein, Polo, 2xist (Straight Guy: Say ‘To Exist,’ it’s very gay). There’s a sprinkling of Hanes or FTL, but no representation from J C Penney. So, the gay stereotype holds true: we’re brand whores.

Underwear quality checks never end for gay men. It’s a point of pride. A comfortable sag here and there is okay (if you’re off the dating track), but gaps, tears, or worse, just wouldn’t happen for a gay man. I never really thought about this, but I suppose good underwear counts because we check out each other’s business. The wrapper just means more for us; and thus the miracle of fashion technology that is the ‘contour pouch.’

Straight Guy, how many seams does YOUR underwear have down the back?

Who likes to buy underwear? Am I supposed to be ashamed?

P.S. Tucking your undershirt INTO the waistband of whatever kind of underwear you are sporting looks ridiculous. Please add this as an agenda item at your next Straight Guy meeting.
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Does This Yoga Mat Make Me Look Gay?

Straight Guy,

This morning I took one step toward fulfilling a new year's resolution: I took a yoga class at my gym. For years I've said I wanted to take yoga (insert learn to play tennis, learn Spanish, get on of those torches that carmelize the sugar for the perfect top to creme brulee).

Resolved to keep my resolution, I had the sudden realization last evening that I might be expected to bring my own mat. Drat, mat. I had already expended too much mental energy on what I was going to wear, I just didn't have it in me to think about the mat.

A friend kindly drove me to Target. So we're standing in front of the mats. Pink, lavender, baby blue. I just can't show up at yoga with a pink mat. Here's a green mat. Green, green is good, right? My friend concurred. Green is the way to go.

As I was unfurling my mat in the yoga studio, I discovered that the work side of the mat had this lovely floral design down the side. Curses, gay again. Though, it's a very handsome design in a William Morris style. Turns out the gym provides grey, somewhat Spartan mats. I guess I'll stick with the one I brought.

P.S. If ever you think that yoga is easy, remember that the class ended 6 hours ago and my arms and legs still feel like jello.

--Gay Guy

Gay Straight Ad Watch: Photo-Chopped

Gay Guy,

Holidays over. Back to work. Might be time for a new calendar, right? Not sure about your preference: photos from Edith Wharton's Mount Estate vs. Tropical Orchids by Season vs. Firemen of the Bronx, hmmmm.

Some controversy this year around the Campari calendar. Each year it features a fabulous babe enjoying the product line and the company of tanned, hairless, italian beefcake. Previous years have featured Eva Mendes and Salma Hayek.

The photo editors took extra liberties this time by retouching pounds off of this year's star, Jessica Alba. (See the before and after above. Obviously not the same shot, but the slimming work is obvious... and overdone.)

Neither you or I are naive enough to belive this doesn't happen all the time. Remember the dust-ups over Beyonce's skin tone (lightened) and tummy (flattened), Kate Winslet's legs (lengthened), and Kate Hudson's and Keira Knightley's bikinis (filled)? Not to forget Hugh Grant's teeth (complete overhaul). Yes, photo retouching is a slippery slope, but this qualifies as digital surgery.

The backlash is always about the damage to the female psyche, re: body image, unattainable standards of perfection, etc. If Jessica Alba needs this much help, what hope is there for Jane Sixpack?

Not trying to minimize the problem, but let's be clear. Straight guys did not cause and do not perpetuate this particular problem. We could care less about the glossy, high fashion, euro-styled aesthetic on display here (which demographic would that be?). And there certainly is no underground campaign by us to make Alba any hotter. I guarantee that most straight guys think she looks fine the way she is.

[No. I am not sidestepping the complicating issue that Alba had a baby last year. If the folks at Campari are trying to completely erase the impact of that, then poo-poo on them and Alba shouldn't have taken the job this year. She looks fine.]

In the case of the Campari calendar, the men are certainly as objectified as the model. Talk about props! (Do most straight guys even buy Campari? Or have a good working definition of "objectified?")

Blame straight guys for the Swedish Bikini Team and the Playboy aesthetic, sure. Maybe women feel pressure to conform to the images of fashion industry waifs AND the bombshells of pop culture. But you can't pin ALL of this angst on us.

Besides, they shouldn't worry so much. One of the best qualities about straight guys is that we are so easy to please. And that's not the same thing as having low standards.

You tell me, Gay Guy. Any of your team's fingerprints on this? Or are women torturing themselves?

--Straight Guy

Straight Guy,

I believe you that straight men don't much care for or about the high-gloss, high-fashion, overdone styling in this calendar. (Come clean, was this a Christmas present?) I find it impossible to imagine this calendar on the fridge of any straight man I know. The out of control Vouge magazine look isn't for y'all. And, you don't like to share your gals, even if it is some Euro-trash wanna be Chippendales dancer hairless abs-blasted boy.

Are my peeps behind this? Behind the camera, probably. Behind the plot to create a male erotic fantasy that actually screams gay, gay, gay and thus must cause some internal distress along with the visual candy? Sounds more like the plot of Shakespeare's Twelfth Night to me. I am not sure that any of my peeps have that much time on their hands. Besides, speaking for the team, if I had the coin to get some mostly nekkid, hairless piece of Italian sausage into a tropical pool on a sunny day, I wouldn't kill the buzz with Jessica Alba hanging around looking for attention. I'm sure she's a very nice lady, but timing IS everything.

So, this begs the question of exactly who is this calendar for? If it's designed to be the answer to a straight man's sexual fantasy and it's not really appealing to straight men, nor is it appealing to gay men, well, that leaves us with the fertile female mind. Is this appealing to lesbians? That is truly outside my area of expertise. Also, outside the range of my might imagination.

Personally, I think calendars like that, and I speak from some expertise now, whether they are designed to titillate straight or gays guys end up being rather depressing. Hot, then depressing. I indulge myself with a sexy man calendar pretty much every year, this year included. (Writing in my mom's birthday and my parent's anniversary in a box below the, well, box is weird. The new calendar features tasteful black and white images, and lured me in with "Fitness Tips" for each month. January's is "don't eat so much." I wonder if my objectified piece of man muscle has be photo-surgically slimmed.

Last but not least: I did once have a Campari and soda. Campari is neither gay nor straight. Nor does it taste good.

--Gay Guy

More 2008 Stats

Happy New Year Folks. Here's a few additions to Straight Guy's comments on our 2008 stats.

We've found readers in the usual suspects of New York, San Francisco, D.C., L.A., and Chicago, but also Yukon, Oklahoma. In fact, we've had hits from almost every state in the U.S. No pressure, but North Dakota, come home, all is forgiven.

Most of our readers are from the United States, but in the month of December alone, we had hits from 28 different countries. From top to bottom (geographically speaking), we've had hits in Tromso, Norway, and Rosario, Argentina. I'm touched that we have regular hits from countries where it might not feel completely safe to type the words 'gay guy' into a search engine.

Keep us bookmarked and write us -- we love hearing from you.

Happy 2009!

--Gay Guy