Written Task 2 Practice

 How and why is a social group represented in a particular way?

In this article, I'll be answering the question above in relation to LGBT advertising.

There are 2 types of techniques marketers use to advertise to the LGBT community. Gay window advertising is one of the earliest and most common strategy targeting gays. It features “average” and straight-looking characters that can be read as buddies or roommates by straight audiences and as gay couples by gays. This advertising strategy tries to appeal to lesbian and gay consumers without offending, or even alerting, homophobic audiences. In addition, through the use of in-group language, gestures, and symbols of gay sub-culture, an ad is able to appear “innocuous” to heterosexual audiences and induce a gay reading from gay audiences simultaneously, thus creating a multivocal article. However, gay window advertising only secretly and ambiguously acknowledges and entertains gay audiences which may become a glass closet, or the “closet of connotation”.

Now, the gay message is beaming through more clearly these days.They now use LGBT families or LGBT individuals in campaigns that reach mainstream audiences. The LGBT community isn’t as ghettoized as it used to be. Gay marketing, like gay-everything, has seeped into the mainstream.

 

Despite this, we've changed tactics. Does sex still sell? More specifically, how are gay men depicted in gay men’s magazines? Is sexuality used to sell products in ways that are similar to the way sexuality is used to sell products in mainstream men’s magazines? Are gay men more sexualized than straight men?

The de-sexualization of LGBTQ media is often articulated in terms of an attempt to make “respectable” the gay civil rights movement.