Different Gays, Different Gaze: Exploring the Effects of the Sanitization of Gay Men in Media

Abstract

This Senior Thesis explores the relationship between different portrayals of gay men in American advertising and the respective attitudes towards gay men and gay-related policies that they elicit from their perceivers. Dividing such ads into two general groups—those featuring gay men as a form of allyship targeted towards a mainstream audience versus those specifically intended for gay men, I analyze how mainstream ads make vague the sexuality of gay men whereas the latter group portrays gay men in more explicitly homoerotic ways. Tracing the development of an underground consumer market for gay men in the 1950s, as well as the mainstreaming of both the gay male consumer market and the LGBT community as a political identity group in the 1990s, I argue that homoerotic consumerism has played a critical role in shaping gay identity, community, and resistance, but has also been historically demonized by the mainstream. As gay men continue to gain visibility in public life and in media, I question whether Americans’ increasing tolerance of gay men is contingent upon seeing them behave with an asexualized respectability, what I coin “heteropalatability.” To test this concern, I perform a survey featuring 500 participants on Amazon Mechanical Turk that compares how they perceive the figures in a homoerotic advertisement for the fetish wear company “Nasty Pig” with female models in a “Victoria’s Secret” advertisement, after first being primed by one of four randomly selected ads that offer a different portrayal of gay men. The survey is composed of three main measurements. Firstly, how do participants rank the characters they observed in the initial two ads on warmth-competence scales? I predict that participants primed with ads that portray gay men as comparatively heteropalatable will rank the Nasty Pig models lower in warmth-competence. Secondly, I predict that in an implicit association test, participants will more readily associate the Nasty Pig models with negative attributes and the Victoria’s Secret models with positive attributes. Finally, I predict that participant groups that rank the Nasty Pig models higher in warmth-competence will be more likely to support pro-gay policies and hold pro-gay cultural attitudes. While the data support my first two hypotheses and, in one of two cases, my third, a series of t-tests reveal many unforeseen indicators of statistical significance. I offer in conclusion an argument for the importance of a counter-cultural branch of the gay consumer market liberated from mainstream concerns of sexual modesty. I also offer that mainstream portrayals of gay men seem to elicit more pro-gay attitudes from perceivers when they depict gestures of affection rather than when they are asexualized.