Out There

February 4, 2010

If an American guy says proudly that he's never watched a Super Bowl, the American imagination assumes he's either a professor who resents the moron sports-money his department isn't getting, or gay. He could be both, but American imaginations aren't as flexible as American tight ends.

Too bad that most popular assumptions are demonstrably wrong. You've never been to a gay sports bar? Lite beer or boutique EPA only. Plenty of gay-guy house parties as well -- those wings had better be hot hot hot and not drip on the Eames.

(Sorry, there's a long tradition of making fun of one's own, especially when "one's own" aren't really one's own.)

Three guesses as to whether this writer has watched the last, or any, Super Bowl. He will certainly not check this one out, because he doesn't wish to see the 30-second Tim Tebow antichoice ad paid for by the madly antigay Focus on the Family. "Dogs aren't born mooing, and people aren't born gay," states a recent Focus press release -- thanks for that nugget, Huffington Post. CBS once refused "issue" ads, but nowadays, a buck's a buck.

Small coincidence, but the network at the same time has rejected a straightforward, commercial 30-second spot from a gay dating service with the snackalicious name of ManCrunch. Before this happened, no one I know had ever heard of ManCrunch -- but no one I know had heard of Tim Tebow, either.

Those half-minute baubles reportedly cost between two and three million dollars to air. So go to the top of the page, click and take a look. Does the ManCrunch effort look like it would do the trick and get a few millions-worth of brew-belching queer singles to sign up online as soon as the game was over?

Even though GLAAD, the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, has asked CBS to explain its apparent homophobic double-standard, one must wonder, after looking at the dating ad, if the ManCrunchers had guessed or even hoped that it would be refused. Its submission does seem like a stunt of some kind, perhaps clever in the way it depends upon fear of fags to succeed. Sure, some regular gay folks are angry with CBS, though others are understandably cautious about wasting their outrage on something trivial when there are so many profound ways to spend it every single day.

This regular gay guy thinks that the ad's sort of fun but leaves a number of crucial questions unanswered. Are those two randy lumps typical of the kind of fellows you'll match up with forever and ever on the site? (OK, the streaked-blond one's not bad.) Why is the black guy sitting by himself -- where's his touchdown? And most important, who in his or her right mind would eat ridged chips, when everyone knows those bumps capture twice the oil?

All ads, by the way, are issue ads. The issue is how we live.

P.S. -- In order to see if ManCrunch ("Putting the man back in romance") is a real site, and because I'm a real journalist, I joined. Seems as real as any dating site, guys.

Three guesses as to my user name.

P.P.S. -- Anyone remember the brave, first-out Dave Kopay? The NFL, to its shame, still ignores him.

For an automatic alert when there is a new Out There post, emailjiweinste@aol.com.

February 4, 2010 11:23 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

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Out There The media make a potentially fatal mistake by dividing arts coverage into high and low, old and young, and by trivializing our passionate attraction to things. In Out There I propose that all creative expression has the potential to be both thought-provoking and popular; to write about flea markets as if they were museums (and vice versa); to celebrate singers and chefs. A short example: more

Jeff Weinstein I've been an editor of arts coverage at New York's Soho Weekly News (1977-79); of visual arts and architecture criticism and much else at the Village Voice (1981-95, with a stint as managing editor of Artforum); of the fine arts at the Philadelphia Inquirer (1997-2006); of arts and culture at Bloomberg News (2006-07). I am also a writer.... more

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