Last Updated on March 23, 2018
South Carolina has dropped out of an ad campaign that was designed to lure gay tourism dollars to the state. The state’s Parks, Recreation and Tourism Department had previously agreed to spend $5,000, not a huge amount of money as ad dollars go, to market to gays in London.
Charleston’s Post and Courier describes one ad that appeared in a London tube station as showing a historic rural home under the headline, “South Carolina is so gay.”
True to form, bible-belt red-state South Carolinians reacted by flying off the deep end. Sure, they want tourist dollars, but just not from them. Even though “them” is a relatively powerful tourist force, according to a Philadelphia study a few years ago, which revealed that for every dollar that city spent on gay tourism advertising, gay tourists spent an average of $153 on hotels, shops and more. At the time, gay tourists were said to spend about $54 billion a year on travel. That’s billion. With a B.
And it’s just a guess on my part, mind you, but I’ll wager those billions are still green like everyone else’s. And still spends, in a sluggish economy, the same.
The problem, according to PRT excuses, was that international advertising wasn’t subjected to the same review process that national advertising is because in this case, a third party firm developed the ad. Does that explanation make any damn sense to anyone? PRT only cares enough to be mindful of the image it is projecting to places like Iowa or Oregon or Minnesota, but doesn’t give a hoot about pulling in tourism dollars from the rest of the planet? And unless PRT has its own ad agency and never uses any third party firms here in the state — which is unlikely — most of their ad projects are ultimately produced or executed by third parties.
And isn’t that what we’d expect, no matter what an international ad said? Who’d know what would appeal to any specific segment of London’s population better than a London-based firm, or at least someone here is from there?
Sounds to me like an excuse about as logical as something a kid would make up after getting caught with his hand in the cookie jar.
Is the ad wrong to use the term gay? Well, let’s look at it this way: would there be any objection from gay groups if South Carolina hoped to attract bible belt tourists to the state with the line, “South Carolina is so straight?” If anyone would have a problem with that, but not the gay line, then what we’re dealing with here is a nice little double standard.
Of course, then there are the ones who’ll try to downplay the whole thing by hiding behind dictionary definitions. Gay has different meanings, they’ll say.
True.
Gay means happy and carefree, although it is used less and less for that these days because “them homasexshals” took over the word.
Gay is also used, mostly by people who aren’t, to refer to something that is screwed up, backwards.
Some would argue after this little display of homophobia and/or sloppy procedure and/or poor judgment, depending on your personal point of view, that maybe, one way or another, the headline isn’t so inaccurate after all.
Just thought I’d let you know a girl in HS in Northwest IL wore a t-shirt to her PUBLIC school & it said “Be Happy, Not Gay” and they school asked her to take it off or alter it. She is now graduated but the courts said she had the right to wear it! Interesting! Yep, have the right to freely speak your prejudice and look like an idiot (that of course was my free speech right!) HA!