MoPod Show 2.0 - Gay Comedy Podcast

People should be allowed to come out when they are ready. That is usually the way I feel. Unless you are a shameless homophobic politician cruising for sex in airport bathrooms or an evangelical hypocrite negotiating with sex for a discount from your gay meth dealer, you deserve a great degree of privacy in making your way out.

States, on the other hand, present an altogether different problem. When a state is in the closet and denies the gayness surging within it (wow…that sounds hot!), it presents a larger problem for the people who live within it. This week a low level state scape goat employee in South Carolina was forced to resign after approving some promotional tourism marketing material with the slogan “South Carolina is So Gay”. The material was aimed at bringing some of the very lucrative gay travel market to South Carolina and at the same time defusing old stereotypes about the south and even defusing the “so gay” phrase into something positive.

Of course this is the kind of gay baiting that anti-gay organizations have wet dreams about. Very public and presented in a way that makes straight people feel like they are about to be invaded. They seemed to freak out because $5000 of the state’s tourism budget (not a lot of money for the potential return - I mean Peasha and Ruphus and I would drop that much on Jaeger shots) would be used on the campaign. The big idea to me is that there ARE gay people in South Carolina, there are gay beaches, and there are lots of financial reasons that So Carolina should be gunning for our disposable income. Here’s a bit more from the original article:

Posters in London subways say, “South Carolina is so gay. Explore an America most never see. From plantations to the Civil War. Golf to gay beaches.” Similar posters proclaim Atlanta, Boston, Las Vegas, New Orleans and Washington, D.C. as being “so gay”. The campaign is sponsored by Amro Worldwide, a company that specializes in “gay travel”, and is aimed at people who are in London for gay pride events.

But state tourism officials never approved the state’s participation in the ad campaign. Prosser says the agency’s independent contractor in the United Kingdom presented a proposal to a lower-level PRT employee, and that employee approved it as part of a larger package of tour-operator participations. As soon as Prosser and higher-level PRT officials found out exactly what the program was, they contacted their UK representative and said the state would not participate and no state money would go to the program. It would have cost state taxpayers almost $5,000.

Palmetto Family Council president and CEO Dr. Oran Smith says, “South Carolinians don’t care for their tax money to be invested in ways that they don’t think is consistent with their values and I think promoting gay tourism is inconsistent with South Carolina values.” He says it also doesn’t make financial sense to invest in something that doesn’t match the state’s target audience, which is families.