Dr. Pepper’s Homophobic Ad for Pride Month
Playing dress -up with queer culture is never A Good Lewk!
It’s incredibly difficult for corporations to thread the needle during LGBTQIA+ Pride Month, wanting to sell products by appearing to support the LGBTQIA+ community but not so much that they alienate the homophobes. The most daring attempt to do so while also being humorous. Few advertisers can pull it off.
Dr. Pepper clearly isn’t one of them.
Its latest print ad ahead of Pride Month attempts to make a sexual joke by appropriating gay men’s slang terms for anal sex to describe the parts of a Dr. Pepper soda can. (The U.S.’ fourth most popular soda brand dropped a similar campaign in Europe in 2018.) But, because the copywriters don’t seem to understand the language they’ve borrowed, the ad perpetuates harmful stereotypes about gay men and performs support for the LGBTQIA+ community rather than actually offering it.
Though sex and sexuality are prominent features of gay male subcultures, it’s not all we are and not everything we do. Pride was born out of a political moment: the Stonewall Uprising. The proper place of sex in what came after is highly contested, even today.
And anal sex is far from the most popular sex act between men. According to public health researcher Joshua Rosenberger, bisexual and gay men report having anal sex less than half the time in their most recent sexual encounters with other men. Kissing, oral sex, and mutual masturbation are much more common sexual acts.
Nevertheless, sex is all straight people seem to be able to think about when it comes to gay men. And, in the straight imaginary, anal sex is the quintessential gay male sex act. It condenses myriad fears, beliefs, and stereotypes about gay men’s passivity and femininity, while sparking a particularly virulent (and violent) kind of phobia in the minds of straight men, for whom anal penetration is akin to being unmanned. It’s our supposed fondness for anal sex — our penetrability — that simultaneously likens us to women and distinguishes us from men; that is, “real” men.
In its singular focus on anal sex, Dr. Pepper’s ad expresses a particularly straight (and straight male) vision of gay male culture that reduces us to the kind of sex (they think) we have. It simplifies and diminishes us into a form palatable to straight people, who are the actual audience for Dr. Pepper’s ad.
Which, given the history of representation of sexual minorities, isn’t all that surprising. We’ve only rarely been allowed to tell our own stories. But purchasing ad space to perpetuate straight stereotypes about gay men during LGBTQIA+ Pride Month isn’t supportive.
It’s homophobic.
The appropriation of LGBTQIA+ culture continues in the ad’s use of the word “queer,” which is a problematic term for many LGBTQIA+ people and certainly not a word to be used casually by non-members of our community.
Unless Dr. Pepper is the name of your drag king persona, you don’t get to use “queer” without our permission! Especially to refer to us. You don’t support us by appropriating our culture without permission and employing a word that’s often been used as a slur against us.
If you’re struggling with that one, imagine the Whitest-white company ever coming out with an ad during Black History Month that casually employs the N-word to describe Black people and you’ll get some sense of why Dr. Pepper’s use of the word “queer” to describe LGBTQIA+ people is inappropriate and disrespectful.
(And, no, I’m not claiming racism and homophobia are the same thing. They’re not. I’m reasoning by analogy. It’s a thing. Look it up!)
But the ad doesn’t even use the word “queer” correctly. Flexibility in anal sex positions (being “vers”) does not make anyone “queer.” Nor does sex or sexuality necessarily have anything to do with self-identification as “queer.” Nor are “queer” and “diverse,” much less “vers” and “diverse,” necessarily related.
I’ve read the ad copy several times and I have no idea what it’s trying to say. It’s as if the text was filtered through Google Translate a few times. It’s not gay culture or gay sub-cultural language. It’s nonsensical word salad.
The ad’s incoherent use of our language points to a fundamental lack of understanding about LGBTQIA+ people — our communities and our cultures. Though it claims to understand us, it’s just playing dress up using our words.
It’s masquerade. Or minstrelsy.
Authentic corporate support for LGBTQIA+ people needs to consist of more than donning a costume of appropriated culture once a year during Pride Month.
We need to stop being so desperate for recognition and validation that we settle for this kind of faux support every year around Pride Month. We need (and deserve) better! Had Dr. Pepper taken 15 minutes to convene a focus group of gay men, or members of the broader LGBTQIA+ community, it might have been saved from this embarrassing debacle. But apparently not.
Dear Dr. Pepper: it’s time for a consult with GLAAD.
Edit: now Coca-Cola’s up to a similar game:
Michael J. Murphy, PhD, is Associate Professor of Gender & Sexuality Studies at the University of Illinois Springfield. He is the author of many book chapters, and encyclopedia and journal articles. Most recently, he edited Living Out Loud: An Introduction to LGBTQ History, Society, and Culture (New York: Routledge, 2019). He tweets @emjaymurphee.
