MTV ran a series of commercials highlighting social justice issues, that’s all.
It was a very different era, gay rights and especially marriage were becoming part of mainstream discourse and the LGBTQ+ community was still relatively well organized from the fight to get proper attention to the AIDS epidemic.
Reagans administration literally let the transmission of HIV run unchecked because they thought it was just a ‘gay thing’ that would rid then of a minority they have always wanted to eliminate anyway. To these monsters, a genocidal plague was a happy little accident.
It took immense pressure and coordinated efforts to gather data showing it impacted straight peole too in order to get research and public health funds allocated at necessary levels.
Against this dark backdrop, MTV was building its brand as the woke media outlet and the suits let the creatives run ads like this.
Really talk to any kind of ‘sexual minority’ who lived through that era and you will find we were well aware of creeping fascism all the way back then. This and other commercials was both a signal to the queer creative community that MTV ‘got us’ and a way for MTV to establish ’counterculture’ street cred.
(Sexual minority is a clinical term I don’t like much as pretty much everyone is ‘weird’ sexually, but it is used by researchers in some fields to avoid the constant and often unproductive wrangling about the letters, knowing this is useful for finding research on these subjects)
porksnort@slrpnk.net 1 week ago
MTV ran a series of commercials highlighting social justice issues, that’s all.
It was a very different era, gay rights and especially marriage were becoming part of mainstream discourse and the LGBTQ+ community was still relatively well organized from the fight to get proper attention to the AIDS epidemic.
Reagans administration literally let the transmission of HIV run unchecked because they thought it was just a ‘gay thing’ that would rid then of a minority they have always wanted to eliminate anyway. To these monsters, a genocidal plague was a happy little accident.
It took immense pressure and coordinated efforts to gather data showing it impacted straight peole too in order to get research and public health funds allocated at necessary levels.
Against this dark backdrop, MTV was building its brand as the woke media outlet and the suits let the creatives run ads like this.
Really talk to any kind of ‘sexual minority’ who lived through that era and you will find we were well aware of creeping fascism all the way back then. This and other commercials was both a signal to the queer creative community that MTV ‘got us’ and a way for MTV to establish ’counterculture’ street cred.
(Sexual minority is a clinical term I don’t like much as pretty much everyone is ‘weird’ sexually, but it is used by researchers in some fields to avoid the constant and often unproductive wrangling about the letters, knowing this is useful for finding research on these subjects)