Rarely is a commercial just a commercial. Ask the Hallmark Channel.
Last Thursday, Hallmark pulled TV ads from the online wedding planning company Zola featuring same-sex couples kissing. (Notably, similar ads with opposite-sex couples stayed put.)
This was apparently in response to vociferous protest from One Million Moms, a branch of the conservative American Family Association that claims to “fight against indecency” – what it sees as deviations from its retrograde vision of kinship bonds.
Hallmark, however, is reversing its decision, an announcement that comes after it faced calls for viewers and advertisers to boycott.
“The Crown Media team” – the channel’s parent company – “has been agonizing over this decision as we’ve seen the hurt it has unintentionally caused. Said simply, they believe this was the wrong decision,” Hallmark President and CEO Mike Perry told CNN Business in a statement on Sunday. “I am sorry for the hurt and disappointment this has caused.”
In some ways, this episode is a distillation of contemporary queer politics in two acts. Hallmark’s move and countermove shine a light on pain as well as progress: Damaging attitudes toward LGBTQ communities still permeate pop culture, but it’s no longer possible to quietly get a pass on something like this.
Read more from Brandon Tensley:
Hallmark’s reflexive response to pull ads with kissing brides is revealing.
For one, as much as we, as a society, like to believe that we’ve embraced homosexuality, the reality isn’t so clear cut, especially when it comes to visible displays of same-sex affection. After all, it’s hardly unheard of for the same person to express both gauzy support for LGBTQ equality – gay people should have the option to get married, too! – and a deeper squeamishness toward how that acceptance might play out in real life – a variant of the age-old “ick factor” argument.
Also speaking to the at times tenuous state of LGBTQ acceptance – to how America isn’t as reliably evolved as it assumes itself to be – is the fact that Hallmark so quickly bowed to conservative pressure (and from a generally unsuccessful group, at that).
The New York Times reported last week that the channel initially rejected the ads in question because it doesn’t accept material it has “deemed controversial.” It was a telling compromise – backward-thinking bleating trumped an honest depiction of what marriage looks like today.
Still, Hallmark’s U-turn is too important to dismiss.
More than anything, it reflects the growing influence of marginalized voices. Most large corporations have long been inclusive of LGBTQ communities, at least in part because they get points – not to mention dollars – from consumers and employees. (A not-uncomplicated topic: See really any debate about the ballooning presence of big companies at Pride celebrations.)
“I was just explaining tonight to my 17-year-old son how sucky it used to be to deal with this crap as a gay person,” the journalist Kara Swisher wrote of the controversy in a Twitter thread on Sunday. “I just had another child and about to get married again and there is exactly no way you’re getting away with this corporate cowardice two decades on, because I am not planning on explaining this to her.”
“Let me update it for you Crown Media: We’re here, we’re queer, get used to it and, welcome to 2019 where you better get ready for some real pressure,” Swisher continued, before urging “everyone” to email Hallmark in protest.
All of which is to say that there’s much to parse in what might seem like just another rote commercial. Indeed, it makes plain that two things are true at once: Anti-gay prejudice still exists even in the most obvious of manners, but getting away with it – reputation unscathed – is another matter entirely.
