viz.

Image Credit: Ellen DeGeneres, Kauai, Hawaii, 1997, photographed by Annie Leibovitz via NPR

At the end of October, the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C. opened “Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture.” The new exhibition features gay and lesbian artists and portraits of prominent figures in the gay community.

Image Credit: Screen Shot from Pandora

While listening to Pandora the other day, an advertisement interrupted my music.  This advertisement told me that my life would be happier and more successful if I commit myself to a monogamous relationship.  The advertiser was a website called twoofus.org which is sponsored by the National Healthy Marriage Resource Center (NHMRC) and provides resources for individuals and for Healthy Marriage Initiative (HMI) grantees.  After a little digging around, I found that the Healthy Marriage Initiative was created in 1996 with the injunction to preserve the institution of marriage because “marriage is the foundation of a successful society.”  Hearing this advertisment led me to consider how the traditionally conservative pro-marriage position becomes increasingly complicated, on both the left and the right, in the context of same-sex marriage debates.  Would the creators of this ad feel they had succeeded if I was now persuaded to marry my same-sex partner?  Does pro-marriage mean the same thing that it did to the creator's of the Healthy Marriage Initiative in 1996?

Hat tip to Seth Stevenson at slate.com's "Ad Report Card" for first calling my attention to this ad; I haven't actually seen it on TV:

Stevenson wonders (with others) if the ad depicts a gay couple; Progressive says it wasn't intended to, but when people started to ask questions, Stevenson notes, they began running the ad on LOGO, the cable channel aimed at LGBTQ audiences. My thoughts after the jump.

Where is the line between visual and textual rhetoric? A brief event brought this question up for me on a personal level recently.