viz.

A recent series of public service announcements sponsored in part by the Ad Council sends the message that using the word "gay" as an insult is, well, insulting.

The video I've posted here features Hillary Duff, but it's just one of three you can see on television (presumably, though I haven't) and at the "Think Before You Speak" campaign's website. What was interesting to me is that in two of the ads, including the one I posted here, only part of the argument is stated explicitly, but what is perhaps the most political aspect of it is left unstated.

In this ad, for instance, Hillary Duff overhears two teenage girls in a tony boutique discussing a blouse. "Do you like this top?" one asks. "That's so gay," her friend answers. Soon after, Hillary Duff steps in and attempts to educate the pair (and here I'm paraphrasing) by telling them that they shouldn't use the word "gay" when what they mean is "bad." The two shoppers stare at the actor, puzzled, and she explains with this: "What if every time somebody wanted to say something was bad, they said, 'that's so girl wearing a skirt as a top.'" The shopper, who is of course wearing a shirt that looks oddly like a skirt, is abashed.

What's the lesson here? It seems to me that the ad, while well-intentioned, equates the category of "girl wearing a skirt as a top" with "gay." Hillary Duff, herself very trendily attired, counters the girl's ignorance with catty commentary about her clothing choice.

While a second ad on the site pretty much replicates this argument, a voice-over at the end of the third ad (which, again, features pretty much the same plot line) injects a necessary corollary to the dramatization. "Imagine if who you are were used as an insult," it demands. I think this gesture toward the general is necessary to make the political point the PSA's seem to be aiming for. Without it the dramatizations are too narrow, too idiosyncratic, too petty. There's a difference between being a fashion victim and being gay. Wearing a skirt as a shirt isn't who the girl is.