Sexuality, Race, and Ethnicity in American Advertising

Advertising imagery has usually depicted sexuality as heteronormative. Over the last couple of decades, gays and eventually lesbians have crept into it. It is a fair generalization to say that advertising imagery, in nearly every case, tends to follow and mimic social and cultural changes rather than to initiate them. Depictions of alternative sexualities in advertising thus began only after LGBT people came out in American society and media programming, most notably TV sitcoms, included first gay and later lesbian characters. If all this were slow to happen, the inclusion of non-white, non-Anglo LGBT characters and imagery began even more recently and remains quite limited today.

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