In late May, the Visit Las Vegas Campaign released “Now and Then,” a glossy vye for queer tourism depicting the marriage of two women. The ad has since reached over 7.8 million YouTube views and the reception is overwhelmingly positive. At first glance, this might seem like a win for a culture unfamiliar with mainstream depictions of women loving women. Yet as I watched, my stomach sank. The ad felt like a cheap, performative grab for my queer attention. Ultimately — and regardless of the many rainbow emojis brightening the comments section — my feminist killjoy alarm went off.

Here’s the down and dirty overview: Beautiful Lesbians A and B are deeply in love and vacationing in Vegas. A wants to get married. B does too, but she’s tormented at the thought of her parents’ disapproval. A cajoles B while they both enjoy Las Vegas’ various amenities, until finally surprising B with a gorgeous ceremony. All the couple’s friends are there, but B is going to shut the whole thing down until she realizes her parents are in attendance. B lets out a high-pitched, “Let’s get married!” then moves towards a beaming mom and dad.

“Now and Then” is shamelessly soap, moving in for every queer person’s soft spot with heat-seeking precision: the homophobic parents, the shame, the emotional release of seeing accepted the little dyke we all root for. It seems like an important step for lesbian visibility in popular culture. So what’s the problem?

Dear Straight Allies, Please Don’t Forget The Harassment Of Queer Women
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The problem is that tolerance is a trap, and the Visit Las Vegas Campaign wants to sell it to you.

Suzanna Walters’ book The Tolerance Trap exemplifies how media like “Now and Then” — with its liberal attitudes towards gay tolerance, depictions of gay marriage, and rainbow capitalism — actually sabotage gay equality while seeming to advance it. Though the high-sheen production value can mask this, the plot of “Now and Then” is clear: If queer folks conform to heterosexual norms like marriage and wait around for societal approval, we’ll be rewarded, Vegas-style. Walters points to the sinister nature of (eventual) acceptance when she writes:

“The tolerance mindset offers up a liberal, ‘gay-positive’ version of homosexuality that lets the mainstream tolerate gayness. Its chief tactic is the plea for acceptance. Acceptance is the handmaiden of tolerance, and both are inadequate and even dangerous modes for accessing real social inclusion and change… The ‘accept us’ agenda shows up both in everyday forms of popular culture and in the broader national discourse on rights and belonging.

‘Accept us’ themes run the gamut: accept us because we’re just like you; accept us because we’re all God’s children; accept us because we’re born with it;…The ‘accept us’ trope pushes outside the charmed circle of acceptance those gays and other gender and sexual minorities, such as [transgender] folks and gays of color, who don’t fit the poster-boy image of nonstraight people and who can’t be — or don’t want to be — assimilated.”

“Now and Then” exemplifies the performative tolerance politics that the straight and cis majority thrives on. By capitalizing on classic — yet very real — tropes of disownment, rejection, and secrecy, the commercial asserts that queer happiness is achieved by hinging your actions on heterosexual opinions and values. B clearly orients her self worth to her parent’s unwillingness to tolerate her. “My parents aren’t proud of me,” B tells A, who feigns incomprehension:

A: “But you’re so beautiful, successful, funny!”

B: “I don’t think it’s my sense of humor they have an issue with…”

Then later,

B: “We can’t get married today, my parents will never forgive me.”

A: “For getting married without them, or for who you’re getting married to?”

Both scenes cut away, leaving unnamed not only the validity of B’s fears, but also the clipped-wing desire to finally have the legal right to marry and feel unable to because of intolerance. Note that the edited version of the commercial (rather than the full length version discussed here) is purged of this dialogue. Instead, the edits imply the parent’s issue is with elopement, not B marrying a woman. With this, Las Vegas give queer people two, and only two, impossible options: Hinge your life to hetero acceptance, or pretend the trauma of being queer never happened.

The dialogue is haunted by B’s apprehension. But with the sound off, “Now and Then” tells a completely different story. Strategic cinematography distracts from the lovers’ conflict, instead panning the best of Las Vegas’ attractions. The women laugh in the gorgeous Nevada dessert, take in the bustling nightlife, kiss in a neon-lit hotel pool. It’s all G-rated and aggressively cliché, but “Now and Then” offers up a rare moment of visibility to lesbian viewers starving for the scraps of representation.

Why ‘Tolerating’ Your Queer Loved Ones Is Dangerous
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When A leads B to the surprise wedding, the venue is candle-lit, elegant, but not ostentatious enough to annoy. This is supposed to be the emotional climax of the story, but instead “Now and Then” proves its own disconnection with queer lives by revealing that B’s perceptions of intolerance are baseless — her parents are there, smiling and happy. Surrounded by supportive friends, family, and — here’s the important part — the city of Las Vegas, the commercial seems to say See, aren’t you silly for thinking homophobia still exists? The irony of “Now and Then” is that it tries to signal the end of intolerance when in fact its star is driven by the fear of it.

Visit Las Vegas’ commercial is dangerous because it “short circuits the march toward full equality and deprives us all of the transformative possibilities of full integration,” by depicting fully-realized queer joy as dependent on heterosexual acceptance. Even more alarming, “Now and Then” offers convenient vindication for any homophobic person ever. B’s parents are not held accountable for their prior actions; when they enter the wedding venue they are absolved of any wrongdoing. Given that B’s parents are brown-ish, and that both women have foreign accents, the commercial reinforces racist perceptions of foreigners as regressive. The ceremony is a racially-coded, apology-free mess.

Whatever the good intentions Visit Las Vegas had, “Now and Then” is a money-driven advertisement, released at a time when Vegas has nothing to lose from marketing to gay people. Note how it’s taken them until 2018, when a majority of Americans support same-sex marriage, to make an ad like this, rather than tout Vegas as a destination for tolerance and fun in the ‘90s. Make no mistake, the motivation behind all “queer-friendly” media is to profit from, not defend, our community. “Now and Then” targeted a market, and now eagerly awaits the pink money and gay tourism that will surely follow. Don’t let the thrill of seeing yourself represented mask this.

Here and now, it’s 2018 and I’m not satisfied with lesbian representations in mainstream media. Even the commercial’s title, “Now and Then,” implies a degree of separation from the bigotry “then” and the tolerance “now.” The commercial is a joke its creators don’t seem to get. Supposedly “post-gay,” “Now and Then” can’t even imagine a present unburdened by the “air kiss of faux familiarity” that defines mainstream understandings of queer people.

Show me the queer love that’s hard to look at, the kind that makes its own rules and does what it wants regardless of approval or pride. Show me the most intolerable among us front and center: trans folks, gender deviants, queers of color, the undocumented, the deeply transgressive. Show me two fat, middle-aged bull-dykes madly in love, deeply amused by the ironies of gay marriage, and getting hitched anyway. Then maybe I’ll visit your damn city.

By Kim McAuliffe

Content warning: discussion of pregnancy loss

I vaguely remember the first time I was bombarded with Facebook and Google ads for a pair of boots I’d added to a shopping cart but never bought. I was creeped out, uneasy, a bit annoyed. My computer was spying on me, whispering about my habits and preferences to various interested parties behind my back.

Now, it happens so often that I don’t bat an eyelash. I find myself managing how Facebook advertises to me by purposely clicking on comments for ads on things that marginally interest me, not because I want more of those ads, but to minimize exposure to ads I don’t want to see. To make its algorithmic analysis of me smarter. I can’t stop seeing ads, so I try to avoid ones that will hurt or annoy me.

This kind of marketing will never go away. At this point, maybe most of us don’t notice, or don’t care. But there are some subjects, some products, that can be triggering, emotionally challenging, even devastating. There are some topics that should be treated with more care.

I find myself managing how Facebook advertises to me.
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I’ve written about pregnancy loss before. Twice. I mentioned in the first piece that in my positive-test excitement I downloaded multiple pregnancy apps only to find later that one or more had sold my information to Similac, which continued to send me unsolicited email long after the pregnancy itself was gone.

What I haven’t written about until now was how shortly after the second loss I got a physical package in the mail from Similac with formula samples and other crap. It seemed so random — until I realized Similac had obtained from the app not only my email address, but my projected due date from the first pregnancy. I was getting this formula right when I should have had a newborn in my arms. I was so hurt by this unexpected reminder, it sent me back into a morass of dark thoughts I had only just started to escape. I was angry; shouldn’t something like a due date have been considered “personally identifiable information” (PII) or protected medical data? How was that even legal?

Hi @AbbottGlobal after 2 miscarriages it’s v sad 2 get surprise #Similac via info u bought fr preggo app I installed

— @EnameledKoi

You can see in the Twitter thread that the company responded, asking me to DM them.

@EnameledKoi Our sincere apologies Kim. Please send us a direct message with your contact information. Thank you.

— @AbbottGlobal

They agreed to remove me from their mailing list, but showed no inclination to take any action that might prevent future harm to others.

I won’t share them here, but the responses to my original tweet make it clear that I am not the only one to have been harmed by similar marketing. I found out that this is so common, in fact, that loss-support groups warn people about it.

@EnameledKoi Have unfortunately suffered the formula samples in the mail too. Luckily we attended a loss support group and were told it would be coming. When your hurtful actions are so common that decent people warn each other, you have a problem. Thanks for posting this.

— @mescad

I also never wrote about the third pregnancy loss a few months later. It was too much, and there were too many other terrible things happening at the same time.

But imagine this for a second: You are nine weeks along, but instead of a heartbeat, sonograms reveal only an empty gestational sac that doesn’t grow. You hope it was too early, a miscalculation, but that hope bleeds away a bit more with every passing day. You spend an indeterminate amount of time waiting to miscarry. You end up traveling with a “specimen kit” because there’s a family emergency — it could happen in the shared bathroom of someone’s AirBnB, but genetic testing on the “products of conception” might be the only way to figure out what’s been going wrong all of this time.

Meanwhile, you suddenly start seeing ads for baby products, nursing bras, pregnancy workouts, and whatever else you can imagine on Facebook. After the initial emotional kick in the gut, you’re angry, because you weren’t stupid enough this time to install any apps. You can’t figure out what happened, until you realize that every desperate Google search for “slow-rising beta hcg levels” or “possible blighted ovum” in your quest for miracle stories has only told the data gods that you are (sort of, not really) pregnant and now is a good time to market baby-related things at you.

You realize your devastation is immaterial in the bigger picture, that you’re an edge-case scenario, and that the gain for all companies involved is too great to care about the heartbreak they’re causing you, right this minute. As if you didn’t already feel so absolutely alone.

It shouldn’t be this way.

If advertising your product has the potential to cause harm, you have the responsibility to try and mitigate that harm.

How The Medical Community Is Pushing Invasive Procedures On People Who Miscarry
theestablishment.co

Asking product manufacturers, marketing departments, and social platforms to think humanely might be a tough sell. How will people buy their products (or ad space) if they aren’t made to feel they are not thin enough, not hot enough, not smart enough, just not enough? Companies are not in the business of making people feel good about themselves.

But hurting those who have experienced tremendous loss already is a breach of human decency so severe, I have a hard time imagining no corporate executive or employee cares. Surely at least some are upset that their products, upon showing up unexpectedly in inboxes, are re-breaking fractured hearts and shattering any tenuous illusion of normalcy.

There is a solution here, and it’s simple: Pregnancy and baby-related companies need to stop using projected due dates for marketing purposes. They must find better and smarter ways to market their products to consumers more likely to have carried to term, like baby registries or Facebook birth announcement posts. They mustn’t presume that everyone browsing a pregnancy forum is there for positive reasons. I can assure you, from three doomed pregnancies’ worth of reading desperate thread after desperate thread at 2 am in bed, unable to sleep — they are not.

At the same time, app developers need to be more sensitive with user data they share for marketing purposes. They must allow pregnancy-app users to remove themselves from all marketing when they experience a loss.

If your app profits from the hopeful journeys of pregnant women who’ve allowed you into their lives, you have a responsibility to care for them when that journey is cut tragically short. Please, avoid causing additional pain when there is already so much.

Please, do better.