South Carolina, Gay?

Now who would have ever thought a story like this would develop? An Australian based gay travel company has labeled South Carolina among 5 other locations in the U.S. as 'great destinations' for the gay traveler. This makes me wonder whether Amro Worldwide did any research before starting their advertising campaign for South Carolina as being 'so gay.'

Amro Worldwide basically started an advertising campaign in London during London's pride in order to promote gay destinations in the U.S. South Carolina, Boston, Washington D.C., Atlanta, New Orleans, and Las Vegas were all chosen to be a part of their poster campaign in which posters describing each city as 'so gay' were put around the London Underground. The South Carolina poster is depicted on the left. But with South Carolina being so politically conservative and having such a anti-gay stance you would wonder how such a thing could happen. Don't we remember how South Carolina was the place where Irmo High School's principal resigned from his high school just because he did not want a gay-straight alliance starting up? So let's see how all of this went down.

The weird part is that it turns out that South Carolina originally liked the 'so gay' idea. Kristy Dillury, who is the spokesgirl for South Carolina Tourism, said "South Carolina has a lot to offer gay travellers... We are delighted to be involved with the 'so gay' campaign in particular as it sends a powerful positive message to everyone that there is nothing wrong at all with a destination being described as 'so gay'." This was put on a press release [here]. From here the advertising poster campaign was begun. It all went downhill once The Palmetto Scoop, a blog from South Carolina, talked about the ad campaign that Amro was putting up [found here]. Apparently Republican state senator David Thomas protested against the campaign and wanted an audit of the tourism department to see how this campaign could have happened using South Carolina's tax payer's money. The audit turned out that a lower level employee allowed the poster campaign to go through and the $5,000 to be paid for the ads without ever talking to their supervisor. Of course this employee quietly resigned. The governor of South Carolina, who apparently is in the running for VP of John McCain, said that the poster campaign was 'inappropriate.'

You can find the whole article [here].

All of this played out pretty much the way anyone could have imagined. I wish that South Carolina was not so anti-gay, but it's one state at a time I guess. I just have one question for Amro Worldwide. Why is San Francisco not on your list of 'great destinations'? And maybe next time, they should do some research before starting and ad campaign.

Realistically,
-Aram the Garmo