First National Press & Viral Marketing Campaign To Sell Product, 1996

How To Get Your Pink Card — The Board Game

I’ve never been a homo­phobe, since I can’t remem­ber, but I sup­pose comes from a back­ground of being exposed to an inter­na­tional “cre­ative” com­mu­nity.  And even have had the expe­ri­ence of say teach­ing gay men my age, vocab­u­lary and terms (like AC/DC) that had homosexual/bi impli­ca­tions that THEY didn’t know, not to men­tion gay history.

And have been an active mem­ber, even though a straight one, of the LGBT com­mu­nity, while fight­ing for their rights since I was a teenager.  I think their ideas of “fam­ily” for exam­ple are far more humane than the main­stream, for one thing.  And are cer­tainly con­cepts and man­i­fes­ta­tions of human sex­ual expres­sion that are inter­na­tional in nature and found in cul­tures all over the world.    And in some really advanced cul­tures, unlike ours, even given extra sta­tus.  Ideas and con­cepts that are not even taught widely much less acknowl­edged or appar­ently even known about to many cit­i­zens of this “civ­i­lized” country.

I dis­tin­guished myself in high school by defend­ing my gay friends, for exam­ple, in a regres­sive, racist, homo­pho­bic and sex­ist south­ern back­assed state where I found myself dumped thanks to my family’s dis­in­te­gra­tion by doing so.

It was hell, but I guess there’s a rea­son for every­thing. I tell myself that alot these days.  And as I told myself then.

The cap­tain of the High School foot­ball team and I once had a lit­tle dustup (he lost) when he went too far in com­pletely humil­i­at­ing once too often one of my gay friends.  I learned at an early age, rather unfor­tu­nately that I had to, where men’s ten­der places are.  As a mat­ter of self defense against drunk men in their for­ties and fifties who thought if they could sleep with my mom, they could rape me.

They learned the hard way they were sadly mistaken.

So a 17 year old gay baiter was no match for me, much to his endur­ing embar­rass­ment and much deserved pub­lic humil­i­a­tion.  Not to men­tion at least half an hour on the floor hold­ing a very ten­der spot of his anatomy and gasp­ing for breath.  And deservedly got end­less jibes as a result, from the other jocks, on all the other male High School Var­sity sports teams, who gos­siped end­lessly about the, as they say in that part of the woods “Act of whup ass” and from the smartest GIRL in the class, end­lessly.  An even BIGGER humiliation.

But trust me, they never screwed with any more of my gay bud­dies.  And they already knew enough not to screw around with me.

I did a lot more work on LGBT rights in col­lege, both for­mally and informally.

And start­ing in col­lege, I began to lose a lot of gay friends to AIDS.

Where most of my straight friends marked their twen­ties going to wed­dings, I was going to funer­als.  Among other things.

Espe­cially because I had befriended the sum­mer before I started UNC Chapel Hill, in the state’s so-called “Gifted and Tal­ented” sum­mer long Governor’s School Pro­gram,”  for high school juniors, one of the most flam­boy­ant drag queens on the make, who invited me to the infa­mous “Cas­tle Par­ties” as soon as we recon­nected at UNC.  Which were held on, yes, for real, a wind­ing lit­tle back alley called Friendly Lane in Chapel Hill as soon as I got there.

The real estate in ques­tion, despite it’s grandiose name, was actu­ally a rather hum­ble abode, but got it’s appel­la­tion because it was an old south­ern clap­board house with a screened in wrap­around porch, per­fect for drag shows, which were held on a weekly basis.

Oh, and five “queens” lived there on a per­ma­nent basis.  The bitch fights for the bath­room were leg­endary.  And grudges were held onto for weeks.  With even a spe­cial “in the know” run­ning com­men­tary in the “Want Ads” sec­tion of the School News paper to keep us all in the know, very well informed.  Not to men­tion highly amused.  You think the “Guid­ing Light” is riv­et­ing soap opera?

Huh!

Shows how lit­tle you know.  With feath­ers and sequins and six inch heels thrown in for good mea­sure.  The high jinks and high drama was never end­ing, let me tell you.

Thus of course the house became known, for those in the know as “The Castle.”

And trust me, those shows were fun, and drag is fun.  And a vital part of gay male cul­ture in both this coun­try, as it is glob­ally.  And often very beau­ti­ful.  And fre­quently known for say, social satire and address­ing gen­der role stereotypes.

It’s never both­ered me, a per­son who knows quite well that gen­der roles are cul­tur­ally imposed, and that het­ero­sex­u­al­ity is just one small range of human sex­ual expres­sion, glob­ally, and in every cul­ture known to mankind through­out our his­tory, and recorded in the work of EVERY respected anthro­pol­o­gist, from an early age and dat­ing back to the dawn of time, that men or women for that mat­ter who were gay or les­bian, had just as many rights, and were enti­tled to them as straight people.

In some cul­tures, such folks are even pre­sumed to have super­nat­ural pow­ers and given spe­cial rights.  But those ideas are only present in really advanced cultures.

Unlike some oth­ers far closer to home I can think of.

And cer­tainly the idea of even EQUAL RIGHTS is an idea that’s taken far too long to sink in, at places, like oh, I don’t know, say THE WHITE HOUSE?

Most of my gay male friends died before I grad­u­ated col­lege thanks to hor­rific gov­ern­ment prej­u­dices and the polices that those gen­er­ated and refusal to deal with the AIDS cri­sis head on.

All of my col­lege gay friends were dead less than five years after grad­u­a­tion.  Thank you so much Mr. Rea­gan.  But Mr. Obama is doing the same thing on TBI, (not to men­tion this crap with forced swine flu vac­ci­na­tions) the for­mer of which my pro­posal deals with in a very sophis­ti­cated way that NOBODY ELSE IS DOING IN THE COUNTRY RIGHT NOW, and that’s accord­ing to DoD, buddy. That means you shit­head in the Oval Office.

And the lat­ter of which I am absolutely going to STOP.  Or help those who are engaged in bat­tles right now to do it.

So even more rea­son to keep on ignor­ing me, right?  Because it’s not just sol­diers who are deal­ing with a con­di­tion that there is no sys­tem set up for to help peo­ple (med­ically, rehab or job wise) but this is a con­di­tion that affects both vets and civil­ians.  And killed both Princess Di and Natasha Richard­son, who had THE BEST MEDICAL CARE MONEY COULD BUY.

Oh, and you’re really going to love this.  Guess what the best med­ica­tion is for man­ag­ing the con­di­tion is, accord­ing to your own FDA who is cur­rently pay­ing to test it?

THE EVIL WEED, which our bril­liant, I’m-so-much-smarter-than-anyone –else-on-the-planet (NOT) Com­man­der in Chief, just dissed. And is plan­ning on keep­ing the same Bush poli­cies in place on keep­ing mar­i­juana ille­gal, despite his lip flap in pub­lic to the con­trary.  In other words, we’ll pros­e­cute you if we don’t like you.

How’s that for a politi­cized Jus­tice Depart­ment in the mid­dle of a health­care cri­sis that the gov­ern­ment is cur­rently ignoring?

And what about that act of Pres­i­den­tial neu­ro­log­i­cal incom­pe­tence com­mit­ted in plain view of mil­lions of view­ers, and pre­served in many places on the internet?

OOOPS.

Another Obama fuckup on national TV.

What a dufus.  You see what a Har­vard Ivy is worth?

And another prime exam­ple of why the Nobel Com­mit­tee was so out to lunch.

Not to men­tion legal­iz­ing mar­i­juana will cre­ate a multi bil­lion dol­lar indus­try (con­ser­v­a­tive esti­mates are at least $10 Bil­lion a year), a high dol­lar cash crop, a whole lot of green jobs and a much cheaper med­i­cine (not to men­tion other green prod­ucts) than the cur­rent monop­oly cre­ated by the gov­ern­ment for Mari­nol, which is fake THC and costs the government…hold your breath for a sec….$800 for just TWO pills on MEDICAID.  And I take much more than that.

So Obama is about to eat crow on another stu­pid deci­sion.  Unless he decides to shape up.  Between ol’ BO (not the dog in the White House, the other one) and Michelle, I’d give up hor­ti­cul­ture alto­gether and leave it to the experts (i.e. those who are not on the take of the med­ical indus­try or Wall Street), but those who actu­ally know what they are doing.  And start with review­ing the plan that should have gone to your desk  in the Oval Office months ago.

MARKED URGENT.  Because this deals with the rights of the LGBT com­mu­nity too.

Despite The White House’s reluc­tance to do some­thing about equal­ity for the LGBT com­mu­nity (which has dealt with the issue of a crush­ing dis­abil­ity for many years), I’ve long been an active fighter for them too.  Even run­ning for stu­dent body rep as the first and prob­a­bly the only straight can­di­date on a pro LGBT plat­form in Car­olina his­tory.  See Sen­a­tor No was also con­tin­u­ally try­ing to defund their monthly meet­ing space in the stu­dent union and I was pissed about that and decided to do some­thing about it.  I lost the race, but I knew even then I was never really cut out to be a politi­cian.  I’m too damned hon­est.  That’s one of my prob­lems.  But at least I rec­og­nized that my career path did not lie that way early.

Plus I’ve got a fam­ily that makes the Addams fam­ily look like the Cleavers….You can read about them later, but trust me, I real­ized from a very early age that just on my fam­ily his­tory alone, I could never live down THEIR exploits to ever be able to run for polit­i­cal office, even if I wanted the job, which I don’t.

But mov­ing for­ward about ten years, the gay and les­bian com­mu­nity was one of the first com­mu­ni­ties to go online in force…okay so it was look­ing for dates, but it was also for com­mu­nity orga­niz­ing, which is why we decided to take the time and risk to invest money we didn’t have, to cre­ate the prod­uct you are about to meet in the first place – we had the inter­net to do free national and even inter­na­tional, mar­ket­ing and outreach.

I had started work­ing with the inter­net in 1989 at my first job at the ACLU, and cre­ated my first com­pletely dig­i­tally shot and edited polit­i­cal film in 1993, on a topic that is still unfor­tu­nately rather top­i­cal, so I was a lit­tle ahead of the game, uhem smarty pants in the White House who loves to take all the credit, for every­thing, but would never hire me no mat­ter how much I approached the cam­paign.  Much like every other male dom­i­nated polit­i­cal strat­egy firm in DC, despite the fact that this arti­cle has become a clas­sic, and prob­a­bly even read by Axel­turf, since it was orig­i­nally pub­lished in THE pub­li­ca­tion of cam­paign strate­gists nation­ally , and quoted in a rather well known book on polit­i­cal strat­egy and cam­paign­ing pub­lished out of where else but the UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS, used in cam­paign strat­egy courses for pro­fes­sion­als nation­ally for years after it’s pub­li­ca­tion, and even used as late as two years ago in col­lege class­rooms in DC on how to cre­ate cam­paign com­mer­cials and cam­paign­ing for pub­lic office.

God you guys are sex­ist bas­tards.  Equal oppor­tu­nity dis­crim­i­na­tors, except for rich white men and Rich Black folks with Ivies.  Good going.  What lead­er­ship.  How inspir­ing. How utterly and com­pletely hypocritical.

And both Axel­turf and the White House lawyers know damned well they are vio­lat­ing both pri­vacy law and their sus­pen­sion of dis­abil­ity law by a legal brief hold­ing about as much water as a Yoo memo on tor­ture for the White House web­site.  And prob­a­bly cam­paign finance law as well.

Nev­er­the­less, by the mid Clin­ton years the gay rights move­ment was gain­ing steam in DC, and I decided to some­thing a lit­tle more cre­ative, but just as polit­i­cal about the sit­u­a­tion which is in almost exactly the same point as it was well over 15 years ago.  Just like say the mak­ers of Parker Broth­ers did dur­ing WWII when they slipped secret escape maps into Monop­oly Games shipped to Pris­on­ers of War.   Talk about sophis­ti­cated cam­paign­ing for a cause.

So rather than say go work on the Hill where absolutely noth­ing of sub­stance on such mat­ters EVER hap­pens (see cur­rent con­di­tions) I decided to take another, and per­haps some would say, more cre­ative and defi­nately less threat­en­ing psy­cho­log­i­cal approach.

But as you can see, the results were pretty impressive.

Maybe they should play a round or two at the White House.  It might speed up Obama’s screw­ing around on gay and les­bian rights.  I still have a few copies in my apart­ment.  Give me a buzz and I’ll send you a copy.  We’ll tele­vise the Prez doing Lib­er­ace impres­sions.  And test your knowl­edge of gay his­tory.  Tele­vised of course on say Bill Maher (he’d love it) since Obama is such a media whore.  Who knows, you might even enjoy it.

I dou­ble dare you.  And get Bill to throw Atti­tude at ya.  To under­stand THAT ref­er­ence, you have to read the clips.

The game achieved a cult hit sta­tus in the gay com­mu­nity and was even used in schools to help gay kids come out by high school coun­selors all over the coun­try, even in DC, like George­town Day.  Maybe that’s why Obama sent his kids to Sidwell.

For a really hys­ter­i­cal arti­cle, an almost Super­bowl play by play, click on the PDF link to read it.  And well worth your time if you want a good chuckle.

Part of mar­ket­ing, whether online or off (and an inte­grated one is a vital com­po­nent to an effec­tive “viral” mar­ket­ing cam­paign, not to men­tion mar­ket­ing strat­egy period, no mat­ter whether you are sell­ing soap or polit­i­cal can­di­dates, is also using your prod­uct to fundraise, and since our game was also a teach­ing tool, it was widely used as a fundrais­ing draw nation­ally at Gay Pride Events to com­mu­nity orga­niz­ing efforts. Par­tic­u­larly for gay pride and gay teen sup­port groups.

Gay teens still have the high­est sui­cide rates of any demo­graphic in the nation even today.   Obama may think HE had iden­tity issues, but you try being a gay or les­bian teenager even today.  That’s another rea­son why his waf­fling and con­tin­ual drag­ging his feet on LGBT issues is so dis­gust­ing.  As usual, Obama is so self absorbed and nar­cis­sis­tic that he seems to think that he’s the only one who had to deal with mas­sive dis­crim­i­na­tion and iden­tity issues in high school.

GROW UP.  And start doing your damned job.

You can see below how our suc­cess­ful our efforts were:

As the arti­cles above point out (and show) rather well, Can­dice Gin­grich (as in Newt Gingrich’s les­bian daugh­ter) even came to this event.  And we got cor­po­rate spon­sor­ship from the self pro­claimed “homo league” from AT&T.  Mr. Obama is play­ing with fire on both DOMA and Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, par­tic­u­larly because the gay com­mu­nity is also part of the dis­abil­i­ties community.

Think AIDS.  And Hepati­tis C.  Which Mr. Obama is doing such a great job of giv­ing to vet­er­ans at the moment.

Which is at a cri­sis point in DC at the moment, with Mr. Obama oppos­ing free nee­dle exchanges because they inter­fere with cor­po­rate prof­its for his bud­dies at GE, and Fenty cut­ting back AIDS pro­grams for years (both of whom used Axel­rod, a man with a daugh­ter with a severe dis­abil­ity who also can ben­e­fit from the legal­iza­tion of mar­i­juana to help her con­di­tion as a cam­paign con­sul­tant and now one of Obama’s chief aides).  Not to men­tion what Deval Patrick is doing in Massachusetts.

What was that about change we can believe in?

Par­tic­u­larly ironic because now AIDS pre­dom­i­nantly affects minor­ity het­ero­sex­u­als glob­ally, not to men­tion in DC.

MS-NBC loved us, way before they became Obama’s num­ber one fan.  And this is another online news por­tal.  Notice we also had an online site to pro­mote the game, which used Flash to flip sam­ple cards as a mar­ket­ing gimmick.

The game, viral mar­ket­ing prod­uct online, and even using inter­ac­tive games to do it, was SO ahead of its time nobody has even come close to dupli­cat­ing it, even though we were given the brush off by the straight (white, and mostly male) mar­ket­ing chains who thought the inter­net was a fad and that our mar­ket­ing efforts weren’t worth a damn.  Not only because of who we were (a woman and a gay man) but because of the sub­ject mat­ter.  How far we’ve come, and how far we have to go.

Sigh.  My stepthing even holds views that if you are gay you shouldn’t adopt chil­dren because you are “degen­er­ate”.  He’s a good one to talk.

Per­son­ally, if he’s ever invited to DC again, I would boy­cott the event if I were you.  He’s a sex­ist, homo­pho­bic ass­hole who I’m about to get fired.  I can’t believe that Appalachian State Uni­ver­sity STILL has him on pay­roll.  Or that NAB hon­ored him with an award last year.  Then again, we still live in a soci­ety where women are rou­tinely abused and the White House isn’t doing exactly a good job on women’s or gay rights now is it?

Mr. Sum­mers. THAT MEANS YOU!

Although that Nobel in eco­nom­ics going to a woman this year WHO CERTAINLY DESERVED IT, unlike, say, oh, your boss, was a well deserved FUCK YOU.