These Are So Gay

I got this link from Band of Thebes, but felt compelled to post about it myself when the bloggers kicked off their list of "The 10 Gayest Pinoy Commercials of the Decade (2000-2009)" by saying, "These commercials are so gay, and we salute them." Is there, could there be a comparable list of American commercials? Sometimes I recognize the cultural deprivation that comes from not watching TV, but not enough to get satellite.

Some of these commercials lean rather too hard on the gay-man-as-sissy trope, but with good humor. As Harvey Fierstein declared in The Celluloid Closet, "I like the sissy ... my view has always been, visibility at any cost. I'd rather have negative than nothing. And also because I am a sissy." And once again, I'm surprised at the visibility of gay people in supposedly conservative Asia (or hell, an archipelago off Asia, whatever). The Bakla Review also has sidebar polls for what its readers consider the best gay Filipino movie of 2009, with 22 choices and a check box for "others". I suppose at least that many independent gay films are made in the US each year, but wow. The Philippines are so gay, and I salute them.

Incidentally, the noodle commercial embedded above works a motif I've seen in several comedy sketches on Korean TV: a couple eat their way toward the middle of one noodle until their lips almost touch, while the live audience shrieks in mixed delight and horror -- only in the Korean routines, the couple are heterosexual, a man and a woman who've been influenced / corrupted by American customs, probably while visiting or studying in the US. Now, that's cultural conservatism, but nowadays even South Koreans are seeing gay commercials on TV.