Editor Ira is here today to talk to you about the intersection of Pride and advertising!

I am blessed/cursed with a remarkable and easily triggered recall for the advertising campaigns of my youth. Mention someone named "Edna" and I'm sharing a bucket of KFC with Mayor Russ Beeler and the citizens of Lake Edna, Minnesota. A song by Supertramp comes on the radio and I'm on the golf course with a bunch of loathsome '90s bros name-checking classic rock bands and drinking bad beer. Text me that you just got off the bus and my brain won't let me text back until it's sung the entirety of "The Woman with the Rose Tattoo" from Willie Nelson's Taco Bell ad.

It was disappointing to me, then, to realize that I have no recollection of the 1994 IKEA ad that was the first widely broadcast U.S. TV commercial to feature a same-sex couple. There are a couple of pretty good reasons for that. For one thing, I'm doubtful that IKEA bothered to invest in much, if any, air time in the La Crosse, Wisconsin broadcast area in 1994. For another, even if I had seen this ad when I was 15, it probably wouldn't have made a huge impression because it's not especially memorable. But I think that's a big part of why it worked.

To put things in context for younger readers, the 1990s were the era when U.S. businesses began to realize that there was more money to be made by marketing to LGBTQ consumers than there was money to be lost by angering the subset of viewers who would prefer to keep pretending that LGBTQ consumers didn't exist. There was still plenty of bigotry to go around, of course. Two years before the IKEA spot aired, K-Mart ran a commercial featuring two guys shopping for a chainsaw in which one man touched the other's shoulder. The ad received enough press that K-Mart put out a statement assuring shoppers that the same guys had appeared with their wives in previous ads, so nothing gay was going on here!

Over in Western Europe, meanwhile, advertisers in The Netherlands and Denmark had started featuring LGBTQ couples in their TV commercials in the early '90s. That included a spot directed by a pre-fame Lars Von Trier that depicted the first same-sex kiss in a televised ad. It followed suit, then, that U.S. TV's LGBTQ barrier would be broken by a Scandinavian business.

IKEA had been operating in the U.S. for less than a decade in 1994 and was not nearly the cultural touchpoint it is today. Its stores were limited to major urban centers, and its flagrantly Swedish aesthetic made it something of a novelty for upper-middle-class shoppers. The brand's more progressive-leaning demographic put it at less risk of alienating homophobic customers than K-Mart had been, but it was still a bold move for the time.

What wasn't especially bold was the commercial itself. In fact, this ad couldn't be a whole lot blander if it tried. From its title ("Dining Room") to its narrative (a couple explains their decision to buy a table) to its stars (two 30-something brunette white guys), it's about as basic as a retailer's TV commercial could be.

What stood out about the spot in 1994 is that these two men are explicitly defined as a couple – their dialogue notes that they've been together for about three years after meeting at a wedding, and that they regard buying a "serious dining room table" with a leaf as a sign of long-term commitment. Other advertisers had flirted with commercials centered on couples whose relationships were open to interpretation, but this unambiguous pairing was a first in the U.S. (Bonus points: one of the actors, John Sloman, is also gay in real life. 50% accurate casting is a pretty solid percentage for 1994!) (Extra bonus points: Sloman appears to be wearing a "Minnesota Athletics" t-shirt in the ad, and we Minnesotans love a hometown hero!) In an era when many Americans were just becoming aware that LGBTQ people existed beyond the stereotypes and caricatures seen in much of the media, an ad about two aggressively boring guys going table shopping was revolutionary in its own right.

The backlash to the ad was swift and largely inconsequential. The usual groups sent angry letters and threatened boycotts, but it's unlikely that a whole lot of the people complaining were shopping at IKEA in the first place. One New York store reported receiving a bomb threat that turned out to be bogus. On the whole, though, the ad received far more positive feedback than negative. IKEA claimed that 90% of the customer correspondence they received about "Dining Room" was supportive. After an initial flurry of media coverage that mostly served as free advertising for IKEA, the sky did not fall and public interest soon moved on to the next big hot topic.

The cynical side of me wants to note that this landmark ad paved the way for a wave of dubious "Rainbow Capitalism" that values LGBTQ people only for their purchasing power, but on the other hand representation really does matter. For better or for worse, an era's advertising is a reflection of its culture and values. For the large-market consumers who saw "Dining Room" air in real time, I have to think that seeing a gay couple portrayed as just another pair of regular folks buying mass-produced furniture and making passive-aggressive wisecracks about each other's taste in decor made a real difference.

For my part, I very much wish "Dining Room" was taking up some of the space that my brain instead insists on dedicating to this hideous Subway commercial.

[Ed. note: Impossible to discuss IKEA and queer representation without talking about the bisexual couch that calls you a liar. Part of a broader art project called Love Seats, most of which were very cool and good–the lesbian one is particularly beautiful; the ace one is also… let’s say “a lot”–this weird misfire lit up the internet in summer 2021. With the possibility of offending the very people they were trying to honor so high (please, we have better taste! We swear!), you can see why they stuck with something so anodyne back in the early ’90s. — Editor Ruby]