Today, a car advert made me cry.
Yes, really.
Have you seen it? The advert for the Vauxhall Grandland X. I know next to nothing about cars, and
it certainly wasn't through any desire for the enormous vehicle depicted in the
driving sequence. I cried because, it was the first time I can ever recall,
that a female couple were depicted doing what we did five years ago - going to
the hospital to have a baby. The tears were of unexpected recognition, of for
once seeing someone like me, like us, depicted in that bastion of tradition -
advertising. For so long, we have been absent from mainstream marketing, but
recently we have started seeing representation creeping in. And that is priceless.
But why does it matter? We have equality now, right? Perhaps. In
places. But beyond legislation, which has come a long way in a relatively short
space of time (in the UK), visibility continues to be a challenge. Someone once
said 'you can't be what you can't see'. That's not strictly true, but I am
testament to the fact that it is really really hard to be what you can't see.
And as I type this I think of the teenage me who started watching a particular
soap opera in the mid 90s just because there was a rumour of a lesbian
character. I watched hours and hours of terrible melodrama for that 30 second
clip of her smiling at another woman, and occasionally touching her hand. That
was all I had. I didn't understand that I was gay. I had no role models. There
was no one I could compare myself to. Was I gay enough? Was I too gay? All the
questions that youngsters ask themselves. I didn't know where to go, who to
talk to. So I turned to the television, to those glimpses of beige, sexless
lesbianism, or worse, overly eroticised sapphic action created for men. I was
neither beige, nor a porn star. Where next? I found my solace at the local
library, in literature, which is a far broader church.
Nearly 25 years on things have changed so much, and happily gay
folk are represented much more regularly, more accurately and diversely across
a range of media. But there was something about this advert. It was an advert
for a car, of all things. The people in it were human, and the story they were
telling was universal. They just happened to be like us. And in one moment I
shed real tears, both of joy, and of grief for the difference that would have
made to me when I was 16. Just two women, loving each other, being together and
having a baby. Simple. Powerful.
As an aside, neither me nor my wife were as calm or collected as
the women in the advert when she went into labour. And we were in a little old
car that I managed to crash when she was transferred from the birth centre to
hospital by ambulance, but that's another story!
