Fifty Shades of Gay: How Gender and Homosexual Imagery Disgusts Politically Conservative Viewers

Purpose Mainstream media is premised on aggregating large, heterogeneous audiences. Because of this, it is typically designed to appeal to as many as possible, alienate as few as possible and follow a "supposedly nonideological middle ground" (Gross, 2012; p. 7). As a result, most mainstream advertising has typically been targeted at the heterosexual customer (Burnett, 2000), where heterosexual masculinity and the hypersexualized female are considered 'normal' (Rubin, 1984). This has resulted in 'heteronormative ideals' (Warner, 1993) that provide the androcentric lens through which society perceives, interprets and responds to notions of sexuality and gender. However, advertisers have often included implicit and explicit LGBT themes in order to be more inclusive of LGBT audiences (Ginder & Byun, 2015). While such efforts have mostly been well received by the LGBT community, parts of the heterosexual community have been shown to respond negatively to LGBT imagery in mainstream advertising (Dotson, Hyatt, & Petty Thompson, 2009). This is partly explained by the fact heterosexuals have been found to be much less accepting of homosexuality in general (Kite, 1984), and gay males specifically (Gentry, 1987). Effectively, in terms of heterosexual attitudes to homosexuality, there appears to be a form of 'Homo-Gender Bias' (HGB), where gay males are perceived in a more negative way than gay females. Despite that, there appears to be limited research examining how such HGB influences consumer attitudes or the causal mechanisms that make this occur. One explanation is that an individual's political ideology has the ability to shape consumer attitudes (Kaikati et al., 2017), because it aligns their political and moral identity (Winterich, Zhang, & Mittal, 2012). Based on this, the current paper investigates consumer responses to LGBT-themed advertising and how gender of the models (GoM) influences their attitudes. In addition, it examines how a person's political ideology influences their response to LGBT imagery and identifies a primary emotional response (disgust) as the causal mechanism in the decision process. Specifically, we propose that for politically conservative consumers, the presence of (supposedly) gay male (vs. female) models in an advertisement will have a negative influence on attitudes towards the advertised product. This effect will driven by disgust and attitude toward the ad in a serial mediation. Design/Methodology The study employed a 2 (gender