Gay pride ad parade

Nate Berkus, interior designer and Oprah favourite, appeared in an ad for Banana Republic with his partner, Jeremiah Brent early last year. You just can’t fake adoration like that with models.

Till Goa’s sports and youth affairs minister Ramesh Tawadkar keeps his promise of ‘curing’ homosexuality with the latest drugs, we must all somehow hobble along and accept the fact that some people are gay. Not only are they gay, but some of them also fall in love and want to pledge their eternal love to each other. What ever will these crazy kids think of next!

Aiding them in this unholy enterprise is this new Tiffany’s ad featuring a real-life couple in New York. This ad brings visibility to gay rights issues, but it’s even better for the brand, which is so venerable and rooted in the heteronormative tradition, that this latest campaign takes off at least 20 years. The copy reads: Will you promise to never stop completing my sentences or singing off-key, which I’m afraid you do often? And will you let today be the first sentence of one long story that never, ever ends? Will you?

Click through to find out which other brands have featured gay couples in their campaigns to great effect.

As a brand for the youthz, Fastrack has always pushed the envelope and with this 2013 TV ad too, released when it was still legal to love who you love in India, it stayed on message. Come out of the closet, it said, and move on.

The Utterly Butterly Delicious girl tipped her hat to the enlightened Delhi High Court decision of 2009 to repeal Sec 377 of the Indian Penal Code that criminalises homosexuality. Those were the optimistic days before the Supreme Court took a giant step back in December 2013.

The nice thing about this image of a lesbian couple and their daughter from a 2012 JC Penney catalogue is that it was the classiest way in which a corporate brand could give a group of potential customers the finger. Earlier that year, they’d ignored the ravings of an organization called One Million Moms, which threatened to boycott the department store chain unless they withdrew their decision to hire Ellen DeGeneres as their spokesperson. Ellen stayed, the crazies went away.