The Future Is ... Personal Ads?

In 1979, a song called "Escape" written and recorded by British-born American singer Rupert Holmes for his album Partners in Crime was released.  Mr. Holmes later agreed to rename the song "Escape (The Piña Colada Song)" when record company executives convinced him that the public recognized the title by the name of the popular cocktail.  As the lead single for the album, the pop song was recommended by Billboard for radio broadcasters on September 29, 1979, then added to prominent U.S. radio playlists starting in October–November. The song peaked at the end of December to become the last U.S. number one song of the 1970's.

That song, which authors Gael Fashingbauer Cooper and Brian Bellmont who wrote the book "Whatever Happened to Pudding Pops?: The Lost Toys, Tastes, and Trends of the 70's and 80's" wrote in their entry entitled "Story Songs" (which as the authors note, are still going strong noting that as long as country music lives, the story song will never die)!  Escape (The Piña Colada Song) was actually about cheating on your woman, with your woman (whoops).  That classic track can be listened to below, or by visiting https://youtu.be/TazHNpt6OTo:

Central to The Piña Colada Song was a personal ad the singer responded to because he was getting bored with his girlfriend, so he responds to a personal ad he read in the newspaper, and to his surprise, the person who wrote the ad was his own girlfriend whom he hoped to cheat on.  Irony?  Perhaps.  But the central role of personals will likely be with us for a long time to come, even if they are no longer printed in the back pages of the newspaper, but move online, or to the mobile environment.

Classified ads are a form of very brief advertising which was very common in newspapers and other periodicals, and more recently, it has migrated online (e.g. driven by free ads) and even to mobile applications, dealing with offers of or requests for jobs, houses, apartments, cars, personals, etc.  The ads may be charged or distributed free of charge.  Typically, classified ads in newspapers were very short as they were charged per letter, line or column.  As the name suggests, classified ads are classified into different classes or categories.

The original U.S. newspaper ad was published in 1704 in the old Boston News-Letter. The ad was an announcement seeking a buyer for an Oyster Bay (on Long Island, New York) property. That ad reportedly marked the birth of newspaper classifieds in the United States.

Personals

The classified ad used in one of the few hit Madonna
movies "Desperately Seeking Susan" from 1985

One form of classified ads that has long been treated with suspicion are the personal ads (or personals).  Indeed, because abbreviations have long ruled in classifieds (real estate ads, for example, have many acronyms, as do employment ads), learning the appropriate lingo meant the difference between understanding and being clueless about what the ads said.

For example, an ad for a used car might read: 2010 Blu (for blue color) Toyota Camry, <50K mi (under 50,000 miles on the vehicle), 4D (4 doors) HB (hatchback), 4CY (4 cylinder engine), 4WD (for a 4 wheel drive auto), ALUM/W (meaning the car has aluminum wheels), 4 new tires, $17K OBO ($17,000 or best offer).

That would read as:

2010 Blu Toyota Camry <50K mi 4D HB 4CY 4WD ALUM/W w 4 new tires $17K OBO eves 555-555-5555/email@email.com

That ad contains just 19 words, which is useful when you pay for an ad based on number of words and/or ad length.

Similarly, personals ads have their own unique lingo, usually something like this: 32 YO NM NS SWF (32 year old, never married, non-smoking single white female) ISO (in search of) SWM (single white male) HWP (height weight proportional) for a LTR (long term relationship).  Likes: music, fine dining and BWAY (Broadway) shows.  Call eves (evenings) at 555-555-5555 or email at email@email.com.

So the personal ad above would read:

32YO NM NS SWF ISO NS SWM HWP 4 LTR. Like music dining & BWAY. Contact eves 555-555-5555/email@email.com

All told, its exactly 19 words, and would be quite inexpensive (if the venue even charges for the ad) to run, and could potentially run for an entire week, possibly longer.

Of course, traditionally, personal ads have been viewed with a degree of skepticism, as there's really no screening involved so the risk is that a person will look absolutely nothing like their personal ad suggests.  Terms like "average" (or AVG) are seen by skeptics as fat since most Americans are fat, and other terms like disease and drug free (DD FREE) used for ads seeking sex are perceived as something everyone writes, even if there's no basis in reality for the assertion.

Initially, classified ads dominated local newspapers (either dailies, or weekly alternative papers), but at the beginning of the new millennium, most of that activity shifted to online sites including craigslist.org or online dating or hookup sites (and their relevant mobile applications) including match.com, Tinder, OKCupid, or the site for married people seeking extramarital sex with others known as AshleyMadison or for gay male sex hookups grindr or scruff.  As noted, increasingly, most also have apps which enable access from smartphones, although the allure of dedicated dating apps is seen as drawing the younger population more so than older people.

That said, in early 2018, the U.S. House of Representatives approved a bill known as FOSTA (allowing states and victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act of 2017), which placed legal responsibility for sex-work interactions on the platform holders, rather than on individual users.  It was a dramatic shift, since platform holders had, for years, been immune to legal responsibility for what their users do on their platforms, provided that they responded to inappropriate behavior effectively.  The new law shifted the responsibility to companies like Craigslist, which concluded it was easier to simply abandon personals rather than face any legal problems or fines by puritanical lawmakers looking to stop supposed sex trafficking online.

Unlike companies including Facebook or Google, Craigslist has always been stubbornly simple, by design. It doesn't use advanced artificial intelligence (AI) or whatever to root out bad posts. Because of that, the site announced that it was taking down the popular Personals section entirely.

In its posting (see https://www.craigslist.org/about/FOSTA for the posting) about the legal development, Craigslist wrote:'

"Any tool or service can be misused. We can't take such risk without jeopardizing all our other services, so we are regretfully taking craigslist personals offline. Hopefully we can bring them back some day."

They closed by noting:

"To the millions of spouses, partners, and couples who met through craigslist, we wish you every happiness!"

It certainly doesn't mean personal ads are dead, rather just as they migrated from print to online, they are continuing to emerge elsewhere, and likely will continue doing so as long as people are seeking companionship, sex and more from other people.

Like the proverbial whack-a-mole arcade game, where one hits moles that pop up with a mallet only to have another pop up elsewhere.  We also saw that in the early 1970's when theaters showing pornography would routinely open, be shut down, and then open up someplace else a few miles away.

The Future Is ... Personal Ads?

Still, the old-fashioned personal ad has some virtues, among them being that it enables people to be a bit more specific about what they're seeking in a partner.  Women, in particular, find male-focused dating and sex hookup apps like grindr or scruff tend to overlook content other than photos, with the ability to swipe left on a listing to skip over it in seconds, hence it tends to be extremely superficial.  By comparison, someone seeking something a bit more informative is out of luck.

That's why a lesbian developed what she calls a queer online dating community formed around an old-school format for hookups: old-school styled personal ads.  The New York Times reported (see https://nyti.ms/2wNrMXW for the article) that the outcome of that is an Instagram dating community called Personals or Personals on Instagram (linked to an Instagram account) that developer Kelly Rakowski built for lesbians; bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex and asexual women; and gender-nonconforming and nonbinary people. (Basically, anyone who isn't a cisgender and/or straight man.)  Personals is not for straight couples or cis men.

The term cisgender (also referred to as simply cis) is still not universally understood, but it basically means that one's gender identity exclusively identifies with their sex assigned at birth, but has nothing to do with sexual orientation.  Both straight and gay men are cisgender since both identify as men, even if they are gay and have sex with other men.  Likewise, heterosexual women and lesbians are also both cisgender.  Because the term cisgender is still relatively new, even many gays and lesbians respond to the term with confusion.

Terminology aside, the idea that old school classified personal ads delivered via Facebook's Instagram social media network (although its designed to work WITH Instagram, even if its not a requirement) still generally presumes the use of a smartphone to generate photos for postings (although one can instead use a regular computer at http://www.personalspersonals.us/ without a smartphone, and it also excludes most men other than those who were previously female.  Then again, given that gay men already have the Chinese-owned app Grindr for gay male sex hookups or the American-owned Scruff, and straight men can rely on many others including match.com, Tinder, OKCupid or ashleymadison (the latter one being for married people to have affairs) for similar purposes, the female angle of Personals for women is indeed unique.

Still, the idea of enabling old-school personal ads in a more modern environment is akin to many other things that have since become commonplace.  Think about online video streaming services including Netflix, Amazon Prime video, Hulu, Kanopy as well as iTunes and Google Play, while music also includes the two just noted, as well as Spotify and possibly others which have yet to emerge -- all of which enable both streaming of video content or music online.  Previously, one relied on broadcast radio and television, and later cable TV and video rental shops including Blockbuster Video to deliver those things, and today they are available on-demand with a broadband internet connection.

Whether the new women's version of Personals is widely adopted depends upon building awareness.  Building awareness will also enable it to build a user base, which is really the key to a successful dating and/or hookup platform.

Queer Eye: Why A Show From 2003 Is Getting A Reboot in 2018

The focus of this blog is mainly retro pop culture from the 1970's to the 1980's, but it's worth acknowledging that those are generalities.  Perhaps the most notable is because the start dates and end dates are not always clear-cut, and with television, reruns have made moderately-successful network TV shows far bigger hits in syndication.  For example, the TV sitcom "The Brady Bunch" is generally considered to be a 1970's show (as was "Gilligan's Island").  But both Sherwood Schwartz sitcoms were actually much, much bigger in syndication than they were in their first-runs.  Also, both shows first premiered in the late 1960's, hence both shows could technically be considered sixties pop culture and therefore irrelevant to this blog using the original year of broadcast as a cutoff.

I refuse to do that.

Without getting too tied up in specifics on start and finish dates, although the 1990's and 2000's aren't a central focus for this blog, again, because some pop culture (television, movies, music, etc.) carries over from the 1960's or the 1980's, it occasionally does find a place here, too.  This is one such post.

One early 2000's cable program that is enjoying a renaissance (resurrection or reboot) is one of cable-network Bravo's earlier success stories from 2003.  The show was initially known as "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy" (later renamed simply "Queer Eye").  The premise of the show relied upon the stereotype of gay ("queer") men as experts in matters of fashion, style, personal grooming, interior design, and culture.

It's worth acknowledging that Bravo's own history as a cable network is relevant to this discussion.  Bravo began in 1980, and its original focus was on performing arts, drama, and independent films (indeed, Bravo originally claimed to be "the first television service dedicated to film and the performing arts" and a 1985 profile of Bravo in the New York Times observed that most of its programming at the time consisted of international, classic, and independent films).  The Bravo network was acquired in the early 2000's, and it switched its format from focusing on performing arts, drama, and independent films to being mainly focused on popular culture including reality shows, fashion/makeover shows and celebrities.  In those days, Bravo quite literally was throwing things against the proverbial wall to see what stuck, much as the Fox broadcast TV network had done just a few years earlier.  The main difference is that Bravo was done on cable, rather than on broadcast TV.

The concept for "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy" was created by the show's executive producers David Collins and Michael Williams along with David Metzler through their company, Scout Productions and, as noted, turned out to be a surprise hit for Bravo.

There were a variety of reasons for its success.

One reason for its success was that "Queer Eye" very much stuck to the 22-minute format (which amounted to a half-hour show with commercials) and ran at many different times throughout the day.  Given that there were no story arcs (also called a narrative arc), which are extended or continuing storylines in episodic storytelling in media such as television, with each episode following a dramatic arc.  On a TV program, for example, a story arc would unfold over a number of different episodes.  Without any arcs, there were no expiration or sequence required for airing, making it well-suited for cable.  Arcs were missing from "Queer Eye", lending it to repeated play throughout the day whenever the network needed half-hour content to run.

The original "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy" series starred five openly-gay men from New York who conducted a "make-over" (or "make-better") of another person, usually a hapless straight man at the request of his wife or girlfriend, with the cast helping to revamp wardrobe, redecorating, and offering advice on grooming, lifestyle, and food/wine.

Original Fab Five cast from Bravo's version of "Queer Eye"

The opening sequence introduced the gay "Fab Five", outlining each of their particular "specialties" on Manhattan's "Gay Street": Fashion Savant (Carson Kressley), Food and Wine Connoisseur (Ted Allen), Grooming Guru (Kyan Douglas), Design Doctor (Thom Filicia) and Culture Vulture (Jai Rodriguez).  The five men armed themselves with their tool of choice (including Thom Filicia holding a paintbrush, Ted Allen holding a whisk, Carson Kressley holding a shopping bag, Kyan Douglas holding a blow-dryer, and Jai Rodriguez holding a set of music headphones), all in-line with their particular specialty, then put on their sunglasses before we saw the camera turn the corner of "Gay Street" to enter "Straight St."  The opening sequence closed as the Fab Five "power walked" straight toward the camera.

The show also enabled the newly-nascent Bravo cable network to successfully transition to a completely different focus for content (and audience), and established it as a cable network willing to break away from traditional cable network dogma about what was necessary to succeed, as well as having a willingness to break from traditionally-taboo topics, including featuring genuine gay individuals on television.

The original "Queer Eye" series ran perpetually on Bravo in 2003, as it sought to fill 24-hours with new content that was anything but its original content, which was much more like what ran on PBS in those days, and also had a much more limited audience.

The series also quickly attained pretty good ratings for Bravo, peaking during September of that year with 3.34 million viewers per episode according to Nielsen.  The popularity of the series also established the original Fab Five as media celebrities in their own right, with high-profile appearances at the Emmys and a "make-better" of Jay Leno and his The Tonight Show set in August of that year.  Fab Five members parlayed their celebrity into endorsement deals, perhaps most notably Thom Filicia's becoming the spokesperson for Pier 1 Imports, and Ted Allen would later endorse cooking utensils (skillets, for example) sold at retailers.

The American press also generally complimented the series and the Fab Five.   The gay Out magazine listed the Fab Five in its "Out 100", the "greatest gay success stories" of 2003, while Instinct magazine declared Mr. Kressley one of the "Leading Men" of 2004.  The series also won an Emmy Award for Outstanding Reality Program in 2004.

Mr. Kressley knows it's impossible to disentangle his sexuality from "Queer Eye" and he made zero effort to try and do so.  2003 America was not especially kind to the LGBTQ community.  At the time, "Don't ask, don't tell" banned openly gay people from serving openly in the military, and only a few months earlier, 13 U.S. states had homosexual sodomy laws on the books while heterosexual sodomy was legal (the U.S. Supreme Court invalidated those in the Lawrence v. Texas decision in 2003).  Kressley says that by introducing America to real queer people, it allowed them to get to know members of a demographic long shut out of most other media, and he is of the opinion that was the show's real power.  His co-star Jai Rodriguez agreed, telling The Hollywood Reporter that the number one thing people told him about "Queer Eye" was that the show helped them come out to their families. "The houses and the fashion, that has never been a takeaway," he said. Though "Queer Eye" didn't have an explicit political message, that didn't matter: "In 2003, being out was political."

Mr. Rodriguez also says that "Queer Eye" also made space for friendships between straight and gay men, a bond that at the time "wasn't OK to be formed" because of homophobic fears of romantic attraction.  On the show, gay and straight men could exist, work and laugh together without strings attached.

Since 2003, the Bravo cable network has changed ownership a few times, and is now firmly in the hands of cable television giant Comcast's NBCUniversal Cable Entertainment business.  But Bravo's days in 2003 were more freewheeling, as already noted, marked by its willingness to try and see what drew in viewers.  The "Queer Eye" gamble paid off for Bravo, drawing a diverse audience far beyond a gay-only viewership, to a more mass-market success.  That also made the show relevant for a broader, American culture perspective.  The cast discusses the impact in the video playlist below.

In January 2017, internet streaming service Netflix announced that it was reviving the series with a brand new Fab Five in a season of eight episodes.  It's part of Netflix's desire to move into the unscripted space, including talk-shows hosted by Chelsea Handler, David Letterman, and soon, former President Barack Obama.

NPR's popular radio show "All Things Considered" covered the "Queer Eye" reboot which can be listened to below, or by visiting https://n.pr/2H5fMnV.

The new "Queer Eye" show is based in the southern city of Atlanta rather than New York.  Netflix does not disclose traditional Nielsen ratings performance indicators as broadcast and cable television do, but on review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, as of March 2018, the season held an approval rating of 100% based upon 13 reviews, and an average rating of 7.35/10.  The website's critical consensus read, "Queer Eye adapts for a different era without losing its style, charm, or sense of fun, proving that the show's formula remains just as sweetly addictive even after a change in location and a new group of hosts." On Metacritic, the season had a weighted average score of 73 out of 100, based on seven critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews".

The new Fab Five cast on the Netflix version of "Queer Eye"

As noted, the new version of "Queer Eye" does change the locale from New York to Atlanta, and although there is no news (yet) on another season, co-creator and producer Collins said that if Netflix does order more, he hopes to find a new location for the show — and he's thinking specifically of returning to his roots.  He said "I'm from Cincinnati, Ohio, born and raised. I would like to go the tri-state region: Ohio, Indiana, and Kentucky, because you can base in Cincinnati and go across the bridge to Kentucky and go up the interstate to Indiana. The corn-fed midwestern folk are where I'm from — and I love actually being from Ohio, it's a great place to be from."

Similar to the cast chemistry of the original, the new Fab Five cast for the new version of "Queer Eye" seemingly has pretty good on-screen chemistry, although some important yet relevant changes have been made.

Notably, unlike the show's first iteration, where four of the five stars were white, and all were cisgender.  But it helped open the doors to wider and more diverse queer representation, bringing the Fab Five into millions of homes around the world. That counts for something. Jai Rodriguez, a New Yorker of Puerto Rican descent, notes that his successor in the reboot, Karamo Brown, told him: "One of the biggest things for me watching the show was finally seeing a queer person of color."  Another evolution is that much of this cast comes from lower-income backgrounds, and some even have little mouths (children) to feed.

The new "Fab Five" consists of Bobby Berk (Design Expert), Antoni Porowski (Food Expert), Jonathan Van Ness (Grooming Expert), Tan France (Fashion Expert) and Karamo Brown (Culture Expert).  Of them, Tan is a gay, British-Pakistani Muslim (who happens to be married to an American Mormon cowboy), and Karamo is a gay, African-American man from the South who is also a father of two children, while cast member Bobby has been married to another man for almost fifteen years.  None of that could have been accepted, let alone watched on television, back in 2003.

Updating the original 2003 series to reflect the current social and political climate of today's America was important for Mr. Collins, given how much things have changed. For starters, it feels possible to be a bit more open about the Fab Five's personal lives: "We've evolved in a big way," Collins said. "If you think about the fact that our original Fab Five [didn't use] word 'my husband' or 'my boyfriend' or 'my kids' — America was not ready to handle that. [Now], we get to see that Karamo is a father of two, Tan's a Muslim man married to a Mormon cowboy. And Bobby's been married for almost fifteen years now."

To view a playlist consisting of the original show's intro, the new Fab Five meeting with the original Fab Five, the new show's intro and an interview with the new cast conducted by co-creator and producer David Collins which can be seen below, or by visiting the playlist I created at https://goo.gl/wV4hms:



Author P.S., March 26, 2018:  Entertainment newspaper Variety reports that the Netflix version of "Queer Eye" has been renewed for a second season.  Although a renewal for Season 2 is now confirmed, there is no word yet as to whether it will relocate from Atlanta to Cincinnati as co-creator and producer David Collins said he hoped to do. Subsequently, on March 15, 2019, after being announced in July 2018 that a third-season for the Netflix reboot of "Queer Eye" had been ordered, the third season of the reboot was released. Season three saw the cast move from Atlanta, Georgia to Kansas City, Missouri to help its citizens learn how to be the best versions of themselves.