A friend's birthday was yesterday and I wanted to send him something fun and lighthearted in the email inbox.
I perused different websites like Hallmark, 123Greetings, gogaycards.com then I stumbled on American Greetings.
They had a electronic birthday card : Queers from Outer Space.
Three gay spacemen in a spaceship fly to earth, see a straight couple at drive-in, hover above the couple, beam the male on board, make him over then beam him back to the car, and fly off.
From my knowledge American Greetings is NOT a gay company founded by gays catering to the buying gay customer, so I find that this card is offensive. In fact, a Jacob Sapirstein founded the company and he had a son Irving I Stone. Stone ran the company until 1987. Son-in-law Morry Weiss then took over as CEO until 2003 when Weiss' sons took over.
First of all, to even use gay characters( esp. by a heterosexual founded company in a e-card cartoon) is offensive.
To use the word "queer" is offensive: I understand when the gay community uses that word with each other because we took an ugly word and we are owning it and using it. But to have the straight community that started that word and used it as an epithet against us is NOW using the word again in a card??? I am dumbfounded. Am I being illogical or do I have a right to be offended?
Then to assume we gay "queers" are all wardrobe consultants and makeover artists: that is offensive American Greetings.
Unless a company is gay owned and catering to the gay buying public: don't make cards using we gays as subject matter, my bad, we "queers" as subject matter.
Just stick to birthday cake icons and don't feed middle straight American more stereotypes that pigeon hole gay males as ALL wardrobe/makeover consultants.
I want this card taken down from the site and never used again in electronic form and certainly not in paper!
No longer will I be giving my spending dollar to American Greetings.
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