I hate ads.

They’re just everywhere, and if we’re not being bombarded with commercials and billboards, then we get sore-thumb product placement and hidden plugs. As a minority, it’s a toss-up as to what’s worse: just being outright ignored by marketers or having people who categorically don’t understand a thing about you try to pander to your perceived interests.

The results can range from the eye-rolling, to the embarrassing, to the cringe-inducing. Just the casual assumptions about what’s universal are bad enough. Your average shaving or shower gel ad aimed at men will assert that men (read: real men) think about sports every minute and about chicks every other minute. I don’t do either, and yet I’m a user of both products. Huh.

Many is the woman I’ve met who complains that her husband can’t multitask or pick up after himself, yet a single gay guy like me doesn’t have a girlfriend or Blue Fairy to waft in weekly and clean my space for me. When’s the last time you even saw an ad for a household product that featured a man in it? Ever see a single father give a kid cough syrup? How come there are no gay couples in erectile disfunction ads, and more pressingly, why the fuck is everyone always in an outdoor bathtub holding hands?

The thing with advertising is that it’s so unnecessary. Ads create needs for products that didn’t previously exist before a team of execs decided they must, they sell unobtainable dreams, and they treat all of us like monolithic demographics with no social overlap. Gay ads — this encompasses not only directly-targeted merchandise like underwear or fitness equipment, but also Public Service Announcements, implicitly gay commercials, and natch, the Gay Panic ad — are often the worst because they tend to play to the lowest common denominator. A virtual porn aesthetic isn’t really pushed to the same degree in hetero-themed ads like it is in gay ones. Why, you’d swear all we do is fuck and work out!

So here they are — 10 soul-sucking, depth-defying ads sure to leave you resenting Free Market Capitalism even more than you already do :

10. Taking It From Both Ends

Lest you think I’m too PC, I’ll gladly admit that not every gay ad is a debacle. Impulse Body Spray turned out a lighthearted and gentle-spirited one some years back. Bianco Footwear created a cute on recently. I actually thought the French McDonald’s spot was sweet, and I’m quite taken with Orangina’s animal menagerie.

I don’t just get sexualizing food, though. Yes, improvising with our orifices is great when it comes to creative sex, but as for eating proper, I want to keep my oral and anal fixations delineated. Do straight men really get that hungry watching naked women gyrate that they need buffets at high-end strip clubs? I once had a friend dragoon me into going to restaurant wherein patrons were expected to dine while scantily-clad drag artists go-go’d on the tabletops. And porn and food? Pass. Nothing triggers my fast forward finger like guys starting to slather each other in whip cream or pouring chocolate sauce all over themselves. Keep it simple, advertisers. One appetite doesn’t always fuel another.

9. Flaming Creatures

“The roof! The roof! The roof is on fire!”

No, seriously — it’s on fire!

The gays. Always breaking into song. Forever unable to keep their clothes on. Perpetually doing the swish-and-mince-it.

Don’t you just love it when straight people assume that you’re a natural-born performer who loves show tunes, karaoke, dressing up in cute outfits, and watching materialistic bitches whore it out all over the Big Apple? I don’t give a damn about any of the above, but for many, being gay is a performance, and since we’re all muscle nellies, we can only approximate masculinity by donning man-drag as we play at being policemen, cowboys, and firemen. Video games with rampaging zombies and questing elves are for the real boys who don’t go for none of that singin’. So how do you market a product for chicks and the queers that’s tied into a traditionally male brand? You split the difference and offer them a mash-up of cheesy beefcake and vapid Glee-inspired fluff.

Nailed it!

8. Bones, Plugs, & Monotony

Look, some people are irredeemable idiots and can’t be helped. You can spend countless dollars trying to steer kids clear of drugs, and there will always be dipshits huffing glue somewhere at any given hour of the day. For all the anti-smoking campaigns, I still see doctors and nurses lighting up outside of hospitals, and young girls who’ve grown up in the same smoking-conscious culture that I did can’t seem to manage a simple conversation without their cigs. No matter how well-meaning and factual your PSA, there are those who won’t bother with condoms, even if it does mean putting their lives on the line.

HIV is horrible, but its horror can become grotesquely comical when you attempt to illustrate it through metaphor. Images of a man mounting a scorpion, two guys going at it as they plunge out of a window and down toward certain death, headless bodies banging away, and yes, getting sodomized by Hitler really succeed in making AIDS seem like a Road Runner cartoon by way of Tales From The Crypt. When I see dickless skeletons grinding pelvises, safe sex is the last thing I glean from the display. All I end up doing is asking whether Ray Harryhausen‘s gay bone warriors from Jason & The Argonauts are able to serve openly in the Army of The Night.

7. “We’ve Traced The Call — It’s Gay!”

Gay phone sex ads are without fail hilariously bad and feature voice-over narration along the lines of “Do you want to go one on one with a hot muscle guy, boy?” or porn stars saying “Call me…I love the taste of your hot cock…” with deep sincerity. Gay chat lines have to tread a finer line between smut and legitimacy, so they can be less satisfying, but hands-down the most hysterical gay chat adverts ever came across the pond from Britain’s Gay XChange.

The central factor behind every Gay XChange spot essentially followed a Village People-style formula: take as many hoary gay stock figures as you can come up with and cuisinart them into a man tableau. In this take, we get a leather-jacketed tough guy, a twink, a business man, a muscle daddy, and a busy doctor (?). Most ads of these types are instantly forgettable, but Gay XChange is deathless in British pop culture for two reasons: first, the perfectly-pronunciated tail-end digits of the phone number elocuted as “thiiirty-four, thiiirty-four, thiiirty-four,” and especially, the twink’s now-legendary dance moves, which have been parodied countless times on YouTube and are still performed by drunken straight guys in pubs.

6. Panic In The Year Queero!

Gay Panic is more than just a go-to murder defense and means of galvanizing Conservatives to vote for idiots. It’s also a great way to sell stuff because nothing is more daringly clever than showing one man trying to kiss another unwilling recipient. Except maybe men in dresses. C’mon! A man. In a dress. Kooky!

Diesel, fine purveyor of Guido threads and innumerable ads full of pointless shock value, hits every Gay Panic nail on the head with this one. You’ve got the wildly inappropriate romantic overture made not only in public, but in a traditionally male setting where such a thing would be unheard of. None of the men featured are up to the expected physical standards of your typically homosploitive Diesel or A&F model, so it’s clearly repulsive all around. There’s even the agog onlooker. Yes, Diesel’s cologne is so powerful that it might even make a man go all pheremonal for your ass, and awkward sexual attraction can be a tough scenario to navigate. That’s why whenever a woman tries to kiss or sexually proposition me, I beat the bitch down into the pavement. You gotta nip these situations in the bud.

5. Fruits of The Loom

Oy, not more food/dick confusion! But wait — there’s more! Ask yourselves what this ad is actually trying to sell you. Hot dogs? Western wear? Self-tanner? Nope. This is an underwear ad.

I get that sex sells, but when your actual product doesn’t even appear in your ad and the whole thing’s purpose has to be intuited, you know what it is you’re really hawking. Underwear ads have never really sent me, and designer skivvies are lost on me, but with Ginch Gonch apparently serving as the trashier answer to 2(x)ist’s glossy gaysploitation, this must appeal to the same guys who wear International Male. When I want to buy sex, I just opt for a DVD, but I have to give this ad cred for going against type and not being all about dead-eyed, over-bronzed himbos feminized into prepubescent Peter Pans. I mean, that blonde chick in the back is built.

4. Porn Creep Chic

Porn has permeated aspects of mass culture with sly ease and guile, but this footwear ad is anything but cheeky or ironic — it’s literally two jock strap-clad guys ass-wrangling while a truncated (and utterly superfluous) chick enjoys a bird’s eye view of the proceedings. Not quite sure what exact role the shoes play — leverage? shock absorption? — but as is the case when cynical gay capitalization overshadows your product, they’re irrelevant.

The ad — released in the U.K. a few years back — became something of a cause celebre when public uproar focused on just what it was exactly that the two male models were simulating. Patrick Cox & Co. tried to pass it all off as wrestling or roughhousing, and while the company’s efforts drew fire, I’ll presume they must’ve translated into sales, considering Cox never met a transparent advertising single entendre he didn’t love to wring out for every last cent. Now that’s a money shot.

3. Frankenstein Must Be Devoid!

Haven’t you been looking for a way to waste money on extravagant enrollment fees for a health club full of opulent velvet couches, pretentiously artistic interior design, eurodisco lighting, and eardrum-rupturing house music? If you’re an insipid high-roller, then even sweating your ass off on the elliptical has to have a luxurious angle, and thanks to David Barton — I’m talking about the anabolically-dessicated mini-hulk, not the full-time Republican Choose-Your-Own-Adventure historical revisionist — you’ll come as close as you’re able to approximating human interaction as you mingle with the emotionally crippled beautiful people in a setting straight out of American Psycho wherein the V2 Vodka flows freely and you check your soul at the door. Content is soooooo full of carbs.

This Rainbow Brite promotional bukakke tells you everything you need to know about the Tragic Kingdom, and since 4’1” fireplug Barton — who thanks to The Soup shall now forever be known as “Steroid Liza” — is a man-made creation terrorizing the countryside, the Frankensteinian implications are clear. Looking like a freshly-unswathed Rocky Horror (with Nomi Malone and Isis as back-up), Barton is Queen of The Damned, and malignant narcissism is his coronet. Everyone’s a prancing, preening drag queen manque in this pansexually hollow scene, and with La Barton megalomaniacally cribbing gay culture and selling it back to us as a warped parody of itself, do consider that you’ll expend more calories by simply torching Castle Frankenstein to the ground rather than shelling out your hard-earned green to become one of its broken horrors.

2. Cross The Gays & Hope To Thrive

Why don’t all you horrible Liberals have a nostalgic longing for the Lost Decade like true-blooded patriots do? Wasn’t it really a lot better than it seemed at the time? Everything we did was a test of our loyalty to the Red, White, and Blue, like who had the most viscerally jingoistic reaction to national misfortune, who could clear the most brush while it all went to Hell, and (we guess), who could drink their beer with the most caricatured macho swagger. Miller’s ditch-the-swish ad may’ve debuted just last year — thanks to the heartland hacks at Saatchi & Saatchi in…ugh…New York, but make no mistake: this is pure Neo-Con spill-over from the glury days of Freedom Fries and Toby Keith boot-fucking.

You know how them thar gays are. Always flappin’ their wrists when they run from guys in flannel in pick-ups, talkin’ with them purdy lips, making real men’s eyes dart away from the women folk with their tight, rock-hard asses — it’s un-’merican! Thankfully, we have the he-men at Miller to remind us that leg-crossing, raised pinkies, and upturned collars are for queers, foreigners, and fancy boys, while chilled mule piss gussied up as Patriot Lager is reserved for ruggedly independent heteros of the Ponderosa, Hooterville, and Hazzard County.

1. Fortune & Men’s Thighs

Take a scenario lifted from a typical ’70s Grindhouse Rape & Revenge flick, put a 5th Avenue gay spin on it, and brand it under a high fashion moniker — voila! “It’s called fabulous, dahling!” Sure, it would be repellent to feature a woman in this setting (which D&G did as well, at least letting her have clothing), but this is really just a typical night for a gay urbanite.

I can’t even count the number of times I’ve been drugged by wealthy Story of O-style sadists, subjected to a night of carnal debauchery a la Justine, and then gone all I Spit On Your Grave on their asses. Sure, your typical fashion “genius” is an ugly queen selling outrageously overpriced and impractical attire to the gullible top 1% of our economy while simultaneously marketing genetic freakdom as beauty, but all I care about when I wake up dazed and nude in an opulent abode is whether the stitching in my gang rapists’ $2000 ensembles holds up.

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