another can of beer on the shelf
by Douglas Messerli
Tony Kaye (director) Stand By Your Man / 1996 [unreleased Guinness
ad]
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“Creatives Jerry Gallaher and
Clive Yaxley at Ogilvy & Mather quietly developed their concept for
Guinness. Directed by Tony Kaye, stylised in black and white, a messy male
stereotype, suited and booted in a rush to leave the house and head to work
[presumably after a hard night of drinking]. Their partner is a stay-at-home
homemaker who we're led to assume is his wife, rubber gloves up to the elbows,
cleaning up after him as Tammy Wynette's Stand By Your Man accompanies
the montage. The last seconds of the ad reveal his male partner as there's a
kiss to the cheek. The ad closes out with the tagline: 'Not everything in
black and white makes sense.'"
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The executive of Guinness beer, Sir
Anthony Greener, realized that it was far too ahead of its time, wondering, "What
have you done to my brand?" The company was fired, and the ad was put back
in the can and never apparently presented to the public. But still it exists
today, in a wonderful DVD version, a memory of what might have been, and a
truly important reminder that there were others which attempted of offer
something that didn’t fit into our visions of that awfully ugly period of LGBTQ
history.
Davies observes that “The
brand hadn't been brave enough to face down the backlash and run the ad. So it
sat on the shelf.”
If the alcoholic beverage
couldn’t stand by their men who drank it—and I did many an afternoon and night
at the local Los Angeles pub Bergin’s—time has demonstrated that there were
some advertising executives and directors such as Kaye to “stand by their men,”
even if they themselves were not gay.
Los Angeles, February 16, 2025
Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (February 2025).
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