Kraft Attacked for Gay Games Support -- Outsports.com

The rabidly anti-gay American Family Assn. is stepping up its criticism of Kraft for the company’s support of the 2006 Gay Games by posting what it calls “very offensive” pictures from the 2002 Games.

Kraft has been very strong in its support for sponsoring the Gay Games, to be held in Chicago in July 2006, with a company executive recently sending employees an e-mail reiterating that “diversity is not a selective concept. By definition, it's nothing if not inclusive.”

Kraft’s support has angered the AFA, based in Mississippi, and the Illinois Family Institute, which have taken to calling the Chicago event the “homosexuality games.” AFA has hinted ay a boycott of the food giant, with one official telling the Chicago Tribune, “Now if I go buy Kraft mac and cheese, I'll know that part of my dollar is going to sponsor Olympic-type games for men that have sex together."

The AFA’s latest tactic is to show three images from the 2002 Gay Games in Sydney to rally its base. In large red type on its website, the AFA first tells readers: WARNING: By scrolling down this page, you will see only a few of the offensive photos taken at the last Gay Games. There are dozens more. These photos are provided for informational purposes and only to show the types of activities Kraft Foods is sponsoring at the 2006 Gay Games in Chicago. If you do not wish to review these photos, please close this browser now.

Below this warning are about 50 lines of white space with the phrase “Scroll down to see photos” interspersed, lest anyone faint of heart scroll too far. Finally we see three images (reproduced at the bottom of this story) that show shirtless men cavorting. My guess is that the fine, upstanding, moral readers of the AFA’s site will disinfect their keyboards after seeing these images.

I have some thoughts on these pictures:

--They are taken from Chris Geary.com, the site of a British ex-pat living in Miami who loves posting hundreds of photos of shirtless men. Since Geary is openly and proudly gay, I doubt that he gave AFA permission to use his copyrighted images as a propoganda weapon. I advise Mr. Geary to sue AFA for unauthorized use.

--These pictures are not of athletes or sporting events at the Gay Games but of parties that always spring up around an event like this. As one Outsports reader posted: "I'm sure that any good photographer during any big sporting event, the World Series, the Super Bowl, the Olympics, could go to a sports bar or some other venue dispensing alcohol to pretty young things and find people pulling up their shirts, revealing their chests/breasts, touching one another. The focus of the AFA is off course, of course, just trying to be scandalous and thereby being typically bigoted."

--These images are hardly “very offensive.” You see as much skin in the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue or on MTV's "Spring Break." If you are going to sell the sizzle (“Warning: These photos are very offensive.”), don’t undercook the steak.

--I wonder who at the AFA was tasked with finding these images and whether he (I bet it wasn’t a she) immediately deleted the links from his browser history, or forwarded them to his private e-mail account.

--I am somewhat offended that AFA didn’t pull any pictures from our extensive Gay Games gallery. Sending them a “cease-and-desist” order would have been fun.

*Pictures I Really* Find Offensive**

Donald Wildmon, founder American Family Assn.	Peter LaBarbera, executive director, Illinois Family Institute,