South Carolina Tourism Head Did Not Ask to Pull “So Gay” Campaign

By Robert Kittle

Published: August 4, 2008

There’s new information about South Carolina’s involvement in a controversial ad campaign that targeted gay travelers in London. The campaign featured posters that said, “South Carolina is so gay”, and encouraged gay travelers to visit the state for its history, golf and “gay beaches”.

After the posters were put on London subway walls, state tourism officials heard about them. SC Parks, Recreation and Tourism director Chad Prosser said the state would not pay the nearly $5,000 for its share of the campaign, saying he doesn’t think it’s appropriate to use state tourism marketing funds to support any specific social agenda.

But PRT emails obtained under the Freedom of Information Act show that, on July 3, Prosser told his staff the state would take part in the campaign. The email to London says, “Per Chad’s direction as of 4:40 p.m. today, (July 3) DO NOT ask the vendor to remove South Carolina from the campaign.”

Prosser told reporters after the story broke that upper management at PRT never approved the posters, and other emails back that up. He says it was approved by a lower-level employee who resigned after lawmakers, the governor and members of the public questioned the use of tax dollars for the ads.

One email, from PRT Communications Director Marion Edmonds, says, “I’m praying this little story doesn’t jump the pond.” His email was in response to one from another PRT employee’s friend who was traveling in London and sent a cell phone photo of the South Carolina poster. “I hadn’t seen the photo of the poster,” he writes. Prosser says he also had not seen the actual ad until he was forwarded the same email with a photo of the poster in the London subway.

Asked why he directed staff not to ask the vendor to remove South Carolina’s poster from the campaign, Prosser told News Channel 7, “These were not our ads. We did not place them, so we didn’t have the authority to pull them.”

The ads were done by Amro Worldwide, a travel promoter that caters to gay travelers. It says its goal was to turn the phrase “that’s so gay” from a negative into a positive.

Prosser says his initial reaction was, in fact, to pull the ads. But once he found out the ads were done by Amro, not PRT, he decided not to ask that they be pulled.

“Asking for ads that we weren’t paying for, that we didn’t place, to be pulled would’ve been difficult,” Prosser says. And there was another reason. “We found out by that point that the campaign was extremely limited in time and the ads were already scheduled to come down, so there was really nothing that we could do to speed that process up,” he says.