''Dining Room'' (also known as ''Dining Room Table'') was a television commercial made by the Deutsch Inc. advertising agency for IKEA in 1994. It is considered the first television advertisement broadcast in the United States that openly presented a gay couple.

Background

In June 1992, a

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commercial had been broadcast in the United States—on the occasion of

Father's Day Father's Day is a holiday of honoring fatherhood and paternal bonds, as well as the influence of fathers in society. In Catholic countries of Europe, it has been celebrated on 19 March as Saint Joseph's Day since the Middle Ages. In the Unite ...

—in which a romantic relationship between two men was suggested. However, the company denied such a situation and pointed out that said characters had already appeared in previous commercials with their respective wives. In the commercial, two men were shown buying a

chainsaw A chainsaw (or chain saw) is a portable gasoline-, electric-, or battery-powered saw that cuts with a set of teeth attached to a rotating chain driven along a guide bar. It is used in activities such as tree felling, limbing, bucking, pru ...

, one of them taking the other by the shoulder as they walked away from the camera shot. The first television commercial to explicitly show same-sex couples (both gay and lesbian) was broadcast in the

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in 1992 for the insurer AMEV. The following year, an advertisement made by

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for the Danish newspaper ''

Politiken ''Politiken'' is a leading Danish daily broadsheet newspaper, published by JP/Politikens Hus in Copenhagen, Denmark. It was founded in 1884 and played a role in the formation of the Danish Social Liberal Party. Since 1970 it has been indepe ...

'' showed the first gay kiss in a television commercial.

Production

Made by the advertising agency Deutsch Inc. and with Patrick O'Neill as art director, the ad featured two actors (John Sloman—who is also openly gay—and Scott Blakeman) playing respectively Steve and Mitch, a gay couple who had been together for around 3 years, and presented the search in an IKEA store for a new table for the dining room of their house. In addition to the search for the table, the characters talk about how they met and their future plans. The commercial first aired on March 30, 1994, on local television stations in New York City,

Philadelphia Philadelphia, often called Philly, is the List of municipalities in Pennsylvania#Municipalities, largest city in the Commonwealth (U.S. state), Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, the List of United States cities by population, sixth-largest city i ...

, and Washington D.C. at night, being also planned to be broadcast in Los Angeles. The ad was part of a series of IKEA commercials in which different types of families and their members were presented; some of them featured, for example, a divorced mother and a heterosexual couple with an adopted child.

Reception

IKEA received more than 3,000 phone calls about the commercial, of which 307 contained negative opinions, and the company received free publicity, since

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, for example, showed the commercial 38 times in its news blocks when covering the reactions to its broadcast. Stuart Elliott, an advertising columnist for ''

The New York Times ''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid d ...

'', noted that IKEA's ad sought to get the brand the "Gay Housekeeping Seal of Approval". Scott Sherman, a member of the New York Communications and Advertising Network, noted favorable reviews for the commercial. The broadcast of the IKEA commercial generated protests from conservative and Catholic groups; some of the store's branches on the west coast of the United States had their phone lines inundated by protesters expressing their anger at the announcement. A store in

Hicksville, New York Hicksville is a hamlet and census-designated place (CDP) within the Town of Oyster Bay in Nassau County, on Long Island, in New York. The population of the CDP was 41,547 at the 2010 census. History Valentine Hicks, son-in-law of abolitionist an ...

, received a bomb threat, which was ruled out after the evacuation of the premises. Despite protests from these groups, IKEA continued its campaign in the weeks that followed, refraining from withdrawing its TV ad.

References

{{reflist

External links

Dining Room commercial
on YouTube IKEA 1990s television commercials American television commercials LGBT portrayals in mass media LGBT history in the United States