August 4, 2008

South Carolina’s Not-So-Gay Chad Prosser Has Some ‘Splainin’ to Do

It looks like Chad Prosser, director of South Carolina’s Department of Parks, Recreation and Tourism, is a big, fat liar* — and that some poor schmuck fell on his sword to cover Prosser’s butt.

In late June, Amro Worldwide announced a poster campaign to lure gay travelers from the U.K. to various destinations across the U.S., with the tagline Atlanta — or Boston, or Las Vegas, or wherever — is “so gay.” (We like it — it’s cool that somebody decided to co-opt the phrase “so gay” as a positive rather than a negative.)

At the time, South Carolina Tourism spokesperson Kirsty Dillury said:

“South Carolina has a lot to offer gay travellers, and we think that people may be surprised to see our destination reaching out to the gay market,” said Ms Dillury. “We are delighted to be involved with the ‘So Gay’ campaign in particular as it sends a powerful positive message to everyone that there is nothing wrong at all with a destination being described as ’so gay’. For our gay visitors it is actually quite wonderful for them to discover just how much South Carolina has to offer — from stunning plantation homes to miles of wide sandy beaches.”

By early July, however, SC Tourism pulled out of the campaign, and refused to pay Amro five grand. Per 365Gay.com:

South Carolina Pulls Plug On Gay Tourism Ads

South Carolina’s tourism agency has slapped the wrist of its ad manager and is refusing to go ahead and pay for a campaign to attract gay tourists from Britain.

The state employee who gave the OK for the ad campaign resigned Friday.

“[He] exercised extremely poor judgment in approving participation in the program,” state Parks, Recreation and Tourism director Chad Prosser told the State newspaper.

Prosser said the department will require more review in the future.

It was too late to stop the ads that proclaim “South Carolina is so gay”. They’ve already gone up in the London subway to take advantage of gay pride in the British capital.

But Prosser said Friday the state will refuse to pay the $5,000 cost of the ads. …

Today, WSPA-TV reveals that Prosser himself had essentially approved the “so gay” campaign — or, rather, he was for it before he was against it:

…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.

What a… Well, you find your own word for what Prosser is.

Meanwhile, we can’t make heads nor tails of the gobbledygook excuse Prosser offered WSPA:

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.” …

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.

Oh, puh-leeze.

* No libel here: We said it looks like Prosser is a big, fat liar — “big” and “fat” being purely figurative, as we have no idea what he looks like.

Posted by: Sapphocrat

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