Image Attribution: “Advertisement for Gay Village on bus in Rome” by Terryl Atkins is licensed under CC BY-SA. Rome, Italy (See interactive map)
This advertisement features a close-up of an intimate kiss between two men writ large on the back of a public bus in Rome, Italy. Gay Village is a ten day festival of entertainment and events featuring the interests of the LGBTQ community. This advertisement is important because it uses the bus as a billboard, reflecting the advancement of advertising and commercial interests to ever more public spaces (buildings, vehicles) as photographic technologies become more advanced. It is also a very large public provocation at the centre of Roman Catholicism which, until very recently, embraced the heterosexual nuclear family model of sexuality. The image also puts sexuality forward as a consumable product and/or activity.