Marc Jacobs' ads too homoerotic

The new season's Marc Jacobs men's ads have been deemed too homoerotic a campaign by some publishers. The ads, shot by Juergen Teller, feature photos of makeup artist Dick Page and husband James Gibbs kissing while lying on a bearskin rug in the woods. Another ad shows the two men arm-in-arm in their front lawn. Interview magazine chose to feature the rug version in its August issue, Men's Vogue did not include either of the images in its upcoming fall issue, on newsstands this week.

Sources close to Men's Vogue said the quarterly believed the ad was too homoerotic for its taste. A spokeswoman for Marc Jacobs said one magazine disapproved of the horizontally inclined image, but declined to identify it. "I believe that they felt that the content was something they wouldn't be comfortable with," said the spokeswoman. Men's Vogue, meanwhile, denied any objection to the spread.

Homoerotic imagery, of course, is nothing new in advertising. Witness the Marlboro Man or, more recently, all those shots of half-naked yet oddly overdressed guys who apparently like to congregate in steam rooms and dungeons. And what about the whole Brokeback Mountain trend? Checked shirts will never be worn the same.

Perhaps that's why Marc Jacobs's new campaign is so refreshing. Shot as always by Juergen Teller, the ads do away with innuendo and instead depict Page and Gibbs in a series of intimate moments in their Manhattan apartment and outside their Long Island house. "You always see something more sexual and aggressive, a stereotype of gayness," Teller says. "For me, this ad is about two human beings loving each other."

Robert Duffy, president of Marc Jacobs told MenStyle.com. "We try to make a lot of things we say and do positive statements," he says. "They are a normal family, what I consider normal."