ABSTRACT
A vibrant mass of people – red, blue, green, violet – every colour of the rainbow streaming into a city famed worldwide as the home of liberation. There is something profound in the notion of pilgrimage, and of course, something profound in the journey towards authenticity that coming out performs into being – the realization of self. In one fell swoop, the ad indexes the liberation of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and otherwise ‘queer’ people, and the historical associations between tourism and pilgrimage to sites of the sublime, on which the former capitalizes. The semiotic choices made for marketing purposes are always inherently, unavoidably ideological and political: uplifting particular social realities while devaluing others.
