Would the voice of a bidet sound different from that of a toilet bowl? French, perhaps?

As for gay air stewards, I’m yet to meet one … and I do travel … despite Tracey Ullman’s “Trevor” and “Will” on Mile High.

I think maybe I saw a gay counter-person once in a TCBY. Ah! Now it starts to make sense!

You think Alexander the Great had a lisp? Not if he was bloody Irish!

And this has nothing in common with tokenism, which obviously always presents it’s token minority representative in a positive light. Your token presenter in a chair is socially useful - if a wheelchair-using little kid sees someone with a chair in a fairly glamorous, high-profile job, that can only help them to deal with the difficulties being in a chair presents, and give them someone to point to when faced with the ‘Does he take sugar?’ assumptions that their physical disability renders them incapable in areas where it makes no difference. A gay little kid seeing the Muller ad, as Tom said, is unlikely to take anything positive from that representation, it just reinforces the sort of shit the gay kid is getting in the playground every breaktime. Even offensively bland is good, really - those smiling mixed race couples, by dint of their smiling ‘normality,’ probably shift a few preconceptions, and even if it’s thanks to a combination of political correctness and simple greed (black people have money too!) the result is good.

anything threatening has to get awkwardly mocked or misrepresented for a while before it gets properly accepted

Well, yeah, but you can still hope that we might be able to skip this stage when it comes to sexuality, having gone through it over decades with representation of women and ethnic minorities in the media (not, obviously, that those groups are properly represented yet.) Also, it seems that good representation of minorities defined by sexuality doesn’t stick - it’s been a decade or more since the first (laughably chaste) gay kiss on Eastenders (between a non-mincing, non-evil gay couple), but the furore surrounding a recent gay storyline in Corrie recently matched the tabloid opprobrium of ten years ago.

And Nadia is an interesting one: she’s not being perceived as a woman in the press, or even on Channel 4’s Big Brother programmes, but if you look at the onscreen SMS messages from kids on the live coverage, she’s massively liked because she’s good fun, full stop - you see comments like ‘You go girl!’ not ‘You go suspiciously-jawed transexual who I will mock to mask my fear of the other!’ Doubt that means the kids of today are incredibly broad-minded, but her fanbase must contain folk who previously would’ve run a mile on meeting a transexual, or beaten her up, and who are now going to treat transgender folk with a wee bit more respect, despite the media take on her. (Compare this to the neutered screecher Brian who won a couple of years ago by reinforcing the idea of gay men as deeply trivial ‘entertainers’ who, most importantly, don’t have torrid bumsex. Which gave him the perfect in to presenting kids TV, which is a whole other media peculiarity.)