I am quite happy with my two Hyundais, my 70s era Porsche and Volkswagen Bug, and my 1995 Chebby Silverado pickemup. I’m even quite acceptive (relax: it’s a fake word, but you knew that, didn’t you?) of wifie’s 1995 Toyota (V-6) Camry, which is a great little all-round workhorse.

As a California-born and bred cis-male, I’ve been immersed in California’s ‘car culcha’ since birth (and even before that: Da had a 1939 Oldsmobile that was his pride and joy). As a teenager, I had an Absinthe-lime colored ’40 Chevy Master Deluxe that I snagged for only $US 25 dollars (I still think it's aesthetically more attractive than its main competition, the 1940 Ford) and as a high-schooler, I lived less than 15 miles from one of the hottest drag-strips in the California Central Valley. Lots of incentive to wake up and smell the hydrocarbon fumes at an early age!

But yeah, that was all largely a rite of passage for any kid raised largely in the immediate post-war period of California. Whether any of that intense exposure to old-school ICE automobile culture had any profound or long-lasting effect on my seemingly inherent discernment of good taste in automobile styling or not, I know not.

Ma, however, despite having been fated to teach grammar school (that ever-thankless job) all of her professional life (due to Da’s premature demise), was a college eddicated (sic) woman and also an art student (who attended the SF Bay Area’s CCAC (Berkeley/Oakland’s prestigious art colony post-grad program). Her reflected taste in automobiles was accordingly exceptional, for the most part, having had a 1955 Plymouth with a racy black and red, two-tone paint job at one point (and later a white 1962 Dodge Dart, which was an unusually appealing and unique design for the otherwise stodgy early 60s...and still is). Had she not had to slave away teaching ignorant little Dust-Bowl immigrant children to read and write, so as to support us both, she probably would have been a successful design consultant. She was that adept in her effortlessly artistic proclivities.

Today, in the uppermost stratospheric region of the human life-expectancy myself, I seem to still have a natural predisposition to artistic ability, although I’ve not exercised it seriously for years. In occasional moments of self-doubt, it flatters my vanity to know that several of my Berkeley-period oils and acrylics still hang on several walls here and there, but my ADD affliction kept me from plunging into artistic endeavors to any significant extent. It was merely a talent that I occasionally used to my advantage (and sometimes to my disadvantage, as well) but otherwise never really took seriously.

[When I say, “disadvantage”, I refer to the fact that whenever anyone else found out that I am a closet artist, I would invariably be pressured into using my ability for that someone’s benefit, and over time this imposition posed an annoyance that I felt I neither needed nor wanted in my life; consequently, I tended to never reveal this ‘exploitable talent’ of mine to anyone save exceptionally close and/or old, trusted friends. This beaux arts protective attitude finds parallel expression is an old bit of GI wisdom that advises raw recruits to “Never let the drill sergeant learn your name.” In other words, don’t stand out from the herd or you’ll rue the day in perpetuity... [The Japanese like to put it somewhat differently: “The nail that stands up gets pounded down.”]

At any rate, today I exercise my appreciative artistic self-indulgence in an ongoing love affair with old Volkswagens and most particularly in my appreciations of the so-called ‘Ugly-duckling’ of the prestigious Porsche GmbH establishment, the Volkswagen/Porsche 914 sports car. Accordingly my classic 1973 Signal Orange Bug is a beauty and so is my Sunflower Yellow 1974 914/4 2-liter. Both now over half a century old, it just tickles the holy pahootie out of me to drive those two vehicles whenever I need a genuinely fun, old-school driving experience, since they comprise the essence of both German pragmatism and the seat-of-the-pants proprioceptions of “old school” driving experiences.

With their minimalistic automotive personalities and reflective of the German essence of functionality with few needless frills (I do not include today’s modern Porsches in this category, since they are not just exorbitantly pricey but little more than Earth-bound, four-on-the-pavement F-35 jet fighters with enough automated electronic systems to drive a born-again Luddite half insane!). When you drive an old Bug or an ‘as-OEM-made’ 914, you are about as close to the archetypal automotive original sin of 70s era automotive art as you can get!

Drivers these days are as far from this experience and being truly competent drivers as most expensive late-model Porsches are from the local automated car-wash concern (using one to clean a 2025 Porsche 911 clone would be tantamount to putting said car in imminent jeopardy!). With so many automated systems common in modern cars, analysts have frequently remarked on the fact that the average driver is totally out of touch with what it’s like to REALLY drive a car the old fashioned way (in aircraft, we’d state this as being ‘basic stick and rudder flying’ ability).

It’s sad, but given the fact that hardly anyone these days ever gets real driver training, and with all the careless distractions smartphone technology exposes drivers to, the erstwhile average young driver is an ignorant, total klutz behind the wheel! Add an elderly driver in a huge Cadillac SUV or an older Asian-American in any car to the mix and you’ve got an accident just waiting to happen. [Note: this is not a statement of blatantly reckless racist bias...it’s a statistical fact that older Asian drivers are among the world’s worst, comparatively speaking! My wifie is a rare exception, having had to drive all over the state in her duties as a mobile AT&T switching engineer.]

But I digress (something I am noted for), so let me get back to the thematic jugular vein wherein this brief blog episode was poked and prompted.

In today’s THE SPECTATOR magazine (the UK edition of the oldest continually published print magazine in the world, no less), a brief article caught my eye. The title of same was “Is Subaru turning me into a Lesbian?”

Hmmm, and hmmm again! Talk about a surefire conversational catalyst! The image of Dykes-on-Bikes type hard-core lesbians preferentially driving around behind the wheel of a Subaru car that instantly flashed through my mind were both stark and mildly alarming, since I’ve never cared much for the attitude-flinging behavior of such profoundly anti-male gender ideologues (and coming originally from the Peoples Republic of Berzerkeley, women’s liberation era of the 70s, I’ve had more prior experiences with that sort than I care to recall).

It would help to mention here that Suckatomato (the capital of Californica) a few years back became the ‘new epicenter’ of Californica gayness, after the original Sodom & Gomorrah that was (is) San Fornacisco abdicated that appellation in its enthusiasm to embrace the irresistible wave of wokeness that that city’s LGBYQ+ folks have immersed themselves in. Furthermore, the SF Bay Area was becoming too expensive to live in, after the massive injection of money that Silicon Valley infused into the area’s economy and most gays could no longer afford their formerly cheap digs in the Castro District. So...understandably...they began looking around for a more livable alternative, and found it in the Great Central Valley of our state.

Hence, many pulled up their roots in The City and relocated to then-still-affordable Suckatomato, which turned out to be smart for several reasons, not least being that it assured gay activists and lobbyists a sure-fire, ready access to the state legislature’s pols, but also given Suckatomato’s reasonably inexpensive cost of living.

The result is that today, gay culture pervades this city like the smell of the... er, shall we say ‘aromatic?’...tropical Durian Fruit when it is sliced open. Durian, which is popular in the Southeast Asian region, actually looks as bad as it smells, with its ripe, custard-like fleshy interior and spiky exterior, but it defies all conventional understanding with its tasty, high-nutrition nature.

An apt comparison, save for the fact that radical ‘gay activism’ and the more extrme/outrageous, over-the-top expressions of LGBTQ+ advocacy still stink. [For my sentiments on personal sexual preferences, liberties and expression of same, see elsewhere in my writings, but I have absolutely nothing against any delineation of personal sexual preference (with the exception of child porn and predation, which are both totally unacceptable no matter how you slice it), as long as it is discretely practiced in the privacy of one’s home. [“In-your-face” flagrant sexual exhibitionism in public, on the other hand, is strictly (and reasonably) utterly censurable, not to mention class-less bad taste, in my considered opinion.]

All other things being equal, as a result of the referenced demographic upsurge of sexual libertinism that obtains here in good old Suckatomato, we now have a great many gay people in our midst. One of those categories of gay sub-septs is that of lesbians and one sees a significant number of these couples walking about in this city, most often as a ‘butch/fem’ pairing trope, in which a (usually) heavyset, mannish woman is in a relationship with a more feminine woman, usually prompting no great perplexities as to which is the ‘simulated’ male figure (“husband”) and which the acquiescent partner (“wife”) in the relationship.

However, that said & observed, no real problems there. Everyone is equally entitled to pair up with whomever they chose, to my way of thinking (as long as there’s nothing sexually explicit going on, in public).

Mindful of all the above, the following SPECTATOR article, which I have quoted extensively from immediately below this main body of commentary, states that the SUBARU Company deliberately elected to aim a concentrated marketing effort at lesbians with the intent to sell them their cars (specifically such AWD vehicles as the CROSS-TREK model) to this market segment. And...dot-dot-dot...they apparently succeeded beyond their wildest imaginings in the ensuing sales department experience!

But let me explain. This all prompted me think further about this rather startling revelation, mostly in the context of what I have observed myself to a limited extent hereabouts, in the vicinity of the neighborhood I live in.

Giving this further ruminative analysis, I recalled that I have noted a significant number of gays driving these admittedly attractive little Subaru Cross-Treks, over the past year or two. And what justifies my saying this, you ask yourself? It’s not just possible but distinctly probable that the small but sturdy Subaru Cross-Trek AWD vehicle appeals to a far broad range of young Americans.

Well, in my neighborhood (as in others I’ve been through), gays have been in many cases so influenced by the flagrant ‘in-your-face’, radical gay activists we have a plethora of here that they often as not unselfconsciously fly ‘rainbow’ flags in front of their houses & apartments, the same way many former servicemen and self-described ‘patriots’ fly American flags at their own homes. “Pride”, you see, often takes form in a rainbow flag.

It doesn’t take many instances seeing two gay-appearing women exiting such a place of residence that has one or several Subaru Cross-Treks in the driveway to put two and two together.

Since there seem to be quite a few gay couples in our specific neighborhood (interestingly, there are two very buff male gays that walk by the house each day dragging a huge Yugoslavian Shepherd Dog in tow, a canine type that was originally bred in Serbia, a century or more ago, to protect sheep herds from wolf predations...brrr!), as well as the ubiquitous always-present Subaru parked in front, I found myself musing absentmindedly about this phenomenon, before filing it away in my memory banks under “Miscellaneous: Gays prefer Subarus?” but giving it no further thought. Until the SPECTATOR article appeared yesterday, with the allegation that this was the product of very specific INTENTIONAL marketing effort by the Subaru Company.

Whoda thunkit!

And this Subaru marketing campaign seems to have been so successful that not just lesbians are drawn to cars like the Cross-Trek, but all manner of gays in all denominations (and in all fairness, a whole slew of non-gay Americans who recognise a quality AWD automobile suitable for just about any on-or-off-road application)!

Yoiks! Mark up another win for good old American mercantilism. The Great American Capitalist System Scores again!

Now, as I’ve observed above, I would never in my wildest imaginings ever have suspected that a traditional Japanese automotive company like Subaru would selectively put their commercial cross-hairs on a specific segment of the population that, statistically speaking, is still fairly small (regardless of all the euphemistic projections and assumptions we all hear about so many claiming to be sexually deviant...deviant from conventional, mainstream Christian male/female pairings, of course), in the main context of US demographics data.

Wow. [Pauses further to reflect on all this.]

Way back in liberal Berkeley daze (sic), we used to chuckle about the Bay Area lesbian bikers known as Dykes on Bikes (their self-proclaimed identity, naturally). But ‘Lesbians in Subarus?’ Surely, that takes the speculative and inquiring mind to entirely new heights of bemusement, in amateur armchair sociologists such as moi!

Even as I write this, I find myself still bemused, amused and mildly incredulous...despite being fuly aware of the chaotic inconsistency of today’s American society in which all conventional bets are off, all traditional gospels renounced and all wild-eyed fantasies madly and inexorably embraced without reservation!

Read the SPECTATOR material on this subject immediately below and see if your brain isn’t similarly gob-smacked or otherwise befuddled by this (the latest) manifestation of possible and very real alternate realities that exist right here under our American capitalist noses!

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From THE SPECTATOR MAGAZINE (UK edition), 29 April 2025.

by Adam Hay-Nicholls

"Is Subaru turning me into a lesbian? The Japanese brand’s unlikely love affair by Adam Hay-Nicholls “I was recently lent the latest Subaru Forester to test drive, and I enjoyed its sturdiness, its space and the frugality of its 2.0 hybrid engine. But as my mileage progressed over the course of a week’s bombing around the back roads of north Norfolk, I started to have a hankering for a nose ring, a tattoo of interlocking female glyphs, and to dye my hair pink and blue and wear dungarees. I put on a k.d. lang playlist, drove home, and watched Angelina Jolie in Gia. Was the Subaru turning me – a bloke, with no unusual pronouns – into a lesbian?

“Let me explain. In the 1990s, Subaru launched a calculated and groundbreaking advertising campaign on the US market. Rather than try to compete with their bigger rivals (Ford, Toyota etc) over the same white-bread suburban demographic, the Japanese company went after niche groups. Subaru built respectable but drab cars, yet they had a USP: their cars were all-wheel-drive, and the five groups that were identified as willing to pay a premium for AWD were teachers, healthcare professionals, IT professionals, outdoorsy types – and lesbians.

“Lesbians – ideally outdoorsy lesbians, who perhaps worked in computers, medicine or education – found Subarus’ lack of flashiness appealing, and they liked that they could get a lot of stuff in the boot without it being as large as a pick-up. Lesbians were found to be four times more likely than the average consumer to buy a Subaru.

“So Subaru set to it, devising an ad campaign around lesbians’ active and low-key lifestyles. They cultivated Subaru’s image in such a way that it helped push gay and lesbian advertising from the fringes into the mainstream. Back in the mid-1990s, Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell was in full effect in the US military, the Defense of Marriage Act had just passed, and pop culture had yet to embrace the LGBTQ cause – so it was brave. And it worked.

“The image of Subarus in the USA is in marked contrast to here in the UK, where they’re more likely to be driven by older wax-jacketed Tory-voting rural types or, in the suburbs, young men in tracksuits who like to leave tyre ribbons in supermarket car parks. The reason for this demographical schizophrenia is twofold: in the 1980s, when the brand first became established here, Subarus were sold through agricultural machine dealers, alongside fertiliser spreaders and seed drills. Then, in the 1990s, Colin McRae came along and drove a bright blue Subaru Impreza with gold wheels to glory in the World Rally Championship. Suddenly everyone in a baseball cap wanted to go sideways in a ‘Scooby’.

“Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, the clientele was left-wing and that’s because Subaru of America hired an advertising agency called Mulryan/Nash that specialised in the LGBTQ community. One ad showed two Subarus, one with the registration plate CAMP OUT and the other XENA LVR, a reference to the TV show Xena: Warrior Princess, in which the female protagonists seemed to be lovers. There was another ad where the plate read P-TOWN, a reference to the popular gay vacation spot Provincetown, MA. There were taglines with double meanings plastered over billboards and magazine spreads: the image of an SUV or estate 4×4 tumbling over rocks with the words ‘Get out. And stay out’, or ‘It’s not a choice. It’s the way we’re built’, or ‘Entirely comfortable with its orientation’.

Another read: ‘It loves camping, dogs and long-term commitment. Too bad it’s only a car’.

“Was the Subaru turning me – a bloke, with no unusual pronouns – into a lesbian?

“Those that got it enjoyed decoding it. It was wink-wink, nudge-nudge. Those that didn’t just saw a car with a bike rack and a kayak on the roof. Although ‘Likes to be driven hard and put away wet’, which took some prime real estate in a 2003 issue of Vanity Fair, was perhaps a less subtle effort.

“While a lot of straight people were blind to the subtexts of the adverts, Subaru did receive letters from a grassroots group that accused the car manufacturer of promoting homosexuality. Everyone who wrote said they’d never buy a Subaru again. But the marketing team quickly found out that none of those threatening a boycott had ever bought a Subaru before. Some of them even misspelt Subaru.

“Subaru wasn’t the first company to create advertisements for gay and lesbian audiences, but it was the first in the United States to do so transparently and consistently. It’s a campaign that has been studied in universities, and discussed in the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Atlantic. Today, high concentrations of Subarus are to be found in the liberal meccas of San Francisco, Portland, Burlington in Vermont and Northampton, Massachusetts, and Subaru has donated millions of pounds to HIV/AIDS research and LGBTQ causes. All of which makes me feel very comfortable behind the wheel of my borrowed 2025 Forester.

"Now where can I buy some Birkenstocks?”

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Addendum:

I wrote the above, not unmindful of the fact that I have had a rather 'different' association with the whole subject of gay females, for a cisgender male. 

In the course of my earlier life, I twice fell heavily for women I later (painfully) learned were lesbians. One worked at my hospital and I got so far as to take her to a San Francisco Flamenco restaurant before she revealed to me that she was '...more interested in women than men' (ouch!). 

Another time, I made an advance towards a stunning brunette I met at a small East Bay regional park lake in the Berkeley Hills I later learned was a popular gay hangout. She was a knockout in a black one-piece tank suit, of course, but that encounter also ended painfully, with ego much dented.

Finally, while working medical contracts in Saudi Arabia, I fell (again rather heavily) for a svelt, well-educated brunette CCU RN from South Africa, who was an ultra-marathoner and who worked adjacent to my heart surgery suite. She was also a rock climber and a gymnist; wow!

We ended up running together, although she was way out of my class, distance-wise. So intensely naive was I, back then, that I didn't even discover her true gender preference until I had returned to the USA. In fact she had come to the 'Kingdom' with a girlfriend whom she was thick as thieves with. Groan! She was, by the way, what we call a 'Lipstick lesbian', so I am told.

So I'm not exactly unsympathetic towards women who prefer women...and why am I sharing this with you all? Because I wouldn't want anyone to think I had any unreasonable biases against lesbians. It wouldn't be stretching things too far to say, in fact, that "Some of my best friends have been lesbian..."

Of course, a psychiatrist would have a regular field day with the above admission and perhaps even cobble-up a popular best-selling book or two from it as well, but I'll simply end things here by acknowledging that human beings are infinitely complex creatures and all deserve more or less equal empathy and understanding...myself (hopefully) included. 

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PS: Here's a link to this year's International Women's Festival, held annually on Lesbos since the year 2000. Looks like great fun...if you're an XX person and 'of that persuasion.' This year marks their 25th anniversary.