While watching last night’s episode of Family Guy just now (thanks to TiVo), I was pleasantly surprised to see a Chili’s commercial featuring Esera Tuaolo, the former NFL athlete currently focusing on a musical career, who came out publicly as gay last year. It wasn’t long ago that athletes who were gay–or even presumed gay–were seen as liabilities, and were very unlikely to receive commercial endorsement contracts. And in Chili’s we have, like Wal-Mart, an institution that historically has been seen as appealing to the American middle-class mainstream demonstrating–explicitly in Wal-Mart’s case and at least implicitly in Chili’s–a wider acceptance of the gay community.

What a wonderfully queer week this has been.