[If you're unable to view, go directly to the site: baskit 'switch' video promo from Alex King & Mito Media on Vimeo.]

Be still my beating crotch!

While that video is aimed directly at gay men, marketing underwear has seen a shift over the last decade or so. Echelon, a website for the LGBT business community, recently published an interesting piece about how underwear brands that were once marketed exclusively to gay men are now being marketed to mainstream America - often using the same risque concepts that were never meant to appeal to more than just the gay community.

Ever since Calvin Klein's men's underwear ads were plastered all over Times Square, in numerous fashion magazines and on television in the 1990s, fashionable men's underwear has taken a shift from being associated predominantly with the gay community and has found its rightful place within the mainstream men's market.

Over the last decade, underwear brands such as /baskit/, Andrew Christian, 2(x)ist and Ginch Gonch have gone just as far as Calvin Klein by appealing to both the gay and straight male sensibilities. By creating mainstream advertisements with a gay undertone, or by first building a foundation within the gay community and then branching out into the mainstream men's market, these companies have seen sales ebb and flow over the last several years....

Since those early days in the 1990s, perhaps fueled by the bold sexuality of Calvin Klein's underwear ads, men have been much more comfortable embracing their sexuality in any way they desire to express it. It was Calvin Klein's initial foray into underwear as "out" wear that catalyzed in younger American men a greater self-awareness of the male form and a newly defined sense of masculinity.