America's fascination with the kiss cam: For better or worse, it's here to stay

USA Today

3 days ago

'Are you not entertained?' Russell Crowe's Maximus famously bellowed to the Colosseum crowd in the 2000 film 'Gladiator.' But for decades, kiss cams have been posing a different question to U.S. sports fans and concertgoers: 'Are you not the entertainment?'
Whether lighthearted distraction or comic relief, the ubiquitous arena and stadium feature is as American as apple pie — or at least as American as baking an apple pie and posting it on social media.
Live competition and performance offer us communal experience on a massive scale, but they also offer a chance to make memories and — with the aid of kiss cams — to become part of the entertainment ourselves. For a few back-to-back moments, as the camera zeroes in on its various targets, fans watch with curiosity, anticipation, excitement and maybe even self-conscious dread.
'These events are epic, nostalgic, and for some even narcissistic,' said Adam Resnick, founder of 15 Seconds of Fame, a Los Angeles-based company whose app allows participating fans featured on in-venue video boards like kiss cams to download and share the footage as a digital souvenir.
The origins of the kiss cam are frustratingly foggy but Resnick and others agree they burst onto sports scenes in the 1980s, in the years after sports franchises began introducing increasingly massive color video screens at ballparks and stadiums. Designed to fill breaks in the action and typically set to cheesy pop ballads, the kiss cam was a major innovation that shifted the focus from courts and fields into the stands.
The feature is pretty much a slam dunk, with the camera's roving eye picking out random pairs of people in the stands who may or may not be actual couples — and therein lies part of the fun. Reactions are broadcast on the venue's giant video boards: If they kiss, the crowd cheers, while refusals draw playful jeers or laughter.
"We love love," said Pepper Schwartz, a professor emeritus of sociology at the University of Washington in Seattle. When couples oblige, she said, "it's a feel-good feeling that transfers from one person to another and makes us optimistic."
Kiss cams are cheap entertainment designed to keep audiences engaged when they could easily check out, said Joseph Darowski, an assistant professor of English at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah.
'The energy of the live crowd is incredibly important, and the kiss cam helps to prevent it from dying down,' said Darowski, co-author of 'Survivor: A Cultural History,' a book that in part explores the rise of reality TV. 'Sporting events are not just about the game being played. It's the entire entertainment experience.'
Any additional theatrics are generally a bonus — at least for the audience. But as illustrated by the now infamous July 16 incident at a Coldplay concert in Gillette Stadium in Foxborough, Massachusetts, that's not always the case for the featured individuals.
When reactions tell the story
It was the shot broadcast around the world – the TikTok'd footage of a couple at a Coldplay concert caught mid-cuddle.
'Either they're having an affair, or they're just very shy,' Coldplay singer Chris Martin quipped after seeing the video from the stage. The video of the July 16 incident at Gillette Stadium has received more than 129 million views on TikTok alone.
The viral moment and its professional and personal fallout, Schwartz said, prompted reactions ranging from amusement and fascination to, for those who've been involved in similar circumstances, schadenfreude and relief. But it wouldn't have unfolded the way it did without the kiss cam.
The couple seen on the screen "could have saved themselves from worldwide derision had they waved and looked like, 'This is no big deal,'" Schwartz said. "But they took the second instinct, which was to flee. And that was the funny one."
'It could have been a vanilla, fleeting moment,' Resnick agreed. 'However, their reaction told a story."
The episode illustrated how kiss cams have provoked occasional embarrassment and controversy since their debut. In addition to outing potential infidelities, their use in the past has been accused of pressuring unwilling participants to take part and shamed for promoting homophobia by showing same-sex couples for laughs.
It also showed the hazards of baring private matters in public in the age of kiss cams, smartphones and social media.
'The expectation of privacy at a public event has never existed, and today, with camera ubiquity, it's preposterous for anyone to take that position,' Resnick said.
More often, though, kiss cams offer those attending live events the chance to score a cameo in their own experience, claiming part or even all of those 15 seconds of fame once foretold for all of us. The power of those moments, Resnick said, lies in their organic nature.
'Authenticity can't be staged in real time,' he said. 'It resonates in the social zeitgeist.'
Kiss cams 'an important metric' of acceptance
The kiss cam's evolution hasn't been without its stumbles.
In 2015, Syracuse University discontinued its kiss cam feature after a letter to the local newspaper cited a pair of troubling instances at the football team's game against Wake Forest. Steve Port of Manlius, N.Y., wrote that the kiss cam segment had twice featured young women who expressed unwillingness to participate but were forced to anyway, either by their male counterpart or by surrounding students.
Meanwhile, a dozen or so years have passed since some major league sports franchises were accused of promoting homophobia by using kiss cams to poke fun at other teams. In those cases, after featuring a series of smooching male-female couples, the kiss cam segments ended by focusing on two of the home team's rival players, or even fans – suggesting they might kiss, and that doing so would be comedic.
As a fan of the NFL's Jacksonville Jaguars complained after such a segment in a 2013 letter to team owner Shahid Khan, initially reported by Outsports: 'Hilarious, right? No, and the message is clear. Jaguars are heterosexual and approved. The opponent is 'gay,' disapproved and the butt of a crude joke.'
A year earlier, pitcher Brandon McCarthy of Major League Baseball's Oakland A's had similarly condemned the practice after a game against the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim.
'They put two guys on the 'Kiss Cam' tonight,' McCarthy posted on the social platform now known as X. 'What hilarity!! (by hilarity I mean offensive homophobia). Enough with this stupid trend.'
Later, McCarthy — now sporting director for the USL Championship's Phoenix Rising FC — told the San Francisco Chronicle: "If there are gay people who are coming to a game and seeing something like that, you can't assume they're comfortable with it. If you're even making a small group of people ... feel like outcasts, then you're going against what makes your model successful."
Before long, franchises were striving to be more inclusive, and in 2015, MLB's New York Mets told the Huffington Post they would no longer feature opposing players in their kiss cam segments; that same year, the Dodgers included a gay couple in its kiss cam.
'Kiss cams are an important metric in measuring how acceptable certain people are in a given community,' said Stephanie Bonvissuto, an adjunct assistant professor of women's and gender studies at Hunter College and Brooklyn College, both part of the City University of New York system.
In early 2017, the Ad Council's 'Love Has No Labels' campaign produced a commercial featuring kiss cam footage from that year's NFL Pro Bowl in Orlando, Florida, where 49 people had been killed seven months earlier in a mass shooting at gay nightclub Pulse.
'Kiss Cams have been a part of sports culture for years,' the opening text read, but at that game, it continued, they 'became part of something bigger.'
The images showed pairs of individuals, outlined by a heart, broadcast on Camping World Stadium's giant screens. Friends were featured. So, too, were same-sex and interracial couples.
Then the camera zoomed in on two women in the stands, one of them wearing a shirt reading 'Orlando survivor.' The two turned and kissed, to the crowd's delight.
Still, Bonvissuto said it's still rare to see LGBTQ couples featured on kiss cams beyond Pride Night events. While cautioning that she hasn't seen any statistics on such representation, she said the footage she's viewed largely features white, able-bodied and seemingly cisgender individuals.
'Kiss cams act as a means to exclude certain people,' she said. 'They're incredibly important in thinking about representation — who we're seeing and not seeing.'
'Socially acceptable' voyeurism
But for the most part, kiss cams have offered streams of harmless fun, fodder for highlight and blooper reels and glimpses into the relationships of everyone from fellow citizens to celebrities and sitting and former U.S. presidents.
Kiss cams, said BYU's Darowski, offer audiences the constant thrill of knowing they could be onscreen combined with 'a socially acceptable, safe form of voyeurism that is traditionally taboo.'
The presumed authenticity of couples' raw, unrehearsed reactions is key, too, he said.
'So much of our entertainment is highly mediated, edited and packaged for our consumption,' he said.
It doesn't always play out as planned – and not all of it is necessarily genuine, thanks to some sports teams' creative minds. Many couples share crowd-pleasing kisses. Others, not so much. Some, snubbed by their companions, stomp off in a huff or peck adjacent fans instead, while youthful pairs looking to lock lips are thwarted by chaperoning adults.
Whether any of it is staged doesn't matter much. Fans and audiences alike have enjoyed their moment in the limelight.
Resnick, of 15 Seconds of Fame, recalled a moment in June 2024 after a Dallas Mavericks loss in game five of the NBA Finals. The arena cameras zeroed on a fan tearful over the outcome.
While it wasn't part of the kiss cam feature, 'the minute he saw himself on the Jumbotron, he smiled and kissed the girl (who was) with him,' Resnick said. 'That's all you need to know about what those 15 seconds mean to fans.'