Call Me by Your Name is a film about love.

It’s the story of the feverish summer romance between a teenager and an academic set in early 80s northern Italy. It’s tender, erotic, awkward, poignant and unarguably, unavoidably, unmistakably gay.

Since its debut in Sundance earlier this year, it’s enjoyed a steady stream of buzz, impressing critics and audiences at festivals and finally upon release last month in the UK (it hits the US later this month). The Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw awarded it five stars, calling it “ravishingly beautiful”, it boasts a 98% rating on Rotten Tomatoes and is being touted as a major contender at next year’s Oscars. One would assume that for a studio such as Sony, almost universal acclaim would be enough to propel a sturdy, problem-free campaign.

The film was launched in more than 100 cinemas, which for a small-budget romance between two men without any banner stars is still relatively ambitious (using a commonly accepted rule of 10, it would be the equivalent of releasing in over 1,000 cinemas in the US). It’s performed solidly, if not spectacularly, making £568,000 ($745,000) to date, but just over a week on from its release, Sony Pictures UK decided to shift the campaign with a staggeringly ill-advised tweet.

The post married a deservedly gushing quote from Empire magazine with an image from the film. “It’s a romance overwhelming in its intensity, a heart that swells until it has to burst,” the ad read while five golden stars lay atop. The tweet asked if followers had seen the film in question yet the real question remains, has Sony’s social media manager seen the film? Because instead of focusing on the winsome gay romance at its centre, a deliberately misleading still was used of Timothee Chalamet, who plays the focal teen, joyfully posing alongside Esther Garrel, who stars as a local girl with whom he has an understandably doomed sexual relationship.

It led to users replying with similarly inaccurate film stills (an inspiring picture of Kirsten Dunst in Hidden Figures, a romantic shot of Cate Blanchett and Kyle Chandler in Carol) and after a well-earned roasting, it was deleted.

While the majority of Sony’s campaign, both in the UK and the US, hasn’t been focused on denying the film’s queerness, the tweet served as a reminder of an awkwardness that lingers in mainstream spaces. In trying to position the film as a romance intended for a wide audience, Sony believed that fooling straight viewers was the way to go, implicitly suggesting that a same-sex relationship would be off-putting to most.

It’s a damaging implication but not a unique one.

In 2010, the US DVD cover of A Single Man boasted an image of Julianne Moore with her head rested on (gay best friend) Colin Firth’s shoulder while the synopsis spoke of unspecified romance matched with two images of misleading male-female couples.

In 2015, Sony and CBS films were criticized for the US home entertainment release of Pride, the British comedy drama about gay and lesbian activists in the 80s. The blurb was heavily tweaked for the DVD, with the group instead referred to as “London-based activists” and an accompanying image was doctored to remove a banner using the words “lesbian and gays”.

Earlier this year, the back of Oscar-winning drama Moonlight promoted it as a story of “human connection”, “self-discovery” and “unknowable forces” – all of which is true but there’s a clear denial of the importance of the film’s coming out narrative, which isn’t mentioned.

I’m not suggesting that posters or DVD sleeves for LGBTQ films need a rainbow flag positioned next to the names of the stars but there’s an undeniable reluctance, an insidious strategy that feels exclusionary. It’s indicative of an industry that still suffers from a tiresome coyness about sexuality.

Sadly there’s often a reason for such Hays Code-era marketing. Last year, a TV spot for Todd Haynes’ lesbian romance Carol was banned from Disney-owned network ABC for being too explicit. Women! With women! Yet the previous year, ads for heterosexual S&M “romance” Fifty Shades of Grey made their way to the small screen unscathed.

2017 has been great for LGBTQ films, with Call Me by Your Name, Francis Lee’s wonderful God’s Own Country (the director himself reacting to Sony’s tweet calling it “infuriating and very dull”), French Oscar contender BPM and soulful Brooklyn-based drama Beach Rats all following on from Moonlight’s surprise success at this year’s Oscars. But they remain largely on the fringe.

Hollywood’s slow introduction of gay characters within blockbusters has been, wait, what’s slower than slow? This year saw blink and you’ll miss it queerness in Power Rangers, Alien: Covenant and Beauty and the Beast while a scene confirming a character’s bisexuality was cut from Thor: Ragnarok.

The ongoing attempts to straight-wash the narratives of LGBTQ people, whether it be embedded within marketing or the films themselves, is not only offensive to the community itself but disrespectful to straight audiences. Stonewall director Roland Emmerich said that he chose a white twink to tell the story of the Stonewall riots because he thought a “straight-acting” hero would sell better with heterosexual audiences. It’s reductive and dim-witted to assume that one particular audience will respond in the same way to a piece of art, despite their overwhelming majority. If a straight cinemagoer has a problem with a gay character or a gay film then studios shouldn’t go out of their way to court them.

This year’s box office success of Get Out, Hidden Figures and Girls Trip proved to Hollywood that yes, films with black casts can become blockbusters (something that has been showcased before but largely ignored). But a gay equivalent of this scale is yet to show the industry that films, and their marketing campaigns, can be left intact and authentic without affecting the bottom dollar.

Call Me by Your Name is a love story between two men. This is not unusual or revolutionary or strange or terrifying or embarrassing but the more times that marketing departments try to suggest, however politely, that this connection is “other”, the more it will be seen as such.