The Westboro Baptist Church has at last found its medium. The hate group's over-the-top brand of expressing bigotry for basically anyone who isn't them, it turns out, is perfectly suited for the cut-heavy, silliness-fueled, 6-second world of Vining. It's like they've been an avant garde art project this whole time and only now can they fully express it.
On last night's episode of the U.K.'s Celebrity Big Brother, heavyweight champ and Arthur remake actor Evander Holyfield said some barely intelligible nonsense about gay people, namely that homosexuality is a choice, like being "handicapped," and fixable.
"I'll be honest, I really wanted to win the Best Rap Video, but this Moonman right here stands for a lot more," the rapper Macklemore said earlier this year, holding the MTV Video Music Awards "Best Video With a Social Message" trophy. The honor was for the video accompanying his gay-equality anthem "Same Love," a song that he called "the most important record" out of everything he's written. "To watch this song in the last year spread across the world is a testament to what is happening right now in America on the forefront of equality," he told the crowd, echoing the song's self-important earnestness.
G.B.F. is a good-natured teen comedy about prom queens in search of gay best friends. Its depictions of affection are chaste and its language is clean. So why does it have an R rating?
When a pair of Jehovah's Witnesses showed up at YouTuber hitmn92's front door carrying copies of the New World Translation, he knew "clean the house day" was about to be rudely interrupted.
Rolling Stone recently asked Eminem about the anti-gay content in his newish "Rap God," song. In it, the decidedly mortal man says "faggot," "fag," and "Little gay looking boy / So gay I can barely say it with a straight face looking boy." He's not homophobic, though—he's just being Marshall. Here is the excerpt from the interview, which was conducted for an upcoming cover story:
A few years ago, I was idly talking to a group of friends about Andrew Holleran's 1978 novel Dancer from the Dance. The book elegantly describes the gay culture of Manhattan and Fire Island at the time it was written, and in doing so shares some sentiment that reads less than politically correct to modern sensibilities. I lamented this—specifically some race jokes, which I think are supposed to be taken as straightforward humor—to the people that I was talking to, and one of them gently challenged my complaint. "I think that you have to take what you can from any piece of pop culture and ignore the bad stuff," she said with a shrug.
With the eyes of the nation trained firmly on which state will be next to legalize same-sex marriage, The Daily Show is naturally looking in the opposite direction: Which state will be last.
Here is an incomplete, 30-second history of Eminem's homophobia and its apparent evolution: On 2000's The Marshall Mathers LP's "Criminal," he rapped, "Hate fags? The answer's yes." In 2001, he shared the stage with one of those fags, Elton John, for a rendition of "Stan" at the Grammys. In 2010, Anderson Cooper asked him if he disliked gay people, and he said, "No, I don't have any problem with nobody. You know what I mean? I'm just like whatever." In 2012, he showed his support for marriage equality by telling The New York Times Magazine, "I think if two people love each other, then what the hell? I think that everyone should have the chance to be equally miserable, if they want."
The second in Stephen Fry's gay-centric, two-part Out There documentary series aired last night in England. (The first, which featured Fry frying an ex-gay therapist, aired earlier this week.) In Part 2, we finally saw the results of Fry's publicized March meeting with Vitaly Milonov, the man commonly credited as the writer of the anti-"gay propaganda" law that's played a major role in Russia's current wave of gay oppression. Fry didn't hold back this time and was, in fact, much less polite than when he met with the ex-gay quack.
A white, heterosexual, stay-at-home dad says he was forced to acknowledge his "trifecta of privilege" this past weekend after finding a gay slur stuck to his luggage following a flight and feeling the degradation, shame, and humiliation homosexuals are made to feel "every day over a lifetime."
Well, this is too bad. Guido Barilla, head of the world's biggest pasta brand, went on an anti-gay rant on Italian radio yesterday, proclaiming that he would never OK a commercial depicting a gay family and that if gays don't like his views "they can eat another pasta."
