The Angry Fag

News and Views from a Man Who Likes Men

Jay Leno Earns Ire of Avenue Q Writer

Posted on | April 23, 2006

It is nothing new that gay people are the butt of many jokes. However Jay Leno has apparently been on a big kick of them lately, prompting the annoyance of writer/composer Jeff Whitty who wrote the musical "Avenue Q". Whitty decided to take his annoyance and put it into a letter to Jay Leno which I am reprinting:

Dear Mr. Leno,

My name is Jeff Whitty. I live in New York City. I’m a playwright and the author of Avenue Q, which is a musical currently running on Broadway. I’ve been watching your show a bit, and I’d like to make an observation:

When you think of gay people, it’s funny. They’re funny folks. They wear leather. They like Judy Garland. They like disco music. They’re sort of like Stepin Fetchit as channeled by Richard Simmons.

Gay people, to you, are great material.

Mr. Leno, let me share with you my view of gay people:

When I think of gay people, I think of the gay news anchor who took a tire iron to the head several times when he was vacationing in St. Martin. I think of my friend who was visiting Hamburger Mary’s, a gay restaurant in Las Vegas, when a bigot threw a smoke bomb filled with toxic chemicals into the restaurant, leaving the staff and gay clientele coughing, puking, and running in terror. I think of visiting my gay friends at their house in the country, sitting outside for dinner, and hearing, within hundreds of feet of where we sat, taunting voices yelling "Faggots!" I think of hugging my boyfriend goodbye for the day on 8th Avenue in Manhattan and being mocked and taunted by passing high school students.

When I think of gay people, I think of suicide. I think of a countless list of people who took their own lives because the world was so toxically hostile to them. Because of the deathly climate of the closet, we will never be able to count them. You think gay people are great material. I think of a silent holocaust that continues to this day. I think of a silent holocaust that is perpetuated by people like you, who seek to minimize us and make fun of us and who I suspect really, fundamentally wish we would just go away.

When I think of gay people, I think of a brave group that has made tremendous contributions to society, in arts, letters, science, philosophy, and politics. I think of some of the most hilarious people I know. I think of a group that has served as a cultural guardian for an ungrateful and ignorant America.

I think of a group of people who have undergone a brave act of inventing themselves. Every single out-of-the-closet gay person has had to say, "I am not part of mainstream society." Mr. Leno, that takes bigger balls than stepping out in front of TV-watching America every night. I daresay I suspect it takes bigger balls to come out of the closet than anything you have ever done in your life.

I know you know gay people, Mr. Leno. Are they just jokes to you, to be snickered at behind their backs? Despite the angry tenor of my letter, I suspect you’re a better man than that. I don’t bother writing letters to the "God Hates Fags" people, or Donald Wildmon, or the pope. But I think you can do better. I know it’s The Tonight Show, not a White House press conference, but you reach a lot of people.

I caught your show when you had a tired mockery of Brokeback Mountain, involving something about a horse done up in what you consider a "gay" way. Man, that’s dated. I turned the television off and felt pretty fucking depressed. And now I understand your gay-baiting jokes have continued.

Mr. Leno, I have a sense of humor. It’s my livelihood. And being gay has many hilarious aspects to it—none of which, I suspect, you understand. I’m tired of people like you. When I think of gay people, I think of centuries of suffering. I think of really, really good people who’ve been gravely mistreated for a long time now.

You’ve got to cut it out, Jay.

Sincerely,

Jeff Whitty

New York, N.Y.

I think Jeff makes some valid points. It is one thing to make a joke here and there or capitalize on the controversy surrounding ‘Brokeback Mountain’, but a constant barrage of jokes crosses a line both in taste and in originality.

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Comments

One Response to “Jay Leno Earns Ire of Avenue Q Writer”

  1. CubPaws2008
    September 2nd, 2008 @ 5:44 pm

    As a gay man, I agree homophobia still remains a major problem in our society — but I personally don’t think Jay Leno is one of its purveyors. I don’t watch the Tonight Show every night, so perhaps I’ve missed something - but from what I’ve seen, Tonight Show jokes are much more in the vein of “humorous redeployment of pop-cultural and social references” than “mean-spirited mockery”. [E.g., famously-hetero celeb A has been repeatedly sighted drinking at the bar with famously-hetero celeb B - pretty soon we're going to see them herding sheep in Wyoming!]

    It’s certainly easy to understand WHY a social minority that still faces frequent bigotry might be sensitive to anything that references us at all, no matter how innocently… but that still doesn’t mean the references are homophobic as a matter of objective fact, or that the speaker’s motives were homophobic. Non-hateful humor relies on an element of recognition that something in everyday life is actually, when you sit and think about it, kind of funny - so being the subject of innocent and well-intentioned humor actually means we’ve ARRIVED as a recognized everyday part of society. We’re no longer invisible - society no longer dances around our existence in disgust. (When Pat Riley of the Lakers blamed his team’s loss on the other squad’s Brokeback Mountain offensive strategy (”isolate and penetrate”), a lot of us were so busy being Righteously Offended that we failed to see how revolutionary it truly was: a well-respected straight participant in one of the world’s straightest idioms was perfectly comfortable making an explicit reference to gay sex at a nationwide press conference!)

    Sure, there are still mean-spirited gay jokes out there… but not every reference to our sexuality is necessarily pejorative. Determining whether something is said with bigoted or hateful intent requires a much broader examination into the context of the joke or statement. It can be kind of a fuzzy and time-consuming test, but we owe it to our fellow human beings so we can avoid making undeserved odious accusations.

    (Oh, and I didn’t want to lean on this too much, because I thought it might come off as catty… but I thought it priceless that the complainant here was a writer for AVENUE Q. Yes, the same show that pointed out, in full song, that “everyone’s a little bit racist”… and mined plenty-o-laughs out of it).

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