To help unpack this issue further,
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Mic
It’s tiring but it’s not new. Both Chelsea [Handler] and Jimmy Kimmel are people who cut their teeth doing comedy in the late ’90s, early 2000s, when that was just a go-to joke that everyone relied and depended on — “Let’s call the homophobe gay, won’t that be funny and ridiculous?” — and they don’t really think about the construction of homosexuality they’re making. They don’t think about the way it reflects on actual gay people. And I think it’s just reflective of the fact that comedy, for such a long time, has treated gay people as a frequent object, but has very few actual gay voices within it.
I [also] think it’s really good and exciting that gay men are starting to have some self-respect. For such a long time, we just wanted to feel included and when a comic made a joke about us that wasn’t saying we were perverts or sex criminals, we didn’t really care if it characterized us as ridiculous. We wanted to show we were cool and were in on the joke.
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That it’s a great instinct to call someone out as long as you’re not throwing an entire community under the bus. You don’t have to punch down in order to punch up. That’s what this feels like, that she’s making a joke about Jeff Sessions at the expense of queer people. I think it’s just lazy and simplistic to lump in [a vulnerable community] when you’re punching at someone else.
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Chelsea’s defense for all this stuff is usually, “This is so stupid. I was just being stupid, it’s just funny — funny is funny,” and other late-night hosts usually similarly trivialize complaints in that way. They act as if they’re trivializing their own behavior, but what they’re actually doing by brushing this stuff off is further trivializing the community who is telling them they’ve been harmed by these statements.
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Mic
It’s an odd hill to die on. As a queer comic, I would love to talk about Kacey Musgraves’ new album instead of this shit — there are so many other important gay issues right now.
It’s too easy for comics to be making these jokes in 2018. We’re well beyond that.
Also, I don’t want these comics to issue a public apology. All I want them to do is make sure Ariana Grande gets to do a concert version of
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Queer comedians explain what’s wrong with all those gay jokes about Trump and Putin, via @mic ...
“There is a substantial risk that this data was misused, and given what we know about the company and the lengths that they’re willing to do for their clients, I think it is worth a serious investigation,” Wylie said.
“I didn’t work on the Trump campaign, so of course I can’t say one way or the other whether Trump used it or not,” he added. “But we do know a lot of things about this company that I think a reasonable person, knowing these things, would want to ask some pretty tough questions about what happened to that data.”
“Facebook knows more about its business, its algorithms, its methodology, than any of us in Congress do. I’m hoping that Mr. Zuckerberg will come to the table and say, ‘Okay here are the problems, here are some suggested solutions, let’s talk it through together,’” Kennedy said Sunday.
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Mic is the leading digital news company, reporting on the most important issues and diverse perspectives that challenge conventional thinking and give voice to the underrepresented.
Mic’s Editorial Manifesto
Mic’s Commitments
Mic was founded in 2011 by Chris Altchek and Jake Horowitz, born of the recognition that a new generation of Change Makers crave journalism to give meaning to the world at a moment of great transformation. We are headquartered in New York with teams in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, Toronto, Kiev, and Stockholm. Mic is a privately held, venture-backed, for-profit media company on a mission to reveal and amplify stories that reshape the world. Our principal investors are Lightspeed Venture Partners, Clark Jermoluk Founders Fund, WPP Ventures, Time Warner Investments and Axel Springer.
Making money, explained
Mic partners with advertisers to drive their business goals. Our approach to advertising mirrors our editorial ethos: to tell great stories that change minds. We partner through best-in-class video production, social distribution, media and measurement. To learn more, email
[email protected].