Jay Leno's joking about a male-to-female transsexual has the National Transgender Advocacy Coalition (NTAC) in high dudgeon, planetout.com reports. The transsexual activists criticized the Tonight Show host for "prime time dehumanizing of transsexuals," adding that "Destroying the positive impact our community makes, simply for the purpose of gratuitous laughter, serves to objectify transgender people and crush their hope."
Leno's offense was in reference to a male-to-female transsexual recently honored as Woman of the Year in San Francisco. Leno joked that the California Assembly "awarded a man who had a sex change as its Woman of the Year. When he accepted the award, he said there was a part of him that didn't want to accept it, but that's gone now."
Now, I admit Leno should have said "she" rather than "he." But were Leno's remarks really "dehumanizing"? Being ribbed by Leno is arguably a sign of your identity group's acceptance into pop culture, that you're no longer unmentionable. Moreover, the facts of what happens during a sex change operation are always going to make a lot of people queasy; jokes such as Leno's are a way of acknowledging this with humor.
But even if you think the joke offensive, the tone of the
activists' protest statement is overwrought and counterproductive.
For instance, NTAC goes on to claim:
"Violence like the type [murdered California transsexual Gwen Araujo] experienced is the end effect of the sort of dehumanizing treatment of transgender people that NBC has displayed with their choice of programming and Jay Leno's choice of seemingly harmless humor."
Exaggerated hyperbole of the type NTAC displays is what causes people to dismiss activists as ideological dogmatic grievance collectors, rather than people whom it might be worthwhile to talk with.
Oh, and NTAC also wants conservative commentator Michael Savage's MSNBC show taken off the air, in case he should say something offensive about transsexuals on his show (which, to date, has not mentioned gays or transsexuals).
Book Review: Bean Ball
Billy Bean, the former major league baseball player who came out of the closet a few years ago, now tells his story in Going the Other Way, just published by Marlowe. He says he's much happier living quietly in Miami with his partner than he ever was playing the game he loved while staying in the closet. Dodgers manager Tommy Lasorda used to call him "Billy Bean, Billy Bean, the boy of every girl's dream." And judging by the cover picture, the dream of a few boys as well. But he also describes Lasorda's homophobic jokes in the locker room, even while Tommy's own son was dying of AIDS.
The emotional high point of the book is the day that his first lover, Sam, collapsed in their San Diego home. Although Sam had AIDS, he had not seemed to be at such risk. Billy raced him to the hospital and insisted that "I AM his family." But Sam died about 6 a.m. After which Billy went home and called his mother--who thought Sam was just a friend. Mom came over to console him, still unaware of the depth of his loss, and urged him to pull himself together and get down to the 11 a.m. City Hall celebration for the team. After the event, he drove a teammate up to Anaheim for that night's game, ran out of gas on the way, got to the game late, got a hit, and then got sent down to the minors--about 28 hours after he first found Sam in distress, and all without having a single friend or family member who knew what he had lost.
There's not much politics in the book, and gays may think it has too much baseball and too little sex. Let's just hope that baseball fans think it has just the right amount of baseball and not too much gay sex. If so, they'll get a good sense of what it's like for an all-American boy who loves baseball to struggle with living in the closet. And we can all be glad that, in the end, he seems to be living happily ever after.
As gossipy news stories speculate about the sexual orientation of current and retired ballplayers, and the Broadway hit Take Me Out dramatizes the topic, Bean provides the inside track on how the sports scene is, and isn't, changing.
Corvino's Rainbow Tour
Reminder: IGF contributing author John Corvino's national
lecture tour is underway. His IGF bio page
provides his schedule.
--Stephen H. Miller
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