UPDATE: The LGBT media letter continues to gain momentum among journalists, bloggers and LGBT organizers and activists. Perhaps most compelling of the new signatories are the current and former employees of Out Magazine, including Michael Goff, CEO/Partner at Towleroad, who was co-founder of Out and its first Editor-in-chief and president. My former editor at Out, Kevin Koffler, noted on my Facebook page that Out now “lacks the intention we had once upon a time. (The late co-founder) Sarah Pettit must be rolling in her grave.” On the other hand, OutFront editor Berlin Sylvestre just posted a defense of the magazine, saying “don’t shoot the messenger.” Meanwhile, the Trump trolls are having a field day, posting nasty, snarky and at times funny tweets on my Twitter page, including this new meme:
BY KAREN OCAMB | I come from a long journalistic tradition of not signing any petition for or against a cause I might wind up covering, lest my signature prove evidence of a conflict of interest in my approach to the subject. But on Wednesday, Sept. 21, I signed onto an open letter from members of the LGBT media and organizers condemning Out Magazine for its glossy, glamorized profile of alt-right gay poster boy and Internet bully, Milo Yiannopoulos.
I signed not only because I agree with the sentiment—written by ThinkProgress LGBT editor Zack Ford—but because I consider the entire spread to be one long advertisement for Donald Trump, who, according to the article, Yiannopoulos likes to think of as “Daddy.”
The letter pushes back on Out author Chadwick Moore’s apparent awe of and collusion in celebrating Yiannopoulos’ parroting of Trump’s call for the end to “political correctness” — which some of us simply call civility. The “serious problem” with the profile, the letter says, is that it “negligently perpetuates harm against the LGBT community.”
The letter spells out some of that harm: “Here is a white supremacist whose entire career has been built on the attention he can get for himself through provocation. His attacks against women, people of color, Muslims, transgender people, and basically anybody who doesn’t like him are as malicious as they come, and he catalyzes his many ‘alt-right’ followers to turn on any target he deems worthy of abuse. This puff piece — complete with a cutesy clown photoshoot — makes light of Yiannopoulos’s trolling while simultaneously providing him a pedestal to further extend his brand of hatred. Indeed, he does so in the profile itself, openly slurring the transgender community, which Out published without any apparent concern.”
Here’s an example of that concern. After expounding on how “gays are smarter than anyone else,” Yiannopoulos is “less generous toward the transgender community,” Moore writes.
“On the one hand, you have the trans lobby that’s all about control and oppression and misery and victimhood and grievance culture. And then drag queens, which is about taking the same kind of pain and expressing it through gender-defying comedy and transgression and subversion. I’m very much in the second camp,” Yiannopoulos tells Out, which then reports on the Breibart writer’s sigh over the lack of humor in every day life.
The excerpt:
“’You really expect me to believe that I shouldn’t laugh about trannies? It’s hilarious. Like, dude thinks he’s a woman?’ He bursts into a fit of laughter, struggling to catch his breath.
‘I’m not saying I want them to be locked up or castrated or God-knows-what. I want the opposite. But we can’t admit that it’s funny? Being gay is funny! Lesbians are fucking hilarious.’
In another era, might Yiannopoulos have been on the left, on the side of the civil rights movement or the Vietnam War protests?”
So Moore asks not if the transgender community has valid grievances or if Yiannopoulos comprehends why they might feel oppressed – but rather he shifts the conversation to the civil rights movement of “another era,” as if African Americans are still not fighting for equality and the very basic right to vote.
Moore suggests that he has asked about charges that Yiannopoulos is racist – but never goes to the next step and explores the allegation that Yiannopoulos is a white supremacist. “Yiannopoulos attempts to dismiss claims of his being racist by saying that he has sex only with black men. Might that simply be fetishism, and therefore dehumanizing and racist?” Moore writes.
“If I were an artist creating fetishized images of black bodies, like trying to compare them to animals in some way, yeah, that could be racist,” he says. “Let’s have that conversation. But the fact is, I just like fucking blacks and, ergo, [am] unlikely to be a racist.”
No follow up? What about that comment earlier in the piece where Yiannopoulos says he wears $1,000 Nike basketball shoes “because the guys I want to fuck know what they are but can’t afford them” – is that not dehumanizing?
Yiannopoulos sounds very Trumpian in his comments about Black Lives Matter, a movement he describes as “hugely destructive and counterproductive for black people” that “has achieved nothing else but to divide people and to fuel racism,” he says.
And then, like Trump, he brings it back to himself. “It’s just not the right response. If you have a community with a reputation of being aggressive and obnoxious and unreasonable and wallowing in victimhood, that’s the last thing you do. They should be getting under people’s skin. Get under the skin of conservatives, make people uncomfortable and do it by being better-looking and funnier and smarter and more interesting than everybody else. That’s how I do it, and that’s how to win in culture,” he tells Moore.
Earlier in the article, Moore writes that Yiannopoulos’ “singular mission is to destroy what he sees as the progressive left’s culture of victimhood, identity politics, political correctness, and social justice.”
“Nobody should be playing the victim,” he says. “Nobody should be doing this grievance, oppression bullshit malarkey. Everyone should just get on with achieving everything that they can in their lives.”
And yet time and time again, Yiannopoulos plays “the victim” – which goes unchallenged by Moore.
“At one event, claiming he feared for his safety from feminist activists, he hired as his bodyguard a porn star rumored to have the largest penis in the industry,” Moore writes with the emphasis on the porn, not the supposed fear for his safety.
“Everybody has bad shit happen to them, and you either use it to turn yourself into a star or you become a victim. And I don’t have time for victims,” he says after becoming “vulnerable describing his abusive family background. “If you allow the bad things in your life to define you, you will only ever be a parasite.” No follow up.
“When Yiannopoulos announced he was moving to the United States, Bannon asked him to reconsider, believing his voice resonated more powerfully from the other side of the Atlantic. But Yiannopoulos told Bannon that he was concerned by Muslims in London becoming radicalized. As a visible gay man and an outspoken critic of Islam, he feared for his life,” Moore writes. No follow up on whether that’s “victimization” or why even radicalized terrorists would know or care specifically about him.
But then, like Trump, Yiannopoulos might simply have an amorphous fear of Muslims. Last year I wrote about “The Trumpification of America” in which I noted Trump’s mocking response to disabled New York Times reporter Serge Kovaleski’s challenging the Republican candidate’s factual accuracy about seeing “thousands and thousands” of Muslims in New Jersey “cheering” as the Twin Towers fell on 9/11.
I included comments about Trump giving rise to the alt-right and White Supremacy. “He’s made it ok to talk about these incredible concerns of European Americans today, because I think European Americans know they are the only group that can’t defend their own essential interests and their point of view,” former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard and Louisiana Rep. David Duke told Politico. “He’s meant a lot for the human rights of European Americans.”
But, as a Mother Jones Sept. 21 investigation on “the Horde of Neo-Nazis, Klansmen, and Other Extremist Leaders Endorsing Donald Trump” points out, the racist, nationalistic, homophobic (“faggot” is common usage) radicalization of ignorant, angry Americans is becoming dangerous and can easily spill over from outrageous Twitter trolling to real life.
In an Editor’s note at the beginning of the profile, Out begs off any suggestion that its lavish profile of the gay Trump trickster is adding fuel to flames of bigotry. “Editor’s Note: It should not need saying that the views expressed by the subject of this piece in no way represent the opinions of this magazine, but in this era of social media tribalism, the mere act of covering a contentious person can be misinterpreted as an endorsement. If LGBTQ media takes its responsibilities seriously we can’t shy away from covering queer people who are at the center of this highly polarized election year, and we ask you to assess Milos Yiannopoulos, the focus of this profile, on his own words without mistaking them for ours.”
Out editor Aaron Hicklin added on Twitter “To be clear Out has always honored LGBT diversity, highlighted its struggles, and celebrated the richness of its intersectional cultures.” He could not escape the barrage of tweets blasting the piece (Towleroad’s Sean Mandell, a signatory to the LGBT media letter, has a slew of tweets illustrating the “take down.”)
The outrage was picked up by the mainstream media. TheWrap noted that Yiannopoulos had been banned from Twitter “for instigating a wave of racist abuse targeting ‘Ghostbusters’ star Leslie Jones. He is also one of the best-known faces of the ‘alt-right’ movement, which has been associated with white supremacism, antisemitism, and extreme right-wing populism.”
But Hicklin tells TheWrap in an email, “Naturally, we anticipated a negative reaction, but I hope readers will recognize that the strength of our profile lies in the diligent way Chadwick Moore interrogates his subject.”
So where is the diligent interrogation of this:
“Like it or not, Donald Trump is bringing subversion, decadence, and troublemaking back to gay life,” Yiannopoulos wrote in “How Donald Trump Made It Cool to Be Gay Again” for Breitbart News. “The domestication of the homosexual has been a disaster for leftists: Not only did the boring and stupid gays retreat into conservative institutions like marriage, but the fun and creative ones like me…are rebelling against the language policing and authoritarianism of the modern left and feeling ourselves drawn to the trollish chaos of the Republican frontrunner.”
And where is the diligent interrogation of this promo for Trump through Yiannopoulos?
“[People’s] sexual preference doesn’t drive everything, and I think that’s what Trump is saying,” Steven Bannon, the Breitbart executive chairman who is running Trump’s campaign, told Out’s Moore. “Trump offers up a vision for America where everyone can kind of work together. I also think he takes very seriously things like radical Islam, which, to me, is the number one threat to gay people in the world, that we cover extensively at Breitbart. There’s been no broader acceptance of Milo than the readership at Breitbart. I mean, they love the guy. But that’s how change is made. You know why they love Milo? He’s a fighter. He’s absolutely fearless.”
And where is the diligent interrogation of this – even with a caustic “really”?
“Donald Trump is such an obvious gay icon,” Yiannopoulos says in the salon. “He’s brassy, he’s outrageous, his taste in interiors is gaudy and exhibitionist. He’s a heavy-handed caricature of a billionaire. Everything about him is at once fantastic and camp. He’s the drag queen you can vote for.”
But Moore doesn’t ask these questions, lest he be perceived as part of the uncool liberal media. He tips his hand early on. “A professional mischief maker and provocateur, he loves a grand entrance. Wherever Yiannopoulos goes, the Loki from London swoops in with rapid-fire talking points delivered in a playfulness so foreign—and intoxicating—to most journalists and Americans that they are left standing in the rubble, dumbfounded.”
So dumbfounded, so enraptured, Moore forsakes even the slight hit of journalism for fawning transcription, as in this excerpt:
—“The whole Trump project, the alt-right project, Breitbart, we recognize the media as public enemy number one,” he says. “Is the media then going to report nicely about us? Of course not. At Trump rallies, the press pen is raised and at the back of the room and he’s pointing at them, saying ‘Look at this garbage, these slimeballs.’ And the whole crowd is cheering. You think those people are going to report accurately on what happened? Of course they won’t.”
He continues, “At least politicians recognize the fact that everyone hates them and nobody trusts them. Journalists haven’t yet worked out that everyone hates them. When people are ridiculing them and correcting them and calling them out on their bad behavior online, they dismiss it as trolling and abuse and harassment and they close their comments sections. They don’t stop and think, If 80% of the comments on 80% of our pieces are blisteringly negative, should we perhaps reflect on whether we are getting it right? The internet doesn’t bring out the worst in people—it reveals people for how they are. This is the nice, polite, politically correct middle classes at war with the working classes, who speak in a far more vulgar, direct, and explicit way. It’s a class thing.”—-
Or classless. Yiannopoulos, Moore and Out mimicked one of Trump’s biggest tropes—that it is the media’s responsibility to “report nicely about us?” Out did that.
I did my due diligence before signing that letter condemning Out. I have friends who work there. But, as Zack Ford wrote in the letter: “As members of the LGBT media, we believe we all must hold ourselves and each other to a higher standard,” one that in no way causes harm to LGBT people.
I agree with that.
And I agree with this from the letter, too: “The political climate right now is particularly toxic, and those of us who report on the LGBT community know firsthand what it’s like to be targeted by those who would oppress us, particularly those of us who have been attacked because of our race or gender identity. We stand apart from those who would sell out the community to promote this toxicity for clicks and profits.”
I’m sure that, like Trump, the vacuous Yiannopoulos will be happy with the publicity. Any publicity. I don’t care. I think/hope this trickster is a passing fad. But in the meantime, he’s embarrassingly dangerous and we should know that.
The LGBT media letter ends with a promise for all of us to do better.
I believe that, too. And that’s why I signed.
— Troy Masters, publisher of this newspaper, also signed the letter
