great show guys.

as for ellen and larry king, she did discuss his death very recently on her show.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QcMEL3_YsVI

~gabe

The point I was making with Ellen and Anderson Cooper is that although their personal feelings for his brutal murder Lawrence King are sincere and public, they fearfully choose to avoid putting themselves in harms way.

The ONE thing they could do to reduce hate in this country, which is speaking regularly on their own sexuality, they avoid it like the plague. Neither Anderson nor Ellen talk about their relationships, their attraction to members of the same sex, or their personal experiences with discrimination. They are silent.

Imagine a world where media folks like Ellen or Anderson would talk about their partners on a daily basis the way we all do. Their visibility carries a responsibility to educate their audiences about GLBT acceptance. Not tolerance, acceptance. Embracing queer people in America. Do they do that? No.

Do they shed tears when they witness the pain and suffering of GLBT people? Yes. Do they make an honest attempt to educate their audiences on GLBT acceptance and embracing our differences? No.

It\’s okay to cry, but after the tears are shed, do something about it!

Imagine if Oprah never spoke about being a black woman. Imagine if Larry King never spoke about being Jewish. Imagine if David Letterman didn\’t speak up about being ugly as a monkfish.

I don\’t want to blame them for anything, I just want to remind them and all of us that we can do simple things in our everyday lives to tell the world that not only gay people exist, but that we must be embraced and loved in order to live in a just and peaceful society.

Okay Fausto I have to defend Ellen a little here.
I saw a few episodes of Ellen\’s show recently. Every time she mention Portia De Rossi her girlfriend. She talked about her surprising her for her 50th birthday with a trip to the vineyards. She showed a picture of the 2 of them hugging out in the vineyards. On another episode she talked about how all their pets sleep between the two of them. I do not watch Ellen every day but I think she talks about her girlfriend a lot.
Anderson Cooper is another story.

Fausto & Marc

I completely understand you being upset with Chuck for not giving credit where it\’s due, I completely agree with you on that.

As far as Shirley Q Liquor, do you get equally offended when the Wayans Brothers put on \”white face\” to be white women in the movie \”White Chicks\”? How about Dave Chapelle\’s putting on white face to be a news anchor?

I totally agree as to the point about how gay bars should give back to the community. I used to work at AIDS Project New Haven, and being that it was a smaller town, almost all of the bars would pitch in and help us whenever we had a fundraiser; it was so awsome.

And then there was this really opportunistic bar owner just like the type Fausto described, and guess what? Less and less people would come to his bar till it was defin no longer THE place to go. I guess that was just a perfect situation as I know it doesn\’t happen that way necessarily, but it made me happy to know there were some community conscious small business owners out there.

See, not all gay small business owners are tyrannical crazies.

BTW, Marc I completely agree, you can\’t just say, oh what about when black people make fun of whites, isn\’t that racist? No it\’s not, because black people do not have a history of subjugating a race of people, namely whites.

Further, as Fausto says, comedy is about making fun of the people in power, when you make fun of the oppressed it stops being funny. Well at the risk of sounding like a liberal wing-nut, Blacks in America are still oppressed. Poverty, lack of political access, etc are all still directly correlated with race in a way we cannot deny. Making fun of spoiled rich white girls is funny and OK (for lack of a better term) BECAUSE THEY ARE RICH WHITE GIRLS.

Shirley Q is entitled to her free speech, but so are we entitled to stand up and say, I\’m not going to watch that or patronize places that show it.

Last point, I wish I was a full lawyer instead of just a half one…it would give me great pleasure to serve a legal complaint on Shirley Q…OH well still got one year to go.

Can\’t wait till Saturday night, I am freaking out with excitement.

First off, I was not trying to attack you, sorry if my post came off that way; and I can\’t speak for Marc so i\’ll just speak for my post.

Secondly, I at no point said that slavery was the exclusive past of America, but that doesn\’t really matter frankly because in an inquiry attempting to determine the propriety of comedy in America it would be most logical to look at the history of America, so I chose to begin my argument with that premise.

Third, I also did not say racism is the sole possession of white America, I said in the specific discrete scenarios you posed of asking essentially why a black actor can make fun of white people and have it be appropriate, that sometimes it is appropriate and non-racist precisely because it comes from an abstract point of oppression. I just think it is a very astute observation that comedy becomes inappropriate when it makes fun of an oppressed class. For some intangible reason, it just seems to turn that humor into a wink-wink nod to the racist stereotypes that have pervaded America since our founding. In contrast, when you have an oppressed class making comedy at the expense of the dominant class, there just isn\’t that same insidiousness.

Just my attempt at recentering the debate on this topic, though probably a bit long winded.

BTW that pic with Ru looks STUNNING

I appreciate you trying to open the dialog; perhaps this is just a particularly sensitive subject for me. But just to be clear in my point, it doesn\’t actually matter whether one\’s ancestors are directly responsible for slavery. I come from a broader worldview wherein I believe that those who are more fortunate in society, those of higher intellect, higher class, higher income, a happy home have a duty to those in society who do not have these advantages. That doesn\’t mean we give hand outs, it just means we try to step in the shoes of people who are less advantaged then ourselves. I ask everyone to try to step into the shoes of someone of a different race and to think about what it would feel like. For me I can honestly say that I could see why if I was black, seeing sambo-like portrayals would remind me of how I am seen as inferior by a large portion of America because of the color of my skin. I can\’t say I have the same feeling as a mixed ethnicity guy when I see people make fun of \”white\” people. I\’m sure other people feel differently, but it is why I, personally, see such portrayals of black people as different than those of whites.

Great show today guys. I loved the beginning, good ol\’ bait and switch.

I have to agree with Gary\’s point earlier though. There is racism in every ethnic group. But Marc also makes a really good point about it not being the same, but for a different reason.

Based on what I know about Shirley, she is a vile, despicable human that not only steals and manipulates the words of others, but also endorses underhanded tactics (such as publishing the personal info of those that oppose her) as a means of silencing her critics. I would assume, based on these actions, that her act is not coming from a place of love as Rupaul suggested but from a place of spite.

There is a place for this kind of thing. It allows us a glimpse of the past, a look at the thoughts and ideas of our ancestors. It allows us to understand what society was like back then. As rational adults, I would hope that we would understand that the ideas expressed in the past about other cultures were horribly wrong and anyone that still thinks in that way needs to get with the times.

oh, anderson cooper is actually gay? has it been made official in the same way it has been for ellen?

I worked for a company that exported gay erotica to the gay bookstore in Tokyo, and yes there is only one. My boss paid my friends to censor mags that we\’d then ship and charge triple the cover price. For newsprint paper they would use a stamp and for glossy a really vile smelling marker. They got paid $1 for glossy and .50 for newsprint which worked out to a measly $7-$10 an hour. For video tapes we were able to charge 110\’s of dollars. I would remove the reel and repackage it in a puffy envelope with a handwritten note about the graduation or wedding I taped. 1 out of 3 tapes never made it but customers accepted that. Digital downloading has thankfully circumvented this practice. While it is still illegal to show genitalia in porn that is changing ever so slowly. At one time you could not show pubic hair but that is no longer the case.

Plus, did you see?(Idol Spoiler)

Both Davids (Archuleta and Hernandez aka delicious cockslapping stripper man) are in the top 12! Though EXTREMELY gay Danny Noriega didn\’t make the cut. Aw.

Late comment here: catching up on shows… The whole Japanese censor thing seems a farce considering how racy the commercials, late night programs, and all the rest of what is considered acceptable there. It didn\’t really bother me much other then when going to an art museum that had an exhibit on historic erotic art…and the genitals were covered with cottonballs! Oh blush girlfriend!

The kicker for me was when I went to the movies to see The Crying Game; paid my good yen, and then was stunned to see that the \’reveal\’ blotted out with a dancing spray-painted (pre-digitized days) dancing brown blotch hovering over the neither-regions; it drew more attention to the fact of something we couldn\’t see, and definitely distracted one from any drama at that point.