I’m quite equivocative when it comes to arguments around this subject, so I find it difficult to support either side’s position wholeheartedly.
However this is one line of argument that imho fails on its face, and prompted a response even though I didn’t read all 23 pages of comments.
Yes we do know that Tim Cook is gay. However, Tim Cook has never said “I gobbled down 30 d**** last weekend” or “Hunky men are lined up outside my door waiting for the next iPhone”. He hasn’t publicly performed Gay and Eurpoean from Legally Blonde The Musical. Do you know if he’s a top or bottom? Or a side? Or has kinks? Or loves huge iPhone bulges?
Gay people in anywhere but the most blue of blue states still aren’t on par with the level of sexual innuendo and out-ness that permeates our society for heterosexuals. We can’t afford to be crass lest we give the people who want to chop off our heads ammunition to do so.
The new movie “Bros” actually has a decent joke about this exact thing in one of the trailers. Someone says “bottom” and this straight family starts doing this mocking “bottom dance” (whatever the hell that’s supposed to mean) to which Billy’s character says “gay sex was more fun when straight people were uncomfortable with it”. The humor lies in the fact that indeed we have made some progress and as gay people we have to deal with the normal shame straight people felt, like when your grandma asked middle school you if you were beating girls away with a stick at school, or you were badgered by your mother about who you were taking to prom.
The “sexual” expression you seem from gay people is only recently being released from exclusively gay places, and even then it’s fraught with danger. In business, in religion, at the supermarket, in government almost all of us still hide the vast majority of ourselves just to survive. Just as one small example, anecdotally, I get asked how my weekend was at work. Instead of being able to say “oh I went on a date” to any number of my straight religious coworkers, and whatever subsequent conversation that entails, for their comfort and my safety I’m pushed to alter what and how much I tell them. Or being in a work meeting with a group of guys, being presented a product by a female presenter, and having to endure talk about her breast size once she walks out of the room from everyone else there.
Like David Foster Wallace’s essay, we’re all fish in heteronormative water. Without being in even the slightest way queer, you don’t quite get the pervasive ubiquity of how the heteronormative expectation is built into everything, comedy and movie references included.
If anyone would like to read one other take on the topic I’ll share this link:
Should I tell them to stop?
slate.com
Now, there’s plenty to be said about what he said, why he said it, and what if anything should be done about it [id say this was way too harsh given the reference material, not a reference I would get, but a misunderstood attempt at humor nonetheless]. Feel free to have that discussion, I encourage it.
But don’t for a second think that because “we all know Tim’s sexual preference” (and even that I’d challenge with “do you?”; feel free to post any link to any article he talks about his sex life explicitly or even implicitly, I’m phone posting but I doubt there’s much if anything to link) it’s the same as some dude jokingly talking about spending his days fondling breasts.
You have plenty of arguments to make about comedy, humor and free speech. Make sure you’re making well reasoned one and well supported one.
