No “homo”
Six hundred million years ago, when I was a waiter at the Pizza Hut in South Hill, Virginia – which still ranks as one of my favorite jobs of all time – I got annoyed by a song that kept playing on the jukebox. It was the mid-Eighties, and seven years after “Sultans of Swing”, the Dire Straits had finally had another major hit with “Money for Nothing” (which featured Sting famously singing “I want my MTV” to the tune of The Police’s “Don’t Stand So Close to Me”).
Everytime someone would put a quarter in the jukebox, I would get to hear Mark Knopfler sing, “The little faggot with the earring and the makeup. Yeah, buddy, that’s his own hair. That little faggot got his own jet airplane. That little faggot, he’s a millionaire.” The video that aired on MTV edited that verse out, but the vinyl single that played on a jukebox in a small southern town in Virginia was less polite.
I remember hearing Mark Knopfler say he heard someone actually say those exact lines (evidently someone who believed in talking in rhymes), and he thought dropping “faggot” would make it less authentic or something. But let me tell you something. When you’re a gay teenager working in a fast food chain in the middle of Bible-belt Virginia and you keep hearing someone singing about those damn faggots with their earings and their makeup, it’s not a pleasant experience.
So I went to my manager and asked her if she could get the jukebox guy to remove the record on his next visit. I told her it really bothered me hearing the word “faggot” so often.
A couple of days later, the song was gone.
The manager didn’t have to do that. Back in 1985, businesses as a whole could care less about gay employees. Hell, a few years later the Cracker Barrel chain started firing anyone who was openly homosexual, and while “officially” they eventually changed that policy, I’ve never stepped in one of their restaurants since. I like to eat, but I like to live even more. Just a couple months ago, a black woman was beaten in front of her little child by an angry white racist right outside the doors of a Cracker Barrel, so I’m thinking as a gay man I’ll stick to safer places like Olive Garden or Red Robin.
In the years that have followed (in which, two plus decades later, I still look EXACTLY as I did when I was a teenager, give or take 25 years and 50 pounds), things have changed a lot. And yet they haven’t changed at all. Eminem is still obsessed with gay guys, calling Adam Lambert and Clay Aiken out for being faggots, which is particularly sad when you consider he is a phenomenal wordsmith who can genuinely move people when he’s not behaving like a second grade potty mouth. And Kanye West, the asshole who had the nerve to go on stage at an awards ceremony and tell a teenage girl that she didn’t deserve to win an award, uses the phrase “no homo” even though he went on record a few years ago saying that rap should be more accepting of gays and lesbians.
On Jay-Z’s “Run This Town Tonight”, Kanye says, “It’s crazy how you can go from being Joe Blow to everybody on your dick, no homo.” First of all, the phrase “everybody on your dick” makes no sense. Second of all, saying something that makes no sense and then immediately stating that you’re not gay makes you sound like a closet queer. And third of all, why is being homo so fucking bad to begin with? This has got to be the most ridiculously annoying phrase ever.
After hearing the song played on 105.7 (Hit Music Now!) once too often, I wrote to one of the managers of the station and asked him why they bleeped the word “dick” but didn’t bleep the word “homo”. I’m old enough now that I’ll be damned if I listen to “gays are icky” shit on the radio – Jesus Fucking Christ, it’s been 35 years since I was in the third grade, and I have no desire to return to that mentality.
I never heard anything back from the manager. I have no idea if they continued playing the “Kanye West isn’t gay, dammit!” version or not, since I stopped listening to them. Who wants to listen to one of those Clear Channel stations that not only decides what 42 songs will be played but also decides what sexual orientations (straight) are cool and which ones (gay) are gross?
But I did go on Yahoo tonight and clicked on the chart of the most popular videos. “Run This Town” was #11, so out of curiousity, I played it. And sure enough, they bleeped the “homo” bit. So to whoever decided being anti-gay wasn’t cool, thanks! And whoever said something and got the ball rolling, thank you even more! I learned at Pizza Hut that sometimes all it takes is one voice.
And to be honest with you, I’m so sick and tired of people being ugly and hateful and then protesting that the world is too “politically correct”. Cause you know those fuckers will be the first to complain (and always are) when anyone says something derogatory about them. What’s good for the gander is just as good for the goose.
And music is too wonderful to pervert into an instrument of hate. I mean, seriously!
