That Gay Thread

[Rev. Rye]

Remembering Matthew Shepard, whose brutal murder sparked a national reckoning on homophobia
https://www.pinknews.co.uk/2021/10/07/ma...ime-death/

One thing that this is reminding me of, there used to be a show called Titus. It's based around the stand-up comedy of Christopher Titus and his dysfunctional family, and one of the characters was his coworker Tommy. He acted like a camp stereotype, but he was actually straight. Why? Because it turned out his dad, who seemed to be the one who did the most work socialising him as a kid, actually was gay. In one episode, his dad actually did come out as gay, and then got beaten up for it.

And they actually mentioned Matthew Shepherd in a brief aside, and it's one of the most powerful bits in the series (scene 17:45):



He gets so much out of simply explaining the facts of the case twice. The first time, it's just stating the facts, but the second time, he's saying it like he wants to say "Seriously? Homosexuality is a good reason to kill a guy? Seriously?" And I can't find the actual quote, but when I got into the series over a decade ago, I remembered him saying that he thought it would be important for him to do an episode like that because he knew that while there were shows like Will and Grace (and maybe other gay shows in 2002), the people who needed to learn the lesson about how bad homophobia is weren't watching those shows. Admittedly, they probably weren't watching Titus either, mostly because Fox had so little faith in the show that, at one point, Titus had to go over an entire episode and explain why the episode was supposed to be funny (in that case, an episode where the cast held an intervention with Titus' Dad to get him to start drinking again), and consequently, it had little advertising and Fox didn't give enough of a shit to let it have an audience. At least they gave it three seasons before they decided to cancel it because Titus wouldn't break up with his wife (they insisted on it because Dharma and Greg, and because it was actually based on his life and the big divorce didn't happen yet, he refused to and it was canceled).