My friend Jeffy Whitty wrote an open letter to Jay Leno recently. It was about Leno's penchant for making girly-man fag jokes on the air. Jeff wrote the letter because Leno ticked him off. Little did he know that the letter would make its way around the Internet so many times that he nows doing CNN interviews about it.
Pretty cool stuff. And an amazing example of what one person can do.
Even more interesting, Jeff didn't have to speak out. In fact, it was in his interes NOT to speak out. Jeff is a playwright. He wrote the book, as it's called, to the hit Broadway musical "Avenue Q," and he even won a Tony for it. Jay Leno, like Oprah, is someone you really DON'T want to tick off.
Didn't stop Jeff. Very cool.
Here are a few snippets from Jeff's letter - please do read the entire thing, and email it to some friends.
Dear Mr. Leno,
My name is Jeff Whitty. I live in New York City. I'm a playwright and the author of "Avenue Q", which is a musical currently running on Broadway.
I've been watching your show a bit, and I'd like to make an observation:
When you think of gay people, it's funny. They're funny folks. They wear leather. They like Judy Garland. They like disco music. They're sort of like Stepin Fetchit as channeled by Richard Simmons.
Gay people, to you, are great material.
Mr. Leno, let me share with you my view of gay people:
When I think of gay people, I think of the gay news anchor who took a tire iron to the head several times when he was vacationing in St. Maarten's. I think of my friend who was visiting Hamburger Mary's, a gay restaurant in Las Vegas, when a bigot threw a smoke bomb filled with toxic chemicals into the restaurant, leaving the staff and gay clientele coughing, puking, and running in terror. I think of visiting my gay friends at their house in the country, sitting outside for dinner, and hearing, within hundreds of feet of where we sat, taunting voices yelling "Faggots." I think of hugging my boyfriend goodbye for the day on 8th Avenue in Manhattan, and being mocked and taunted by passing high school students.
When I think of gay people, I think of suicide. I think of a countless list of people who took their own lives because the world was so toxically hostile to them. Because of the deathly climate of the closet, we will never be able to count them. You think gay people are great material. I think of a silent holocaust that continues to this day. I think of a silent holocaust that is perpetuated by people like you, who seek to minimize us and make fun of us and who I suspect really, fundamentally wish we would just go away....
