Perpetual Gawkstar Choire Sicha better watch his blogger back, ’cause an irate Queerty reader’s out for blood. The gay drama when Sicha wrote the following:
Advertising and marketing people spent $223.3 million in 2006 to convince the gays to go various places. God, it was so much cheaper 65 years ago when they used to just load them into boxcars.
To the point and, we think, subversively hilarious.
The aforementioned reader didn’t think so, ’cause he wrote to us asking why we hadn’t launched a war against Sicha: “Why are you not up in arms about this? We all would if some republican had said the same thing!”
We disagreed…
In our reply, we informed that reader that there’s quite a difference between a Republican – or any politician – making light of the Holocaust and Sicha, a self-described “homosexual gadfly”. Reader wasn’t having it:
How about we take this to the next level?
Our newsletter is like a refreshing cocktail (or mocktail) of LGBTQ+ entertainment and pop culture, served up with a side of eye-candy.
I don’t care who writes it. It’s unacceptable to make fun of the killing of tens of thousands of people like us whose only crime was to be living in the wrong place at the wrong time. These were people like you or me who were rounded up, shipped to concentration camps where they were abused and tortured, and, in most cases, murdered. Just because one can, one shouldn’t.
What’s next? Make jokes about the beheaded gays in Iran last year? Make merry of the Papuan AIDS sufferers who, as you reported, are buried alive? Laugh at our friends who died of AIDS in the 1980s while the rest of the country turned a blind eye?
Whether Sicha is or isn’t gay is not the issue. It’s the callousness of the comment, the use use of gays as fodder for cheap opportunistic humor. This message should not be tolerated, no matter who the messenger is.
Huh? We use gays as fodder for cheap, opportunistic humor on the daily!
We passed along this concerned citizen’s concern to Choire, who responded thus:
Ha! I love it. Well of course I went too far! But the point exactly is the short passage of time between those events.
And of course a chance to post that t-shirt, which SLAYS ME. I guess its only funny to guys my age and a little older though.
That (pictured) t-shirt truly is a masterpiece. We also agree with Sicha: the punchline isn’t really the Holocaust – it’s the relatively minuscule amount of time between Hitler’s bloody reign and Atlantis gay cruises.
Our response to Sicha: “It’s funny ’cause it’s true – silence does equal pork. And dough, too.” We considered adding “Mmm, pigs in a blanket,” but thought it overkill. Meanwhile, Mr. Sicha’s hoping “this person never finds out about the things we’ve said about the Jews, the Armenians, the blacks, and the aborted fetuses. Silence=Fetus!” The blogger then intimated that he likes pork.
A last meal, perhaps?
Dawster
You know, 38 years ago we used to get police escorts. it’s been all downhill since then…
Honeymaid
Well, we can laugh, or we can cry and take on emotional armor to protect ourselves, I’d much rather laugh.
IDNY
Well said Honeymaid….
Also Queetry readers (Americans for that matter) Lighten up, READ and educate yourselves; learn how to use language, its not just about the words and their very first definition.
PJ
Isn’t it odd how we use a pink triangle to express our pride? Wasn’t that what the Nazi’s used in order to mark homosexuals? Now we use it to mark ourselves.
In the grand scheme of things we can only laugh at the sublime while we cry at the tragic. Come to think of it, there is an old Jewish proverb which states, “You are suffering, laugh. When you are hungry, sing.”
Then there is the old saying, “Laugh and the world laughs with you. Cry and the world laughs AT you.”
Humor is used to overcome the pain. Wallowing only prolongs it.
I am not suggesting that anyone forget the horrors of the Holocaust; I am only suggesting that there can still be found some humor even in the most horrific events.