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GLAAD Takes on ’South Park’by Kilian MelloySaturday Nov 7, 2009 The Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD), a media watchdog that monitors how GLBTs are presented, has issued a "Call to Action" against the Comedy Central cartoon program South Park, alleging that the show’s famously risque, rough-and-tumble humor has gone too far.
Click here to watch the episode The F Word.
In the Nov. 4 episode of the show, the central characters--a quartet of young friends in the third grade who live in South Park, Colorado--think that the anti-gay slur "fag" refers to noisy Harley motorcycle riders. In recent years, words such as "fag" and "gay" have become more common as generalized insults, rather than specifically anti-GLBT epithets; still, GLAAD maintains, those words retain pointed associations.
The Nov. 5 "Call to Action" that was emailed by GLAAD told recipients that, "....despite what the South Park writers may believe, the definition of the F-word remains one that is harmful and derogatory to the LGBT community," and encouraged responses to the show’s creators, Trey Parker and Matt Stone, as well as to Steve Albani, of Comedy Central’s Corporate Communications.
The missive asked readers "...to share your personal stories of the negative impact the F-word and other anti-gay slurs have had on your life. It is important that the people behind South Park realize that the F-word is not just a harmless insult; it is a hateful word with often violent consequences."
The "Call to Action" was issued just months after a new leader took the reigns of the organization. Jarrett Barrios, formerly a Massachusetts state lawmaker, had seemed poised to usher in a new age for the organization. Barrios told EDGE last July that he would help introduce a "GLAAD 2.0" and suggested that he came down at an equitable point between free speech and protecting the GLBT community from the destructive power of slurs and negative stereotypes. "I have very strong views on the importance and sanctity of the First Amendment," Barrios said at the time. "I also have a strong view on the importance of promoting positive images of gay people."
At the time of Barrio’s comments, the Sacha Baron Cohen film Brüno was making waves in the gay community for its supposedly anti-gay content. Said Barrios, "My view of what GLAAD’s focus is, is achieving the full equality of gay and trans people; achieving a world where we can live free of discrimination. When a mainstream movie like Bruno will be the only image that some parts of America--not San Francisco, not New York--have of a gay family... and that gay family is pictured in a hot tub with an infant whose father is having sex with other men--that is a concrete harm to those families in Arkansas where that movie was filmed."
Those assurances may have been welcomed by members of the gay community who looked at the quarter-century-old group as inflexible and outdated or even embarrassing. They point to the battles GLAAD has chosen to fight. Bruno is one example. Taking openly gay blogger Hilton Perez to task for calling the manager of the Black Eyed Peas a "faggot," another. Such actions seemed to reflect poorly on the group, critics allege.
Indeed, in an article about GLAAD a week before the Barrios piece, an EDGE writer compared the media watchdog to a real guard dog that had begun "chasing its tail at the expense of keeping its eyes on the prize."
The "Call to Action" acknowledged the good intentions behind the South Park episode as an attempt "to delegitimize a vulgar anti-gay slur," but went on to caution that, "the fact is that the word is and remains a hateful slur that is often part of the harassment, bullying and violence that gay people, and gay youth in particular, experience on a daily basis in this country. It is an epithet that has real consequences for real people’s lives. Just this year, an 11-year-old Massachusetts student named Carl Joseph Walker-Hoover, unable to endure the unrelenting anti-gay bullying and name-calling he experienced at school, committed suicide."
The "Call to Action" missive continued, "The creators of South Park are right on one important point: more and more people are using the F-word as an all-purpose insult. However, it is irresponsible and wrong to suggest that it is a benign insult or that promoting its use has no consequences for those who are the targets of anti-gay bullying and violence. This is a slur whose meaning remains rooted in homophobia."
Kilian Melloy reviews media, conducts interviews, and writes commentary for EDGEBoston, where he also serves as Assistant Arts Editor.
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