BEFORE THERE WAS ISAIAH WASHINGTON THERE WAS…BOB HOPE?

On Wednesday, I blogged about a Public Service Announcement Bob Hope did for GLAAD back in 1988. I didn’t know the reason behind the announcement, but thanks to our AE readers I do now. And I’m sorry to say, Mr. Hope didn’t participate because he’s just an all around great guy who stands up against bigotry. Nope, Bob was the 80’s version of Isaiah Washington using the “f” word on The Tonight Show and telling very nasty anti-gay jokes including the following documented in this Newsweek article:

"I just heard the Statue of Liberty has AIDS," Bob Hope quipped during the rededication ceremony of the statue in 1986. "Nobody knows if she got it from the mouth of the Hudson or the Staten Island Fairy.”

That was two years before Hope used the anti-gay slur on The Tonight Show that led to the PSA. Using the “f” word twenty years ago, while a really lousy thing to do, is something I can forgive, especially for folks of a certain generation. But making a joke about a disease killing hundreds of thousands of gay men (and doing so right in one of the epicenters of the epidemic) is just loathsome. This wasn’t some off the cuff remark, but a joke Hope thought about and wrote up in advance.

I don’t dredge this up just to pick at an old scab, but to remind folks of just where we have come from and endured and why it is so important to speak up when garbage like this happens today. It’s not being "politically correct" to object to Washington tossing around the “f” word; it’s merely asking to be treated with dignity. Too bad that was something Hope apparently only accorded to gay people when GLAAD held his feet to the fire and had the willingness to speak up against it. If they and others hadn’t done so twenty, thirty, or forty years ago, we’d been dealing with worse than we are now.

IT’S A VERBAL MASH-UP!

Rosie O’Donnell certainly seems like the perfect choice to host something called a “verbal mash-up” and that’s just what she was doing at the Eugene O’Neill Theater in New York on Monday. “Verbal mash-up” is really just a hip way of saying “discussion panel for teenagers”. Those wacky kids today. Anyway, Rosie was joined by cast members from the hit Broadway musical Spring Awakening and The N’s Degrassi: The Next Generation to chew over teen issues. Of particular note was participation by the out young actor Gideon Glick from Awakening and Adamo Ruggiero who plays the gay character Marco on Degrassi. Among the topics of discussion were date rape, school pressures, abusive parents, and, thankfully, sexual identity. The whole thing will air on The-N.com in a couple of weeks. Here are some pics from the "mash-up".

Adamo Ruggiero (Degrassi: The Next Generation)

Gideon Glick (Spring Awakening)

Rosie and everyone else!