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Will "Milk"'s sour reception on Asian TV lead to positive changes?
On Monday we told you about the censorship of the rebroadcast of the Oscar cast in India (both Dustin Lance Black and Sean Penn's speeches were scrubbed to remove any reference to the words "gay and lesbian"). It turns out that it happened all throughout Asia, thanks to the satellite TV service STAR, which is owned by ... wait for it ... Rupert Murdoch. Color me surprised. Needless to say, there was outrage among Asia's gay groups, who are demanding answers, and not the lame one they were given by a spokeswoman: Jannie Poon, STAR's Hong Kong-based spokeswoman, stressed that the company had no intention of upsetting any viewers, but said it has "a responsibility to take the sensitivities and guidelines of all our markets into consideration." The least they could have done was cover their tracks better. Just muting the speeches when certain words were said was a rather blatant slap in the face. It might have seemed less offensive if they had cut to Spaghetti Cat whenever the word "gay" was used (or the Asian equivalent ... Fried Rice Cat). If there's a silver lining with all of this nonsense, it's that the gay voices in Asia are refusing to be silenced, and hopefully will grow louder. Submitted by on Wed, 2009-02-25 17:10. |
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The missing gay
Actually I did not even realize that the 'gay' parts have been cut in the retelecast, which I happened to watch yesterday. It did look odd that both Sean Penn's and Dustin Lance Black's speeches seemed to be very very short. I was thinking that the Lance guy is really odd, for he seemed to thank only like two people in the 10 second speech. Only later while surfing the net I realized that they have censored the parts of the speeches. But 'Star' channels tend to censor even straight kissing scences sometimes, so it's more equal opportunity. Still some skillful editing on their part to make it appear that the speeches still made sense. Maybe they deserve an Oscar for that???
As I didn't watch the initial live telecast, (shown at the godawful time of 4.30 am here) I don't know what they did then. Maybe they just blanked it out as this article describes.
By the way while watching the romance montages from various nominated films on the Oscar's, I was thinking they haven't taken the risk of showing gays kissing in Milk, though they did show Indians kissing from Slumdog, which itself seemed to be taking quite a chance. Only now I realize that even the Milk kissing scences (If Oscars included gay kissing scences in its montage, of which I'm still not sure) was probably censored for us in Asia.
Apparently Indians do not mind kissing scenes between Indians now (which is actually noticable by the increasing number of kissing scenes in Bollywood films) unlike in the past, but two guys kissing - still a big no no.