Oh Myyy! (3 page)

Now, normally I don’t care to make fun of someone’s physical appearance unless it’s my husband’s (he once was a svelte marathon runner; now I just tell him there’s more of him to love). But you must admit, Ms. Jackson was asking for this kind of response. If she really believes exposure to some external influence can turn young boys gay, surely the sight of her in all her present corpulence would have a greater gay-ifying effect.

The “comedian” Tracy Morgan was another real piece of work. He is filled with such hatred toward LGBT people that, during one routine, he actually declared that he would kill his own son if he found out he were gay. I was shocked to hear such a horrifying threat, particularly from someone in the entertainment field who works daily with gay people and LGBT allies such as the remarkable Tina Fey, who — to her great credit — took Morgan to task for his outburst. This time news outlets began contacting me for a response. My tweet followed quickly after:

Now, I didn’t know at the time that Tracy’s father was already dead, or I would have tempered that a bit. That was an “oops.” But my objective was to answer hatred with humor, to “defang the snake,” as it were. I could spend hours arguing about how violence, or even the threat of violence against LGBT people is a societal plague. I could expound at length on how bullying and homophobia account for up to one-third of all teen suicides. I could ask someone like Tracy directly if he condones violence against minorities, or how he would feel if someone threatened to kill his son if he were born black, as I presume he would be. But that’s really someone else’s job. My own feeling is that laughter, irony, and ridicule are the best responses to this type of behavior. Giving someone like Tracy any more stage time for his weird, sad rant would solve nothing.

Another person for whom I share little love is former Governor of California, Arnold Schwarzenegger. This movie actor-cum-politician ran on a platform of liberal social policy and fiscal conservatism, and I believed in my heart that he would stand by his principles on the question of same-sex marriage. After many years, the California Legislature finally passed a marriage bill that would allow my then-partner of nearly 20 years Brad and me to be married and enjoy the same rights and privileges afforded to heterosexual couples in the Golden State. I thought to myself, “This is going to happen. The Governor said he supports equality, and we are finally going to have it.”

Imagine my surprise and indignation when The Governator instead vetoed the legislation, saying, among other things, that this was a matter for the courts to decide, not our elected representatives. Of course, when courts overturn same-sex marriage bans, you’ll hear the same people complaining the courts are legislating from the bench; they’ll simply blame whichever branch of government sides with LGBT rights at the time. Schwarzenegger’s act of vetoing the bill was the heat that finally got me steamed enough to take action. I’m speaking specifically about the step of coming out publicly to the press. I had been “out” for some time among family and friends, but had never taken the public step of alerting the press. And as an actor, you’re not really out until you’re out to the press, believe me.

As the world now knows, for Arnold Schwarzenegger to take any position with respect to family values, marriage or morality is truly the height of irony. So when his own scandal broke, I saw no reason to hold back. I tweeted this, with a geeky Sci-fi reference thrown in for good measure:

This turned out to be one of my most popular tweets. But I only learned this after the Webmaster for
Allegiance
pointed me to a site that actually tracks Twitter virality. I had no idea anyone even cared enough to monitor such things.

Another popular tweet played upon the hypocrisy of some of the rants of the Fundamentalists. They frequently cite The Old Testament as proof not only that God is on their side, but that He really doesn’t like gay people. The truth is, you can find almost anything in the Bible to latch onto if you are really determined. The prohibitions in the Old Testament are not only archaic, but wide reaching. So, after hearing yet another righteous citation to restrictions thousands of years past their usefulness, I tweeted this:

It wasn’t really true. I don’t care for polyester. But the tweet resonated, I believe, not only because it pointed out an obvious double standard, but also because there’s something funny about imagining a senior citizen violating Leviticus.

We don’t have that many elderly spokespersons of comedy these days. We once had the great George Burns, and Bob Hope, and Johnny Carson. Today, of course, we have Betty White, who recently turned 90. I’ve learned that when you get to be a certain age, you can get away with saying a lot of things, some of which wouldn’t even be remotely funny if someone forty years younger said them.
The Golden Girls
ran for years off the same theory and basically used the same four jokes for seven marvelous seasons. I’ve recently suggested that Betty and I should do a TV series about two seniors living together in an unlikely pairing of a widow and a naughty gay best buddy. We could call it
Friends with Government Benefits
.

In my tweets, I also try to stay current, not only with news, but with pop culture. I read the Hollywood press, and I see every film up for an Academy Award for Best Picture (this is actually my responsibility, as I’m a voting member of the Academy). I don’t generally listen to rock music. But when I do, I believe some classics should remain undisturbed.

It’s hard to believe, but Kurt Cobain died more than 18 years ago, back in 1994. Miley Cyrus was only 1½ years old when he passed. For some reason, while the 1990s seemed to be a huge decade of change and progress, the years after 2000 all blend together.

Here’s another thing about tweets: You never know if something is going to get “retweeted” much, which is problematic because retweets are what draw fans to my account. Unlike more prolific tweeters, I tried to limit my tweets to one a day and to make them count. For a time, I actually made the effort to track how well they were received, if only to gauge whether they had any resonance with my followers. A pattern soon emerged. A tweet would receive high traction if it was among the first commentaries on breaking news. That traction would be increased greatly if it were funny, particularly if it made a pop cultural reference that had to be inferred. This latter point was important: I wanted to build a following of engaged thinkers, not merely fans. I had no need or patience for those who cared only about my work on TV or film. For me, social media needed to be an interactive, not reactive, endeavor. And a retweet had to say implicitly, “I get this joke and approve.”

Once a tweet enters the Twitterstream, however, there’s no real way to build much of any discussion around it. Sure, there are hashtags to provide a mechanism to enable me to go back and read what others had tweeted on the same topic, but I found the whole thing rather cumbersome. It admittedly took me a while even to figure out what the hashtag “#FF @georgetakei” meant. Where my mind first went with that isn’t fit for print; let’s just say I thought it was pronounced “Pound-F-F George Takei.”

A tweet also lives on forever once it’s out, even if you delete it from your homepage. And there are some tweets that I’ve come to regret, even if they were funny at the time. For example, when Donald Trump was running for President, I was rather unimpressed with his “birther” campaign against Obama. It seemed to drag us into a non-issue over and over again.

So when his campaign finally ran out of steam, I was both relieved and amused, tweeting this: