My friend Graham, a fellow power gay living in Miami, sent me a message the other morning.
“Watch this. Start at 28 minutes.”
It was a clip of Kathy Griffin being interviewed by Carson Kressley.
Graham, like me, is a politically minded centrist who has found himself drifting toward conservatism, not necessarily because our fundamental values have changed, but because the contemporary left has become almost unbearable. The distortions, the privilege, the hysteria, the moral panic, the endless demands that we affirm things we know not to be true. At a certain point, the mountain of bulls**t becomes impossible to climb.
Graham and I met when we were living in New York. We left around the same time. He went to Miami, while I spent much of the following year and a half bouncing between America and Israel. Whenever our paths crossed in Miami, we would get together and contemplate the strange position in which we found ourselves: two grown gay men, starting over, trying to figure out where we belonged in a world that increasingly seemed to have lost its mind.
And then there was Kathy Griffin.
Like a great many gay men of my generation, I adored Kathy Griffin. Fifteen years ago, she was practically required viewing.
Kathy had carved out a brilliant comedic identity as the woman who wasn’t quite invited to the party but knew absolutely everything that happened inside it. She had spent years on the fringes of Hollywood, playing supporting roles, appearing in sitcoms, working as a character actress and watching the entertainment industry’s enormous egos from the sidelines.
Her genius was that she understood the absurdity of celebrity culture. She knew the desperation, the vanity, the hierarchy, the artificiality of it all. She could expose the ridiculous behavior of famous people precisely because she had spent so much of her career being treated as someone who wasn’t quite famous enough.
She made an entire comedic universe out of being on the D-list.
And eventually, of course, she became enormously successful. She won Emmys, filled theaters, made millions of dollars and became a celebrity in her own right.
There was something wonderfully subversive about that trajectory. The outsider had conquered the very world she spent her career mocking.
Then came the photograph.
Unfortunately, her comeback seems to have become increasingly inseparable from her political grievances.
In 2017, Kathy posed with a bloody replica of Donald Trump’s severed head. It was grotesque, provocative, and, in my opinion, a comedic miscalculation of extraordinary proportions.
But I also believed the backlash went too far. Kathy faced an enormous professional and personal reckoning. Her performances were canceled, she lost professional relationships, and she was investigated by federal authorities. She was not criminally prosecuted, but the experience clearly devastated her.
Anderson Cooper, who had been a longtime friend and her co-host on CNN’s New Year’s Eve broadcasts, publicly condemned the photograph. Their friendship subsequently collapsed.
I didn’t think Kathy deserved to lose everything over one stupid photograph. Comedians take risks. Sometimes, they go too far. Sometimes, they make terrible decisions. That doesn’t mean their entire careers should be destroyed.
But what struck me was how little Kathy seemed to understand why the imagery was so disturbing.
We live in a world where jihadist organizations have actually beheaded people on camera. Where groups such as ISIS have used decapitation as a form of political theater, intimidation and propaganda. Where extremist movements have explicitly threatened American and other leaders.
Kathy described her photograph partly as a response to Trump’s treatment of Megyn Kelly, whose confrontation with Trump had become a national spectacle. But Kelly had not requested Griffin’s intervention, and the image took a political argument into a completely different realm.
It was possible to believe that Kathy had been treated unfairly and still recognize that the photograph was appalling.
Unfortunately, her comeback seems to have become increasingly inseparable from her political grievances.
Instead of the wonderfully irreverent comedian who mocked Hollywood’s absurdities, we now have a woman who seems determined to turn every political disagreement into another existential emergency. Whether the subject is Trump, ICE, immigration enforcement or American foreign policy, the outrage has become almost indistinguishable from the performance.
And that brings me to the clip Graham sent me.
No, Kathy.
Florida is not some dystopian homophobic nightmare where ordinary citizens are preparing to report their gay neighbors to the authorities.
Many gay men are moving to Florida precisely because they want a different life from the one being offered in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco or other progressive urban environments.
Miami and Fort Lauderdale have enormous, visible, established gay communities. Gay men are buying homes, opening businesses, building careers, dating, socializing and living their lives.
Some are politically conservative. Some are liberal. Some are completely uninterested in politics. And some, like Graham and me, have simply become exhausted by the ideological expectations of contemporary progressive culture.
Of course, homophobia still exists. Of course, laws concerning sexuality, marriage, parental rights and gender identity deserve scrutiny. But disagreement over public policy is not automatically evidence that an entire state hates gay people.
What drives me crazy is the insistence that gay men must interpret every political development through the same framework of victimhood that defined an earlier generation. We’re not all frightened teenagers hiding from the high school football team.
Some of us are men in our 40s, 50s and 60s. We’ve had careers, relationships, marriages, divorces, businesses, mortgages, successes, failures and extraordinary lives. We have traveled the world. We have experienced other societies. We have developed our own political convictions.
We do not need a wealthy woman in their 60s explaining to us how terrified we should be. And we certainly don’t need her permission to disagree.
Originally published on Substack.
