A waiter in Provincetown, Mass., is accused of strangling his roommate to death and stuffing his body in the closet where it was found several days later. This was reported on the evenings news last night, WHDH Channel 7, specifically, and not once was there any mention of homosexuality.
Provincetown is known worldwide as a major locus for homosexuals, like a San Francisco East, but even more concentrated. But not once was sexuality discussed, although the prosecutor said the two men had some kind of relationship and there was plenty of hinting about it. And not a single person watching the broadcast was unaware that this was probably a lover’s quarrel that ended in murder. So why not just state the fact like the news story linked above does? Because we can’t ever give the impression that homoexuals are anything but always loving and faithful and stable. Don’t hint that they can be subject to murderous impulses or depravity or anything else that make Mr. and Mrs. Middle Class uneasy.
Once again it’s the elephant in the living room.
You missed my point: It was the TV broadcast last night that didn’t mention homosexuality. You had to read it in the newspaper the next day.
The point is that the TV news station went to great pains to avoid telling us about an obvious potential motive in the killing in order to avoid the hard truth that homosexuals are subject to the same murderous impulses as heterosexuals. But to show homosexual lovers killing each other would be to undermine the vast PR effort to depict homosexuals as worthy of same-sex marriage.
I’m not saying it’s a conscious conspiracy. I just think there’s a squeamishness on the part of many journalists to putting homosexuals in a bad light.
Because the newspaper is not the television station. I don’t understand why this is difficult to understand. It seemed a relatively simple concept when I first wrote it.
Just because two men live together doesn’t mean they’re gay.
And thus we normalize homosexual relationships and treat them just like any normal heterosexual relationship.