Tuesday, October 14, 2008

"That's So Gay"

It has bothered me for a long time when I hear people call things "gay" that they think are bad in some way. I hear people on campus using this phrase all the time. I actually have even heard kids at my sons' elementary school saying it too. The Ad Council has released three videos that examine the use of the phrase "That's so gay" as a pejorative. Wanda Sykes and Hillary Duff have joined the effort to end it's use. The campaign can be found at http://www.thinkb4youspeak.com/.

The campaign also defines other words related to sexuality, including nuts, tranny, lesbos, dick, fruit, fag, queer, cherry, bad, dick, dyke, beard, cougar, prick, balls, gay, and geek.

All the videos can be seen on youtube's Ad Council site here

Wanda Sykes' version is my personal favorite:


According to the campaign, this type of damaging language is commonly used among students and more than 50% of students said they commonly hear homophobia. “9 out of 10 LGBT students report being harassed at school in the last year.” More than 1/3 have suffered physical harm due to their orientation or defying gender norms. These students commonly “feel unsafe, miss school, get low grades“ and often don’t continue on to attend university. Let's do what Wanda says and "Knock it off!"

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