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Shocker: Gay hosts handles gay segment properly

When I saw the following in the Description field of the October 7 Q podcast (MP3), I clenched: “American filmmaker Kirby Dick on his latest documentary, Outrage.”

Outrage is about American politicians, mostly Republican guys, who vote anti-gay but are gay in real life or have sex with men. Hence the film is about hypocrisy, not homosexualism or outing. (“Outing” is just “reporting.”) It’s based heavily on the investigative journalism and legwork of Mike Rogers, who outs anti-gay hypocrites when necessary and has never made a false claim of that kind.

Americans have been total pussies in covering Outrage. Interview after interview explicitly stated it would not name the politicians Kirby Dick named. The worst example was that of Fresh Air, in which sinecurist hostess Terry Gross hewed to the unspoken demands of her elite social class and danced around the topic for 13½ minutes. (Last week, Gross commiserated with Ruth Reichl about how terrible it must have been for her to have Gourmet magazine shut down. All very genteel, with no upturned carts of artisanal apples.) Then NPR censored its own film critic.

So I spent a week and a half stewing over the Q segment. I imagined nonheterosexualist popinjay Jian Ghomeshi – whose vanity cannot derive solely from the cultural traditions of coiffed, kohl-eyed Persian males – not just dancing but mincing around the subject, partly at the best of his fop producers. (Seriously, look at these darlings. They fall short of “dandy” and land with a thud on “pansy.” Somebody needs to read The Affected Provincial’s Companion and Almanack.)

Brent Bambury in T-shirt holding NWT licence plate over his eyes I bit the bullet and played the damned episode. Whaddya know, Jian was taking meetings in L.A. or something and our guest host was Brent Bambury, a gay himself. (Older now, but aren’t we all, and still built like a brick shithouse after 25 years.) Surely he’d be even worse?

Nope: Despite an ill-written intro, Bambury carried out the only honest interview with Kirby Dick I know of. Bambury named names from the movie, he let Dick credit Rogers as spiritual and factual inspiration, and he pegged the real issue, hypocrisy.

In the olden days, this used to be called journalism.

Why have we penned him off in the Go petting zoo again?