Kudos for both your admission of error and your apology. Sometimes, the accusation can be as damaging as the conviction.
As with anything else, attitudes about homosexuality range across a broad spectrum. There is a lot in between “I’m gay” and “I hate faggots”. One thing I don’t like about terms like “homophobia” is that they tend to stamp every nuanced position with the exact same identity. Sometimes, people just aren’t comfortable with the whole subject of sexual intimacy, no matter of what persuasion. Or they’re involuntarily turned off by the notion of engaging in homosexual sex. I’ve seen such people called homophobic, which I thought was ridiculous. It is the inablity of some people, in my opinion, to split that out apart from people who actually oppose gay rights that creates some of the obstacles toward their realization. Everyone who doesn’t think just like us isn’t evil incarnate. And unless Melinda was downright Stormfront in her opposition to gay rights, I’d still buy her CDs.
Thank you Liberal. I agree that an accusation can be as damaging as the conviction, and I’m a bit appalled at myself that I fell into that trap.
While I’m here, I apologise for the eye-roll smiley too. I thought it was a bit silly for Big Bad Voodoo Lou to bring up an opinion of mine from an old thread (that Selena was more well-known around the world than Kurt Cobain, but I could never cite it) but I should have just ignored it or said what I meant. It was meant more as a “stop being silly” than a “you %#!#@#$@” comment, which lends credence to those people who say that smileys can be misinterpreted and should never be used in place of words.
Right now, she’s a sensation, not a star. The same way Ken Jennings was a sensation, or Richard Hatch, from the first Survivor. She’s the star of the show, relatively speaking, although not yet a star outside that arena.
As for her chances of success outside AI? All I know is, I feel like I’m watching “42nd Street,” or reading the novel* “Valley of the Dolls,” or any of those stories where the unglamorous, shy understudy steps into the lead role at the last moment, goes out a youngster and comes back a star. What will happen? Who knows. We’re only one week into the finals.
*Not the movie. In the novel, Neely was not the girl Helen forced out of the show. She replaced that girl, and that was her big break.
She had a huge Gay following in the disco era when she was quoted for saying some rather heavy-handed Christian, anti-Gay comments. The uproar was huge and fast. In case you didn’t notice, following those comments her career took an instantaneous nose-dive.
She later (far after the fact) denied saying those comments.
However, what celebrity in their right mind would allow such widely publicized accusations to be made and not take out a full page ad in The Advocate or other magazine/newspaper and deny it? Following that story, every attempt by the Gay press to validate, or invalidate, her comments were met with “no comment”. That speaks volumes. Would you deny being homophobic?
But thank you Equipoise for clarifying. I only brought it up as it is threads like this that get searched by Google and when someone types in “homophobic Melinda Doolittle” that things pop up. And as a good soldier for fighting ignorance, I am sure you would hate to see your name and thread comment show up unless there was valid reason.
At any rate - she is one hell of a singer, and until otherwise proven, I will assume she is not a bigot.
I know it sounds weird to say this, but sometimes the denial is worse than the accusation. Consider, for example, a newspaper headline about a politician that says, Smith Denies Taking Bribe. […snicker…] Yeah, well he would, wouldn’t he.
