“For much of my teen years, I was embarrassingly homophobic, and it all started with that comedy special.”
-Wil Wheaton
#freespeechmatters 16.12.2021
When you close your eyes and picture perfection, you are probably imagining Wil Wheaton and his highly successful career. At least that’s what Star Trek star thinks you’re imagining. In a lengthy social media post shared on Facebook, Wheaton desperately argues that Dave Chappelle’s jokes are potentially harmful to transgender youth and reflects on his past homophobia as evidence that comedians have immense power in their words.
According to Wheaton’s post, he wanted to disappear forever after using the word “faggot” in front of a group of homosexual hockey players. The incident occurred when he was 16, but he still hasn’t disappeared 30 years later. “I realized I had basically said the N word,” Wheaton reflects in his post.
In closing, Wheaton credits Chappelle’s “The Closer” and Eddie Murphy’s “Delirium” for normalizing the rhetoric he regretfully used 30 years ago. Wheaton admits being “embarrassingly homophobic” during his teen years, and places the blame on Murphy’s stand-up comedy. Wheaton even went as far as to suggest that jokes about the transgender community put them at a constant “threat of violence,” because transgender people have been “safely, acceptably, dehumanized.”
While I might admit Wheaton is a creative writer, I can’t say that I agree with his point of view. Personally, I don’t believe that we should be idolizing celebrities. Just because they make more money than us and get more public attention, that doesn’t mean they know better than us or know what’s best for us, for that matter. At 16, Wheaton was old enough to determine what he thinks is right and wrong, and he actively adopted the notion that homosexuals were evil. He was surrounded by real life influences that he chose to ignore over comedian Eddie Murphy.
If we didn’t worship every word celebrities spoke as scripture, Chappelle wouldn’t still be making headline news for a special that aired on Netflix two months ago. Instead, the easily offended need Chappelle to validate their views by because a voice box for the national narrative. Chappelle is not one to take demands, and he has still refused to apologize for any jokes he has told about the transgender community.
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