People, Celebrities

Jay Leno attacked for gay jokes

Playwright urges Tonight Show host to find new targets

Tony-winning playwright Jeff Whitty has written an open letter to Jay Leno criticizing him for joking about gays. “I know you know gay people, Mr. Leno.  Are they just jokes to you, to be snickered at behind their backs?,” he wrote to the Tonight Show host. Whitty, writer of the Broadway musical Avenue Q, said Leno’s frequent cracks about gays are getting old. He singled out a segment with a saddle made for gay cowboys. “Man, that’s dated,” Whitty says of the Brokeback Mountain spoof. “I turned the television off and felt pretty f—king depressed.” Whitty used his letter to remind Leno about the oppression gays and lesbians have lived through – and continue to endure.

“Gay people, to you, are great material,” wrote Whitty. “When I think of gay people, I think of the gay news anchor who took a tire iron to the head several times when he was vacationing in St. Maarten's. I think of my friend who was visiting Hamburger Mary's, a gay restaurant in Las Vegas, when a bigot threw a smoke bomb filled with toxic chemicals into the restaurant, leaving the staff and gay clientele coughing, puking, and running in terror. I think of visiting my gay friends at their house in the country, sitting outside for dinner, and hearing, within hundreds of feet of where we sat, taunting voices yelling ‘Faggots.’ “I think of hugging my boyfriend goodbye for the day on 8th Avenue in Manhattan, and being mocked and taunted by passing high school students.” Whitty pointed out to Leno that many gay people have taken their own lives “because the world was so toxically hostile to them.”
  “You think gay people are great material. I think of a silent holocaust that continues to this day. I think of a silent holocaust that is perpetuated by people like you, who seek to minimize us and make fun of us and who I suspect really, fundamentally wish we would just go away.” The playwright told Leno that coming out of the closet takes more courage than delivering a monologue on national TV every night. “I daresay I suspect it takes bigger balls to come out of the closet than any thing you have ever done in your life,” he wrote. Whitty insisted he has a sense of humor and conceded that much about gay life is funny. But he urged Leno to find new targets for his jokes. “I'm tired of people like you. When I think of gay people, I think of centuries of suffering. I think of really, really good people who've been gravely mistreated for a long time now,” he wrote. “You've got to cut it out, Jay.” Leno has apologized in the past to viewers who are offended by certain jokes or sketches. In March he called Wendy Brogin after she criticized him for making a joke about U.S. vice president Dick Cheney's hunting accident by using footage of a shooting outside the Van Nuys courthouse in 2003.