Joy Behar’s Homophobic ‘Joke’ Was NOT Okay

I don’t accuse Joy of being “anti-gay,” but she is still blinded by heterosexual privilege

It’s been close to a month-and-a-half since Joy Behar made a “joke” about gay male anal penetration while moderating an episode of ABC’s The View. The mainstream media has basically ignored it. And even many of Behar’s apologists and fanboys within the LGBT community itself have dismissed criticism or made excuses for her. Sadly, this lack of human empathy isn’t very shocking in today’s hyperpolarized society.

Here’s what had happened.

On their June 22 broadcast, The View’s cohosts were discussing the outpouring of support after Carl Nassib of the Las Vegas Raiders became the first active NFL player to publicly come out as gay. Although the entire panel (including Behar herself) expressed solidarity with Nassib, there came a moment where Behar — containing a premeditated glint of impish glee in her eyes — quipped to cohost Ana Navarro:

You know, Ana, after they said ‘penetration in the endzone,’ they lost me.

The other women on the panel reacted with nervous laughter, head shakes, and facial cringes. As Behar proceeded to throw the segment to commercial break, she casually said to viewers:

By the way, that inappropriate joke I made for daytime television…scratch it. Make-believe I never said it.

My guess is that one of the producers must have pleaded with Behar, through her earpiece, to apologize. Alas, what she ultimately offered to us was a “non-apology” where, rather than saying “I’m sorry for what I did,” she instead implied “I’m sorry that I got caught.”

Although plenty of people on social media expressed disgust and outrage with Behar, a lot of others defended her. This is a sad testament to how ideological alliances have overshadowed human decency. It’s a flagrant reminder how LGBT people — especially gay male members of our community — are routinely reduced to our genital movements when folks are looking for a cheap punchline.

The cohosts of ET Canada were one of the few North American media outlets to discuss it at any length. Lead host Sangita Patel suggested that Behar should have just offered a sincere apology, and Behar’s “joke” undermined the significance of the NFL (and athletics in general) becoming more hospitable to LGBT people. Guest cohost Bee Quammie remarked how it was disingenuous for Behar to ask viewers to pretend she’d never said those words when her dialogue has been digitally preserved forever; Quammie described Behar’s attempt at “humor” as low-hanging fruit.

But digital reporter Graeme O’Neil epitomized heterosexual privilege by incredulously shrugging off the controversy:

It’s just a joke…it’s a sexual joke. It was a good pun. I don’t get what people are so upset about. Gay people are not upset about this…It’s just a joke. What’s offensive about it? It’s a football analogy. It’s funny…We gotta lighten up, at a certain point…No one’s offended. It’s just a sex joke. It’s okay.

I don’t know what O’Neil’s own sexual orientation is…but it doesn’t really matter. The fact that he wouldn’t even attempt to understand why many gay men would be offended by this situation just oozes of heteronormative entitlement. This is all the more unfortunate, since O’Neil himself stood up against rapper DaBaby’s blatant homophobia in a more recent vodcast.

O’Neil, much like Behar, obviously cares about the well-being of LGBT people from a humanitarian perspective. And that’s why it’s so frustrating that he brushes off Behar’s unconscious heterosexism — in the process, giving cover to people who wish for LGBT people to be perpetually viewed as “abnormal.”

The reason I gave it a month-and-a-half before writing about this was to see what the fallout, if any, would be. The View has now wrapped its twenty-fourth season. ABC’s continued silence on this is telling. In fact, so is the mainstream media’s own complicity.

Many of you might say I’m judging Behar too harshly, or that I’m being overly-sensitive. You may view her casual raciness as “harmless.” After all, she supports secular rights for the LGBT community because it’s in line with her sense of justice, and she believes in domestic parity as a self-described feminist.

But being buddies with Mario Cantone doesn’t shield Behar from succumbing to the poison of homophobia and sexual orientationism — including when it stings men who love other men. Exhibiting misandry and supporting socially-progressive public policy aren’t mutually exclusive.

I don’t believe that Joy Behar, in her heart, harbors malice toward LGBT people based on having same-sex attraction per se. Clearly, she supports same-sex marriage and abhors the right-wing fundamentalists who want LGBT people to either be exiled or make ourselves scarce. But the blindspot Behar does have on this issue is only compounded by other intersectional flaws in her thinking.

For example, Behar — along with cohosts Whoopi Goldberg and Meghan McCain — has exhibited outright hostility toward younger generations (whom Behar disingenuously maligns under the blanket term of “millennials,” not bothering to understand the difference between GenXers, Millennials, Zoomers, and Alphas). Behar is clearly one of those windbags who believes that ageism can only work in one direction (from younger people, against older people).

She also has joined her cohosts in their tendency to let famous entertainers off the hook more easily for bad behavior, enabling what is essentially “celebrity privilege.” Witness her constant borderline-obsessive tantrums about how Al Franken — her fellow comedian and fellow celebrity — was pressured to resign from the U.S. Senate due to allegations of sexual harassment. Would Behar have been so generous and deferential toward the alleged innocence of a blue-collar man lacking a celebrity profile? Or is her self-serving proclivity for iconism rearing its ugly head? Writing for OutKick magazine earlier this summer, Bobby Burack also called out such glaring hypocrisy.

Taking into account Behar’s clear biases against young people and in favor of celebrities, and then couple that with her embrace of the stereotypes surrounding perceptions of gay male sex — it’s evident that, if you’re a gay (or bisexual) male person under the age of fifty with zero entertainment-based platforms, she has no use for you.

This is misandry. Period. It may not be Valerie Solanas levels of misandry, but Behar’s past public comments provide evidence of her sentiments.

For example, in May of 2018, Behar opined how the Girl Scouts should remain sex-segregated yet it’s fine for the Boy Scouts to become coed, because, in her (warped) view, boys benefit from being around girls more than girls benefit from being around boys. Nick Kangadis of The Media Research Center shined a spotlight on Behar’s asymmetry and gynocentrism, here.

Behar has also stated how she believes the only reason a man wouldn’t like Hillary Clinton is because Clinton is a woman. She has misgendered public figures such as Caitlyn Jenner and Chaz Bono — apparently, Jenner isn’t “woman enough” and Bono isn’t “man enough” to satisfy Behar’s transmisandrist worldview of binarism.

When Meghan McCain announced her departure from The View on July 1, Behar (in an apparent gesture of solidarity and “sisterhood” toward the toxic conservative provocateur with whom she normally butts heads) remarked how having five men as cohosts of a nationally-syndicated daytime talk show on topical issues just wouldn’t be as interesting as the female-led View is.

If we were talking strictly about a hypothetical talk show with a bunch of male hosts discussing sports, beer, or “hot chicks,” Behar would have a point. But imagine a male version of The View that delves into politics, domestic life, pop culture, and human psychology. Furthermore, let’s say it was cohosted by an intergenerational, multiracial, cross-ideological, sexually-diverse group of men with dynamic backgrounds who’ve lived very different professional and personal lives. Here’s one hypothetical combination for such a talk show panel: Tim Allen, Colman Domingo, Harry Shum Jr., Mark Indelicato, and Caleb McLaughlin.

You can’t tell me with a straight face that those five men would limit themselves to trite babble when exploring hot topics of the day. In fact, shall we expand the pool of potential headliners for this hypothetical program that Behar seems to discount so easily? Some additional names — Billy Porter, Hasan Minhaj, Kyle Chandler, Michael Yo, Avan Jogia, Jerrod Carmichael, Freddie Prinze Jr., Jonathan Van Ness, Ken Jeong, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Damon Wayans, Kevin Love, Nico Santos, Gary Sinise, B.D. Wong, Karamo Brown, Jorge Garcia, Kyle Kulinski, Alan Cumming, Kumail Nanjiani, John Urschel, or Frank Ocean.

Apparently, all of these gentlemen, if given a TV platform equivalent to Behar’s, would be, in Behar’s mind, vapid and utterly milquetoast.

The takeaway from this is that Behar doesn’t view gay men as a threat…but she views us as being inherently below women of all sexual orientations in terms of intrinsic value.

I don’t think Joy should be fired…or even “canceled” (whatever that means, anymore). I think she should demonstrate a willingness to engage in honest dialogue with members of the LGBT community who may have been triggered by her glib attempt at “humor.” I think she should educate herself about how acts of Queer love aren’t just limited to one man ramming his phallus into another man’s anus.

In fact, I was on Joy’s side during the Spring 2018 media flap that arose after she’d mocked then-Vice President Mike Pence for claiming that Jesus talked back to him, whereupon she likened Pence’s assertions to “mental illness.” When Pence — and thousands of online evangelical Christian whiners — took to social media to express personal offense to Joy’s comments, she was forced by ABC to apologize.

Secular law shouldn’t be dictated by theocratic interpretations of morality. If Mike Pence was using that as his cover for pushing regressive policies — or, if he genuinely believed that Jesus was advising him to support conversion therapy and spousally-chaperoned business meetings with women — then, yes, that is akin to “mental illness.” And I say this as somebody diagnosed with a mental illness, myself.

Joy was absolutely justified in her sardonic dig at Pence, during that discussion. Walt Disney CEO Bob Iger publicly took partial-credit for having coerced that apology out of Joy. Yet, this is the same Bob Iger who smugly referred to homosexuality as a “sexual choice” during the 1998 interview with Diane Sawyer where he placed all of the blame on Ellen DeGeneres for ABC’s cancellation of her then-sitcom. And, to top it all off, Joy has actually praised Iger (her boss) for being a role model.

We should be asking ABC executives: why were there no consequences for making gay and bisexual men the butt of her jokes, but Joy Behar had to apologize when Christians whined that she’d made a crack about Mike Pence’s cultists?

Here’s what I would advise Behar to say, publicly:

“I’m no longer going to joke about sexual activities that are highly-stigmatized, in any forum. I made an impromptu attempt at humor that was insensitive, and it’s something I never would have had to the audacity to say if I’d prepared a comedy setlist. I’ll continue my passionate advocacy for the legal rights and human dignity of the LGBT community, and I’ll work to regain the trust and faith from any members of their community who so often find themselves harmed in daily life by that type of verbiage.”

But I don’t believe Behar has the humility or integrity to make such a statement. Her fragile ego simply won’t allow for it.

Am I disappointed in her? Not really…because I’ve reached the point where I don’t expect very much out of her. That doesn’t change the reality that Behar’s sloppy confluence of misandry/ageism/iconism makes it that much harder for working-class Queer men/boys to stand up to the vindictive stigmas that so many people have toward male-on-male love.

And, before you invoke “power imbalance” — Joy Behar has more power and influence than perhaps anyone who regularly writes for Medium…and certainly more than most TV viewers in general. She possesses a daily megaphone on a popular daytime talk show that has chosen to brand itself as “the most important political TV show in America.”

In rape or sexual assault, power imbalance is between one person over the other. But, apparently, if you are biologically-male (and especially if you’re homosexual or bisexual), it doesn’t get viewed as seriously as if it happens to someone with a vagina.

Has Ms. Behar considered how appalling her “in the endzone” musings might be to men (or boys) who’ve coercively or forcibly had acts of anal penetration inflicted upon them? By relegating gay anal sex to a cavalier punchline, she breathes life into the fallacies of “that stuff doesn’t happen to boys” or “men should be able to resist such a physical violation against them.” She also trivializes any pleasurable acts of anal penetration that can take place between two men who are in love.

So, let’s review what these lack of consequences for Joy Behar say about how society views gay men, or, more broadly, Queer and nonconforming boys/men:

• It’s okay to devalue someone just because they are male (while practicing the entitlement of glossing over one’s own heterosexual privilege and/or cisgender privilege)
• It’s okay to publicly, openly, and unapologetically pontificate on the sex lives of complete strangers as long as you’re a famous comedian
• It’s okay to reduce gay men to one type of misunderstood, caricatured sex act (thereby perpetuating the invisibility of gay and bisexual men who engage in non-anal sexual activities)
• It’s okay to permit double standards denying genuine apologies toward LGBT people while tokenizing apologies toward anti-LGBT theocrats, as long as you’re kissing the butt of your smarmy heterosexual male boss (Iger, in case there was any doubt to whom I’m referring) in the process
• It’s okay to discount survivors of sexual violence because your ego wants to net you cheap laughs…and then, suddenly, you want everybody to just shrug it off when it backfires on you

Meanwhile, Behar gets to promote herself as a strong woman, an outspoken feminist, a safekeeper of American comedy, a sassy Baby Boomer, and a “woke” progressive mind — while conveniently discarding the lived experiences of gay, bisexual, transgender, and Queer men in general…

…and all she has to do is be willing to march in a Pride Parade with us.