NYT Should Know There Isn’t Anything “Funny” About Being Gay

What's so funny about being gay? Because being gay is bad? It's amoral? It's gross?

There must be something I'm missing, otherwise, the New York Times wouldn't have posted a "humorous" cartoon of Trump daydreaming about smooching Putin.

In the past couple of years, it feels as if the New York Times (mainly the Opinion section) has been placed on this planet for the sake of testing us, including "Aziz Ansari Is Guilty. Of Not Being a Mind Reader." to "A Voice of Hate in America's Heartland." While I understand it's all opinion, this video pushes it.

The video portrays Trump as a quintessential, teenage girl daydreaming about Putin, his celebrity crush. A steroid-pumped, shirtless Putin then sweeps Trump off his feet, and together on a unicorn, they ride off into the rainbow-filled sunset, only to end up aggressively tongue-locked. All the while, real audio is playing of past interviews and speeches where the President of the United States is praising the President of Russia.

The video is supposed to be funny, but here's what it gets so wrong: It's mocking a marginalized group of people while perpetuating toxic masculinity.

A large contributor of toxic masculinity is a fear of being perceived as gay or effeminate. That if someone mistakes you for being queer or a "sissy" you are somehow less of a man and no woman will ever find you desirable. As a result, men exaggerate the worst stereotypically masculine qualities, like being aggressive and emotionless. They do everything in their power to show they're not in any way, shape, or form like gay men.

At its extreme, this leads to violence to unequivocally "prove" that they are masculine and straight.

So it's not a stretch to say that this video, albeit inadvertently, not only justifies but also promotes violence. It truly is as simple as that.

If it sounds like I'm being dramatic or grossly overstating my claim, we have to remember that earlier this year, men were shot for holding hands in public with each other while vacationing in Mexico. Over a year later, the Chechnyan purge of gay and bisexual men is still going strong. And it's legal to discriminate against gay people for buying a goddamn wedding cake.

While there has been immense progress in the past five decades since the Stonewall Riots, to say we have so much work left to go is still an understatement.

Of course, I wish we lived in a world where we could make jokes about world leaders being gay, but that world is so far off in the distance. We're not even close to seeing it. It's absurd to believe otherwise.

That's why this video is so offensive.