MouthButtMilo and More than just Gay, Fighter Roxane Gay
“It’s impossible to adequately articulate how much Gay is the antithesis of Milo. Milo rose to fame as the pretty gay male hater of all things gay, of women, of people of color. He was promoted on the pages of Breitbart news–the extremist website of which President Trump’s chief strategist, Steve Bannon, who on January 26 told the press to stop talking and stop reporting, is CEO.
Bannon, who has also made documentaries for Gov. Sarah Palin and Rep. Michele Bachmann and equated Planned Parenthood with the Holocaust, also said "birth control makes women unattractive and crazy," said women who feel they’ve been attacked online should just "log off" and said in a radio interview in 2011 that progressives don’t like conservative women because they aren’t "dykes." Milo was built by Bannon and Bannon’s protĂ©gĂ© is a self-described white nationalist.
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Last year Yiannopoulos alleged that lesbians had the highest incidence of domestic violence of all couples in an article titled "Attack of the Killer Lesbians!" Another article "Lesbian Bridezillas Bully Bridal Shop Owner Over Religious Beliefs," took the side of shop owners refusing to serve a lesbian couple.
Milo was Bannon’s golden boy. There was no one off limits in his screeds, but Milo’s favorite targets were women (especially lesbians) and people of color (especially anyone Muslim). His writing is transphobic and xenophobic and he doesn’t care what anyone thinks. College groups protested him speaking on their campuses while college administrators insisted free speech was at issue.
Currently Milo is on his "Dangerous Faggot" tour, which has brought the "Alt-Right" slithering out, even on college campuses. On Jan. 3, students at the University of California, Berkeley, tried to have Milo banned from appearing. But on Jan. 26, UC Chancellor Nicholas Dirks said Milo had the right to speak on campus at a Feb. 1 event organized by the Berkeley College Republicans.
Yes, Republicans–even the so-called moderates–love Milo because they can point to him as a gay man they "know." They can embrace his virulent misogyny because he’s gay. They can say he’s not a racist because he claims to have sex with black men. They think they can even say the word f*ggot because Milo does.
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It has often seemed that there is no one to stand up to Milo. Those of us who have stood up to him on social media have gotten hounded by his many trolls. Those who have written about him have received threats, too.
All of which is what makes Roxane Gay stand out like a supershero from a Marvel graphic novel. She stood up. Bigly.
In these days of The Resistance to President Trump, women are leading the protests. Our protests are taking myriad forms. On Jan. 26 award-winning writer Roxane Gay showed us what democracy–and intersectional feminism–looks like when she withdrew her upcoming book from Simon & Schuster.m
The best-selling author and New York Times columnist announced she will no longer publish her book with Simon & Schuster specifically and only because they had signed Milo Yiannopolous.
In a statement given to BuzzFeed News, Gay explained, "I was supposed to turn the book in this month and I kept thinking about how egregious it is to give someone like Milo a platform for his blunt, inelegant hate and provocation. I just couldn’t bring myself to turn the book in. My editor emailed me last week and I kept staring at that email in my inbox and finally over the weekend I asked my agent to pull the book."
Gay appeared at Indiana University Jan. 25 to a crowd so huge, there were hundreds in an over-flow room. There she explained she could not normalize racism. Gay also revealed–and this is both shocking and utterly unsurprising given who is now president–that Milo’s $250,000 advance is more than the advances for her first five books.
In her statement Gay said she was not calling for censorship, she was making her own statement, which, as she had said in her tweet, she could actually afford to do.
"Milo has every right to say what he wants to say, however distasteful I and many others find it to be. He doesn’t have a right to have a book published by a major publisher but he has, in some bizarre twist of fate, been afforded that privilege. So be it."
Emphasizing that as a well-known and popular writer (and, I would add, much beloved), Gay said she is in a "fortunate enough" position to withdraw her book. "I recognize that other writers aren’t and understand that completely," she added.
Simon & Schuster CEO Carolyn Reidy responded to S&S authors with a letter in which she said in part, "First and foremost, I want to make clear that we do not support or condone, nor will we publish, hate speech," BuzzFeed News reported. "Not from our authors. Not in our books. Not at out imprints. Not from our employees and not in our workplace."
According to Reidy, the decision to publish "Dangerous" was an "editorially independent" one made without the "involvement or knowledge of our other publishers." The book was pitched as an "examination of the issues of political correctness and free speech," Reidy said in the letter.
Reidy explained, "The imprint believed that an articulate discussion of these issues, coming from an unconventional source like Mr. Yiannopoulos, could become an incisive commentary on today’s social discourse that would sit well within its scope and mission, which is to publish works for a conservative audience.” We will need more brave people like her in the coming weeks, months and years. We will need people willing to put everything on the line. We will need people to remind those who can’t stand up that there are heroes walking among us and that their voices can propel us forward.
Gay is the daughter of Haitian immigrants. She was born in Omaha, Nebraska. She has a PhD and teaches at Purdue University. She writes so much it’s hard to keep up with her work.
Gay said she was "putting my money where my mouth is."
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Last summer, Gay and poet Yona Harvey were announced as writers for Marvel Comics World of Wakanda, a spin-off from the company's Black Panther title, making her the first black woman to be a lead writer for Marvel.
Roxane Gay is a boss. She fends off haters with aplomb. She makes time to send consoling tweets to women in the hospital and responds to aspiring writers and talks about the movies she loves (you’d be surprised).
And whether Simon & Schuster knows it or not, Gay’s made a statement about them that many of us will not soon forget. ”
Victoria A. Brownworth is an award-winning journalist, editor and writer and the author and editor of nearly 30 books. She has won the NLGJA and the Society of Professional Journalists awards, the Lambda Literary Award and has been nominated for the Scripps-Howard Award, RFK Award and the Pulitzer Prize. She won the 2013 SPJ Award for Enterprise Reporting. She is a regular contributor to The Advocate and SheWired, a blogger for Huffington Post and A Room of Her Own, senior politics reporter and contributing editor for Curve magazine, contributing editor for Lambda Literary Review and a columnist for San Francisco Bay Area Reporter. Her reporting and commentary have appeared in the New York Times, Village Voice, Baltimore Sun, Los Angeles Times, Boston Globe, Philadelphia Inquirer, The Nation, Ms Magazine, Diva and Slate. Her book, Coming Out of Cancer: Writings from the Lesbian Cancer Epidemic won the Lambda Literary Award, From Where We Sit: Black Writers Write Black Youth won the 2012 Moonbeam Award for cultural & historical fiction. Her new novel, Ordinary Mayhem, won the IPPY Award for fiction and the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Mystery. Her book Erasure: Silencing Lesbians and her next novel, Sleep So Deep, will both be published in fall 2017. @VABVOX
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