Commenters on my post below about Steven Slater said, variously:

1) Who knew that he was gay, and who cares?

2) Why bring race into it, and you’re wrong anyway?

3) How dare you call him a fraud.

Let’s take these in order.

1) The gay thang: If you couldn’t tell Steven Slater is gay from the second you saw his MySpace photo, below, then you have not been to a major city lately. Or watched a reality TV show. Or flown on an airplane.

In any case, Google “Steven Slater gay” and you’ll see that most of the world had no trouble picking up on this. Here, the GA Voice debates whether Slater is good or bad for the gays. (They say: Good. I say: Terrible.) To those who allege homophobia on my part, I answer: Nice try. My point was that Slater played into unflattering stereotypes of gays: That they are melodramatic, bitchy, moody divas.  (As portrayed on reality TV.) Slater did every professional gay man a disservice.

But then, some gays, like the GA Voice writer, embrace the stereotypes:

If you didn’t already know, stressed gay men will pop off at the mouth in a moment’s notice. …Slater didn’t go to work on Aug. 9 expecting to become a gay stewardess icon, but here we are, on Aug. 10, seeing his mug all over the news….

2) Back in black:  I posed the question, “Would America have reacted differently to Steven Slater if he were a straight black man?”  If you don’t believe me, I said, ask a black guy if he thinks that’s a crazy question.

The responses were generally, it wouldn’t make any difference, and why would you ask that question in the first place?

Here the blog “Chocolate City,” which describes itself as “the best African-American blog,” asks the question, “What if Steven Slater was a Gay Black Male?” (I took it up a notch.)

Would you have started a defense fund on his behalf without knowing anything about him? Would you have started a Facebook page for him? Would you have become one of his fans, or Would you have instantly passed judgment or condemned him and probably referred to him as a “crazy n*&&#@”?

(To be fair, the post is a little vague, and may be condemning homophobia in the black community. But…the point remains that perceptions of Slater would be different had Slater been black.)

3) Is Slater a faker? The answer looks like yes; not one of the passengers verifies his account, some of the passengers say he had a cut on his head before the flight started, and he’s admitted that he’d dreamed of popping out the chute for years. (Calling Dr. Freud.)

There’s a decent chance that Slater was actually drunk.

The guy’s a scam artist. And so our culture does what it does for all scam artists: It offers him a reality TV show.

Which is to say that the scam worked. And that an action which was probably shaped by images of the world on reality TV, and propelled by a desire to be on a reality TV show, now comes full circle. Artificial reality becomes real life becomes artificial again.

It’s a good thing no one died from that chute….

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