Gays and Lesbians Don't Exist
» Homophobia
Malaysian television coverage of the 2009 Academy Awards for Milk:
Now, obviously for a movie about a gay man, the acceptance speeches would be peppered with the words gay and lesbian. Actually, the screenwriter said the words once each, and Mr Penn only mentioned gay once.
However, as shown on Astro, those words were muted out. In other words, those words were considered unacceptable to our ears.
But words … just describe things. We use it to communicate. In Ms Perry’s performance, the word “girl” was muted out because presumably it describes a lesbian act, so “girl” is unacceptable when taken in the context of the song. It was pretty obvious Ms Perry meant a girl, though.
In the second instance, “gay” and “lesbian” were presumably muted out because they describe the sexual orientation of a certain group of people, namely homosexuals.
