Op-ed: Brett Ratner, a Hollywood Homophobe

Things can happen very fast in Hollywood: green lighting a project, casting a flick, making a few million, crashing and burning your career.

Brett Ratner is one of those overnight sensation guys who found a shtick (the Rush Hour movies) and ran with it right to box office gold and instant cachet. Goofy straight guys, scatological humor, action, babes, sex, more action, The End. With over a dozen top-grossing films in his repertoire, Ratner is a Hollywood A-Lister. If you haven't seen his films it doesn't matter; plenty of 13-year-old boys and their 25-year-old clones have. It's enough to keep a Kardashian in weddings for a really, really long time.

Tower Heist is Ratner's most recent box office hit, starring Eddie Murphy (he of the late night visits with transgender prostitutes and former host-to-be of next year's Oscars having quit today) and underused Oscar-nominee Gabourey Sidibe. Ratner's a moneymaker so he doesn't have time for much (rising stars never do). So when he said during a Q&A after the Nov. 4 premiere of Tower Heist that "rehearsals are for fags," everybody laughed and kept moving.

Well, maybe not everybody.

Fast forward a few days and Ratner has gone from Tower Heist to Towering Inferno. The outrage over Ratner's latest anti-queer slur was fast, furious, and proved that some faggots and dykes are done with being the last minority you can still slam in public to get a good laugh now that blacks and Jews are off the table. But hey, if President Obama can get away with homophobia ("I'm still evolving on the issue" of queer civil rights --imagine the uproar if a white president said that about black civil rights?), why not a Hollywood director, right?

This wasn't Ratner's first homophobic slip of the tongue. He's a known misogynist, as well, who views women as orifices to "hit" and likes to say so publicly and often. Ratner also opined in the past that if NYU film students hadn't seen his top-grossing films, they were probably watching "some fag shit" instead. Ratner also claims to have had sex with Lindsay Lohan, who is Hollywood's best-known problem lesbian and half of Ratner's age. Yet this was the guy the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences had chosen to revamp the Oscars after last year's disaster with a laconic James Franco and peripatetic Anne Hathaway.

Apparently the Academy forgot-for the moment-that their head writer for over a decade has been Bruce Vilanch, one of the (proudly and openly) gayest men on the planet. Perhaps they also forgot that the Oscars -- and Emmys and Tonys -- have all been hosted by queers: Ellen DeGeneres, Neil Partrick Harris, Jane Lynch, Rosie O'Donnell. Fortunately, someone whispered in their ear and by late on Nov. 8th, Ratner was out, cut from the broadcast entirely, "resigning" the coveted gig.

The story doesn't end there, however, because the classic move for homophobes connected to the large or small screen is to run to the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamationfor rehab. Just a few pats on the back from the nation's least aggressive watchdog organization and Ratner will be able to say some of his best friends are gay and he'll get another green light and another major gig. Who needs those faggy Oscars anyway?

GLAAD says they are working with Ratner to "convene public discussions with leaders in the entertainment industry about promoting fair and accurate inclusions of LGBT people and stories." Here's a suggestion. Send Ratner over to the set of Grey's Anatomy for a few days. Creator Shonda Rhimes -- a leader in the entertainment industry -- has managed to keep a complicated lesbian storyline front-burner for several years on the top-rated show, winning Emmys and NAACP and ALMA awards in the process.

Rhimes dealt with a major scandal involving the homophobic Isaiah Washington and out gay actor T.R. Knight, both cast members at the time. Washington ran to GLAAD for rehab, but still couldn't keep the word "faggot" from falling out of his mouth. He's never managed to work much since Rhimes fired him. An object lesson for Ratner?

If it's defamation to slur other minorities, then it's not okay to slur queers. We don't need to boycott Ratner's films; we aren't his audience. But we do need to remind the Powers That Be that we are a large demographic for the entertainment industry and a major demographic of its behind-the-scenes workers (can you say hair, makeup, set design?).

The Academy did the right thing in dumping Ratner. Bigotry doesn't deserve a reward. Now GLAAD has to follow through with Ratner's rehab while the rest of us watch to see if this homophobe's script really can be changed.