TRIGGER WARNING: This post was prompted by a hateful comment left on DallasVoice.com. A screen cap of that comment is included below. Be forewarned: It is vile.
Sometimes, those of us who are lucky enough to live our lives more or less immersed in our LGBTQ community can forget just how vicious and vitriolic the outside world can be.
Sure, it can get pretty nasty inside our community, too. We definitely have our fair share of racism, misogyny, classism, xenophobia and, of course, transphobia, among others.
But there’s just something about that gut-deep, blindingly pure hatred that comes from the so-called straights, especially the so-called Christian so-called straights, that can really get your attention and make you think twice about whether or not it’s actually, physically safe just to walk about the world as your true, authentic self.
We here at Dallas Voice don’t forget that, however. Because we get reminded on the regular, thanks to the ever-so-lovely comments people leave on stories on our website.
Because comments on our site are moderated, nothing gets publicly published until one of us OKs it. And usually, we just delete the crap like this and move on. If we happen to get a comment that is actually threatening harm to some individual or to the community at large, we will report it to authorities.
(I once had to call the Secret Service because a man with some obvious mental health issues stopped by my office to talk to me about how he was being targeted and manipulated by radiation waves or something like that. It was when he started with the threatening language aimed at then-President George W. Bush that I decided I should let authorities know.)
Usually we just delete the nasty comments. But this time, I decided to share this one particular comment here on the blog as a reminder to all of us that the hate is real. And the hate can be dangerous. So please forgive the unedited language in the screen cap below, but understand this is the reality of bigotry. (You won’t find this comment elsewhere on our website, by the way; it has been deleted.)
So, y’all stay safe out there. Look out for yourselves, and look out for each other. And, as the one big rainbow family we should be, let’s all be careful not to do the haters’ work for them.
— Tammye Nash
This is reprehensible. Horrible. And I agree- we should all be careful not to spread hate. But I would also ask that the VOICE do its own reflections on it’s own reporting. In the past few months, you’ve called people like Katrina Whately and Melissa Kingston homophobes with zero evidence or proof. Its disheartening to me as a reader that there is not more care and concern for your own reputation. And I’m still waiting for the public apologies….