RYAN LEE
| 8.27.2008
A FORTUNATE TWIST of my childhood was my family getting cable TV shortly after I discovered masturbation.
One of my favorite networks was a channel we didn’t even subscribe to. I sometimes still worry about suffering permanent eye damage from all of the hours I spent “watching” the scrambled Spice Channel, the picture distorted by rolling horizontal lines that blurred into a rainbow.
Of course, I tried to squint between the rainbow lines, but the real stimulation came from setting the volume low, placing my ear against the TV and listening to the wooden dialogue and wailing moans of pay-per-view porn.
I also used to become more familiar with myself while watching the “Emmanuel” soft-core movies on Showtime, and the early installments of “Real Sex” and “Hookers at the Point.” But the definitive peepshow during my puberty years was “Dream On,” an HBO series that started in 1990.
My favorite character was Eddie Charles, who became one of my first TV crushes by appearing naked almost every week while being a manwhore. Eddie was played by Dorien Wilson, an actor who went on to appear in “The Steve Harvey Show” and “Sister, Sister,” and star as Professor Obie in “The Parkers.”
Imagine spending your entire life making other people laugh, only to have your life become the punch line in another comedian’s joke.
I recently Googled “Professor Obie” and found this one-line description on WikiAnswers: “Dorien Wilson, a closeted homosexual according to comedian Katt Williams.”
KATT WILLIAMS IS A COMIC genius who brazenly outs Wilson while talking about gay people he’s seen at “mansion parties” in Hollywood.
“Is that two n----- kissing?” Williams says in his 2006 HBO special “Katt Williams: Pimp Chronicles Pt. 1.” “Is one of them n------ Professor Obie?”
The audience roars with laughter, and Wilson immediately goes from being a fairly successful actor to a “closeted homosexual.”
I don’t know if Wilson is gay, but if so, my heart aches for him as it does for any gay person whose life is thrown into turmoil for the sake of other people’s amusement. It’s even sadder knowing that if Wilson is gay, he surrendered the power that is being used to abuse him.
I had an awful habit of getting caught while fooling around with boys when I was younger. I can’t remember how many times older folks walked in on me and a friend pulling up our pants or escaping some other compromising situation. Fortunately, these incidences always happened away from home, so I was never busted by any of my family members.
But as I grew older and became more sexually active, I feared it was only a matter of time before my mother came home early from work and caught me in the act. I imagined the absolute trauma of trying to explain myself under those circumstances and knew that I couldn’t continue to live with that risk. I also knew that I was a boy who liked other boys, and that was not going change.
I was petrified and on the brink of tears when I sat my mother down and told her I was gay; but I will forever be grateful that she learned such information about me on my own terms, instead of discovering it herself or learning it second-hand.
During my senior year in college, I hooked up with another student who became embittered when I didn’t want to pursue a serious relationship. He knew I was an editor with the school newspaper and president of my fraternity, and he threatened to expose that I was gay.
“Bitch!” I said as I laughed in his face. “You’re not telling anybody anything they don’t already know.”
I CAN'T IGNORE ignore that there remain homophobic forces in our society and that there is the potential to suffer consequences when telling other people that you are gay. But this is 2008, and most gay people who are still living in the closet are doing so by their own volition.
There are countless rationalizations for why people are not open and honest about their sexual orientation:
"My personal life is private and is nobody’s business," "Being gay is not all of who I am," or "I don’t like labels."
It’s noteworthy that most heterosexuals are not burdened by such excuses when expressing who they are and who they love.
In reality, it was incredibly difficult to be openly gay until just a few decades ago, and many of us are still constrained by fears that were once real, but have become imaginary. We downplay our sexuality and create rationalizations for not expressing ourselves because we think it will lessen the pain that comes with being gay.
But in 2008, more pain comes from the deception, and fear, and duplicity, and secrets than from being gay.
Just because we are silent does not mean our stories will not be told. When gay people remain invisible, as we had for hundreds of years, the straight people will control the discussion about what being gay means.
As long as they have that control — as Katt Williams and his audience proved — they will continue to laugh.
Thankfully, we have the power to kill the joke.
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