Anti-Gay Slurs: The Latest in Hilarity — Page 2

Hmm, I see your point and I think that we can agree there, actually.

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Updated On: 12/17/06 at 12:33 PM

Glad to hear it. Getting a point across on a message board is a skill I've yet to master.

Rathnait62: My bad. I suppose I should know more about the play before I jump into a debate about it, hrm?

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SporkGoddess, I have to disagree with you about minstrel shows. Genuine minstrel shows didn't even have black people in them. I don't see how they brought sympathy and respect to black people.

Rathnait62, I don't know if you've read the whole article, but one of Isherwood's points (and one I happen to agree with) is that the agent only seems to be a lesbian so that she can get away with saying anti-gay slurs and get laughs with them. There is otherwise not one thing in the play about her being a lesbian, and I didn't believe the character was a lesbian for a second because I didn't believe anything about the character.

Indeed, this is the problem with the entire play. The characters behave with no consistency whatsoever, so much so that they can barely be considered characters, not if by characters we mean creations that have some believability in human terms. The characters just keep behaving in ways that the author, a talented writer, believes will get laughs, regardless of what has previously been established about them.

nobodyhome: Foster's song "Nellie Was a Lady" was the first time that a black woman had EVER been referred to as a lady. And "My Old Kentucky Home" was inspired by Uncle Tom's Cabin; it was evident that it was about the ugly side of slavery and thus made people think about that.

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"Minstrel shows, while horrenously offensive, did have some good music, and with Stephen Foster's help eventually brought more respect and even sympathy to black people."

To clarify my earlier response to your statement quoted above, SporkGoddess, there's no question that minstrel shows had some great music. But despite Foster supposedly having told minstrel-show performers singing his songs to present the characters with compassion, I still question whether white actors in blackface who most of the time did mock their characters—if not, Foster would not have felt compelled to offer his admonition—really did cause white audiences to feel more sympathy and respect for black people.

I think that we really can't know. There may indeed have been a few performers who did desire to do that and a very few who succeeded. But I would bet that such cases were very few.

I don't know of contemporary accounts of performers managing to effect real change in their audience's perceptions. Perhaps there were some.

"Foster's song 'Nellie Was a Lady' was the first time that a black woman had EVER been referred to as a lady. And 'My Old Kentucky Home' was inspired by Uncle Tom's Cabin; it was evident that it was about the ugly side of slavery and thus made people think about that. "

I'm sorry but I kind of doubt that Foster's song was the first time that a black woman had EVER been referred to as a lady. I know I'm taking you literally in a way that you didn't intend to be taken. But we really can't even say with certainty that this was true in popular culture. Even if this was stated as fact in a book, so much popular culture of that time is lost that I wouldn't trust any book that would make such an absolute statement about something unknowable.

And the information I've found says that "My Old Kentucky Home" (which I admit Frederick Douglass did view as a song sympathetic to black people) was written in 1850, and Uncle Tom's Cabin was published in 1853.

Whatever Foster's intentions for his songs, I don't think that minstrel shows did much, if anything, to make white audiences respect black people. It's not as if Foster's songs were the only ones that were heard in minstrel shows, or that he had any power over how they were performed 99.999 percent of the time. And I think that the overall view of black people as presented in minstrel shows probably counteracted whatever positive effects may occasionally have been present.

Of course, someone like William Lane, aka Master Juba, might have actually had some positive effects. But even though he did appear as a sort of special guest in some minstel shows, I wouldn't really count him, as his appearances were such an anomaly.

"We don't know anything about her personal life - that's part of the point. I think making her a lesbian makes her character all that more fascinating - she spends the entire play fighting to keep her client in the closet."

And it might be interesting if that aspect was explored even in passing. I think that what you're saying may have been the intent, but with no development whatsoever, I just didn't buy the character's lesbianism as anything more than a device thrown in to take the sting off the character's homophobia so that we would laugh at it.

Again, if I had found much of anything in the play believable, I might have been willing to go with that. But it seemed to me that the characters were puppets who behaved as the playwright wanted them to from moment to moment, Of course, this is true in every play, but the art is in making their actions seem inevitable and true. For me, this play did not succeed in that at all. I appreciate that for others it did.

Blackface, while VERY racist, did help black people get on the stage and start making names for themselves (even though it was a horrible way to do so). Like the movie "White Chicks" . . . that is blackface in reverse, but there was not a stink about it or anything because it was black people impersonating white people. I CAN NOT stand double standards.

With the slurs toward gay peole . . . it really is in the context of where that slur came from. It is from "Will and Grace" it is funny because it is about gay people and and used for comedic effect . . . not with Larry the Cable Guy (who is a know homophobe), it is COMPLETELY different.

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Spidey, it's only "double standards" if you make the underlying assumption that the two parties are on equal footing in the first place. You know they're not.

And I can't believe we're going into "these people suffered more than your people," as if that actually means anything. Besides Jews always win that contest, so get over it.

"Blackface, while VERY racist, did help black people get on the stage and start making names for themselves (even though it was a horrible way to do so)."

Are you talking about when black people used makeup to make themselves look darker onstage and to look more like white minstrel performers in blackface? That did happen, but most of the time when people talk about blackface, they mean white performers wearing dark makeup.

nobodyhome: I dunno, in a video we watched on Stephen Foster in my music course someone said that it was the first time a black woman had ever been referred to as a lady. :/

Are you sure about Uncle Tom's Cabin? Because every source that I've seen says that "My Old Kentucky Home" was inspired by it. In fact, the original title had "Uncle Tom" in it.

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I'd be inclined to trust what's on this site, which says that the song was written in 1850, though not published till 1853

http://www.kdla.ky.gov/resources/kysong.htm

I think the idea that the song was inspired by Uncle Tom's Cabin is probably a common and understandable misperception based on the song's original title. But if the song was indeed written in 1850, it would seem impossible for it to have been inspired by Stowe's novel.

Although the origin of the phrase "Uncle Tom" does seem to usually be attributed to Stowe, it's possible that it was in use before then and both Foster and Stowe appropriated it. Or it might just have been a coincidence that both Foster and Stowe came up with it. It might even be that Stowe got it from Foster's song, which she might well have heard before it was published. It might have already been popular as a song before it was published. I don't know.

The site does say that Foster instructed blackface minstrel-show performers not to mock the characters, but again I think this tends to show how prevalent the mocking approach was. And I doubt that one man would have able to effect much of a change, not even Stephen Foster. And he did only live till 1864.

As for "Nelly Was a Lady," I just always mistrust anything that says "this was the first time this was done." It's almost always unprovable. And to say that the song was the first time a black woman had ever been referred to as a lady, if that is what the documentary claimed, is pretty silly. They probably meant that it was the first song in which that was true, but even that would be hard to prove.