Each day I make a list of things I don’t expect, but that I would welcome:
- A pack of bears makes a move as if to eat me, then reconsiders and hands me a Klondike bar.
- I get a call from Amy Poehler. It’s a wrong number but we talk for hours.
- Honey Boo Boo gets nominated for an award for promoting positivity about LGBT community and issues.
Well, I’ll be a Georgian child beauty queen’s uncle. EVERYTHING’S COMIN’ UP MOLLY!
Yes, TLC‘s inexplicable lightning rod of indecent, morbid fascination Here Comes Honey Boo Boo has been nominated for a GLAAD media award. Each year the awards honor media and entertainment that features ”fair, accurate, and inclusive representations” of the LGBT community. Honey Boo Boo‘s cast features Uncle Poodle, who is gay. And named “Poodle.”
And the infamous Georgia clan has made it clear that, as the kids say, it ain’t no thing.
As Alana “Honey Boo Boo” Thompson famously quipped, ”Ain’t nothing wrong with being a little gay. Everybody’s a little gay!”
Let’s be clear: there are people in this country who don’t nickname each other Poodle and Boo Boo and Sugar Bear. Who don’t pour Mountain Dew down the gullets of passersby so as to energize and rot as many children as possible. Who don’t refer to one teen sister as “the pregnantest” of all. And many of those people–the ones we would hold in far higher esteem than Honey Boo Boo and family–make a big hairy deal out of whether or not someone wants to love/live/sleep with someone of the same sex or who identifies as the same gender. Or anyone, for that matter. BECAUSE REMIND ME AGAIN WHY WE CARE WITH WHOM OTHER PEOPLE ARE LIVING/LOVING/SLEEPING?
Honey Boo Boo’s GLAAD nod highlights two things for me: (a) the absurdity in these wacky, tacky, possibly exploitative people being national thought leaders on an important social issue, and (b) that maybe all of the Boo Boo booing is unfair and classist.
Maybe not *all* of it.
Folks with scads more education, privilege, money, and traditional manners than the Thompson family can’t see that LGBT people are just…people. Some otherwise progressive people aren’t half as evolved on the matter. Hell, just last week a high-profile British feminist published a rant-of-an-editorial cruelly implying that trans women aren’t women and aren’t feminists and are “longing for a phantom limb” as they mourn the penis they abdicated.
And so Here Comes Honey Boo Boo‘s GLAAD nomination draws attention to the simple truth that you can’t buy class.
I, for one, did NOT see that coming.
*sits down, awaits the bears*
About Molly Martin
