wait could you elaborate on the snl transphobia sketch thing? i don’t use twitter and haven’t watched snl since i was a teenager so i’m out of the loop.
yeah of course. i'll do a bit of a deep dive for usefulness, but it's a very dark and upsetting story so be warned this is going to discuss transphobia, transphobic violence, sexual violence and murder.
the post was about this meme:
This is late comedian Norm Macdonald, reporting on the murder of Brandon Teena for the Weekend Update segment.
Brandon Teena was a transgender man from Nebraska. He passed so successfully that most of his social circle did not know he wasn't cis. His own girlfriend, Lana Tisdel, did not know he was trans until he was jailed for check forging and she found him in the female section when bailing him out. Word got out after this.
As a result, two men in his life -- John L. Lotter and Marvin "Tom" Nissen -- assaulted him at a Christmas party a few days later. They forced Brandon to expose his genitals to Lana, against both his and Lana's will. They then took Brandon away and gang raped him. Brandon escaped and Lana convinced him to report the rape, but the rape kit was lost and the police were expectedly hostile due to his gender.
Lotter and Nissen got wind of the report and hunted Brandon down and murdered him, along with his roommate Lisa Lambert and Lana's sister's boyfriend, Phillip DeVine. Lotter was executed and Nissen sentenced to life in prison for their crimes. Brandon, only 21 years old at the time of his death on New Year's Eve 1993, was buried under his dead name with an epitaph describing him as a "daughter" and "sister."
The SNL joke comes from Weekend Update, a segment that recounts the news of the week with a humorous slant. This meme comes from a February 1996 episode, "reporting" on the sentencing of Nissen and Lotter. Macdonald's full joke is as follows:
"And finally, in Falls City, Nebraska, John Lotter has been sentenced to death for attempting to kill three people in what prosecutors called a plot to silence a cross-dressing female who had accused him of rape. Now, this might strike some viewers as harsh, but I believe everyone involved in this story should die."
Naturally, this was heinous for a number of reasons. Even in the homophobia and transphobia of the 90s, community organizations spoke up in outrage over this. The Transexual Menace threatened to picket if SNL didn't apologize. NBC even admitted the joke was inappropriate at the time.
But still, this joke also aired almost 30 years ago, before a lot of us were even born (I myself was just a baby). While Teena's murder (along with Matthew Shepard's) was a watershed moment for the gay rights movement in America, it's not as widely discussed today. But we have a responsibility to not perpetuate this joke that was castigated even in its time. It strikes me as our responsibility to do right by our elders who held NBC to account for this and not pass this meme around and rehabilitate it unintentionally. Maybe that's overdramatic. I don't think so.
discoholicmusic
gummygunk
origamiaround
