China to Hollywood:
Don't Say Gay!
Hollywood: Yes Sir!
We already knew that Hollywood and corporate America are filled with total frauds on issues related to "human dignity" and "social justice," but here's your latest example. Before I get to that punchline, recall that the entertainment industry made a big show of opposing Florida's (popular) new parental rights law (which I've addressed several times). Boycotts were threatened, Disney blessed an employee "walkout" while weighing in heavily, and other forms of public pressure were applied. At the Oscars, the three emcees "said gay" onstage – the Florida bill in no way bars the saying of gay, but such details are beside the point – to loud audience cheers. This was before The Slap, of course. Stunning and brave:
Hollywood stands firmly behind the LGBTQ community, you see. Queer erasure will not stand. We say gay!*
*Exceptions apply:
References to a gay relationship in “Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore” were edited out of the movie by Warner Bros. for the film’s release in China. Only six seconds of the movie’s 142-minute runtime were removed. Dialogue that was edited out alluded to the romantic past between male characters Dumbledore (Jude Law) and Grindelwald (Mads Mikkelsen). “Harry Potter” author J.K. Rowling revealed Dumbledore was gay in 2009, but the movies had never explicitly referenced the character’s sexuality until this third “Fantastic Beasts” entry. Warner Bros. accepted China’s request to remove six seconds from the movie. The dialogue lines “because I was in love with you” and “the summer Gellert and I fell in love” were cut from “The Secrets of Dumbledore” release. The rest of the film remained intact...
“As a studio, we’re committed to safeguarding the integrity of every film we release, and that extends to circumstances that necessitate making nuanced cuts in order to respond sensitively to a variety of in-market factors,” Warner Bros. said in a statement to Variety. “Our hope is to release our features worldwide as released by their creators but historically we have faced small edits made in local markets.” “In the case of ‘Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore,’ a six-second cut was requested and Warner Bros. accepted those changes to comply with local requirements but the spirit of the film remains intact,” the statement added. “We want audiences everywhere in the world to see and enjoy this film, and it’s important to us that Chinese audiences have the opportunity to experience it as well, even with these minor edits.”
What a statement. "Nuanced" and "minor" edits were "necessitated" by "local requirements." But don't worry: "The spirit" of the film, with the LGBT references carefully excised, remains in place. And mission accomplished: The film debuted in China before it was released in the United States (meaning that the "don't say gay" version appeared on silver screens over there before Americans could see the uncensored original), it won the Chinese box office in its opening weekend, and the studio raked in millions – despite the minor complication of 25 million people in Shanghai being forbidden from leaving their homes, by government decree. Those people might be slowly starving, but other regions carried the Warner Brother release to a multi-million-dollar victory. Nice "win" for Hollywood. Audiences in Xinjiang providence, ground zero of the ongoing CCP genocide, were unavailable for comment.
The Chinese Communist Party demands gay characters be literally erased from movies before they're shown to domestic audiences. Hollywood, which preens and postures on these issues back home, eagerly salutes – as it does on various censorship orders from Beijing. Will Disney encourage its Chinese employees to walk out of work in protest of this? At least the ones who haven't been forcibly locked into their apartments for weeks? Will we get a statement from the CEO lamenting another industry heavyweight bowing to systemic homophobia? Absolutely not. This is a company, after all, that thanked the CCP for the privilege of shooting a film near concentration camps holding millions of ethnic and religious minorities. They censored other content to whitewash China's human rights abuses. So they'll say gay all day, so long as it's within the context of appeasing woke activists and domestic employees eager to attack the Republican governor of Florida. They'll sit down and shut up the nanosecond Chairman Xi tells them to. While we're on the subject of sniveling hypocrisy, will any major Western corporate sponsors have anything to say about the upcoming FIFA World Cup?
Adidas, for example, made a big show of running a trans athlete ad during March Madness. Are they comfortable sponsoring the upcoming overt bigotry at the World Cup, based on their own alleged "values"? Or does their "commitment" to the cause stop the moment their bottom line is potentially threatened? We all know the answer. After all, we just saw the same farce play out with Woke Corporations' bankrolling of Beijing's Genocide Games. Believe whatever you'd like about the Florida law. But performative opponents who say nothing in the face of bona fide oppression and bigotry when it suits their financial interests should be ignored, if not aggressively called out. Silence is violence – is it not, activists? I'll leave you with my radio monologue on all of this: