Below are the posts in which Andrew and readers respond to Foster’s bizarre coming-out/acceptance speech while receiving a lifetime achievement award at the 2013 Golden Globe Awards.
Jodie Foster Stops Lying
Full transcript here. Her date last night, believe it or not, was wife-abusing, homophobic anti-Semite, Mel Gibson. Would you entrust your young sons to a man with Gibson’s violent and vile history? A highlight of her narcissistic, self-loving speech:
I already did my coming out about a thousand years ago, back in the Stone Age, in those very quaint days when a fragile young girl would open up to trusted friends and family, co-workers, and then gradually, proudly, to everyone who knew her, to everyone she actually met. But now, apparently, I’m told that every celebrity is expected to honor the details of their private life with a press conference, a fragrance, and a prime-time reality show.
What unadulterated bullshit. She never came out until, very obliquely, in 2007. And virtually every coming out these days is low-key, simple and no-drama. I do not remember Anderson Cooper’s press conference, fragrance or reality show. She goes on:
[S]eriously, if you had been a public figure from the time that you were a toddler, if you’d had to fight for a life that felt real and honest and normal against all odds, then, maybe, then you too would value privacy against all else. Privacy. Some day, in the future, people will look back and remember how beautiful it once was. I have given everything up there, from the time that I was 3 years old. That’s reality show enough, don’t you think?
“How beautiful it once was”? When gay people were put in jail, or mental institutions, or thrown out of their families – all because of the “beauty” of privacy for Hollywood royalty like Foster? And she honestly believes it’s courageous to come out in a retirement speech? Well I guess we should be relieved she didn’t leave it for her obit. I defer to a reader’s open letter:
Dear Jodie Foster:
There’s nothing wrong with not publicly acknowledging the open secret of your sexuality for decades as you so chose. There’s also nothing wrong with choosing to kinda-sorta discreetly come out by thanking your partner in a speech in 2007. Yet there is something very tragic and self-contradictory about a bitter diatribe criticizing how other people choose to come out, officially announcing your sexuality on your way out the door of the industry in a non-coming-out speech because you came out “1000 years ago” – while simultaneously defending your fierce desire for privacy – in a brazen attempt to get some of the praise and love you now see the younger gay generation getting for their fearlessness of/indifference to being out… all while being escorted by one of the most well-documented anti-Semitic, homophobic, bigoted assholes in Hollywood history, claiming he “saved” you. If that was indeed your retirement announcement, what a sad end to a stellar career of a brilliant artist. If ever there was a closet you needed to stay in forever, it would be the one marked “Mel Gibson’s friend.”
J. Bryan Lowder defends Foster:
As far as I’m concerned, as long as a gay person hasn’t been actively pretending to be straight (like a number of people in that hall tonight are probably doing), I don’t think she is required to be an activist or even a “role model” for younger LGBT people if she doesn’t wish to be. It is, of course, wonderful when big names like Zachary Quinto and Anderson Cooper have the courage to give up their hetero-privilege in a public pronouncement, and undoubtedly the increasing recognition that so many of our culture-makers are gay has the power to challenge perceptions. But in the midst of the noisy demand that celebrities be “loud and proud,” as Foster put it, the ostensible endgame of the LGBT equality movement can get drowned out: the ability to live our lives as we wish, freely and gently, in peace.
Yes, yes, yes. But the only way we were ever going to get past that oppression was through it. I’m thrilled Foster can now live a fuller life with less fear. I’m saddened she waited until others far less powerful had made the sacrifice to make that possible. And that she waited for the safest moment of all – winning a well-deserved Lifetime Achievement Award – to do so.
Jim Burroway is much more forgiving towards Jodie Foster than I was:
Jodie Foster, near as I can tell, was never homophobic. But she could have been a role model, they say. They, who are not Jodie Foster. Of course, so could have a million other people. Some of them came out, others still haven’t. But because of those who have come out, there are more role models now than we can shake a glow stick at. So why the controversy now that she has come out? Does anyone seriously think there’s a teenager in Omaha who has been holding off on coming out, waiting for Jodie Foster to take the first step? Does anyone even think there’s a teenager in Omaha who knows who Jodie Foster is?
That really wasn’t my point. I’d have been thrilled if she’d just put it out there calmly and simply the way others do. But she mounted an incoherent attack on the coming out of others, and equated privacy with the kind of deception no heterosexual would contemplate for a milli-second. Alyssa thinks Foster’s plea for privacy backfired:
[W]hen Foster last night praised “one of the deepest loves of my life, my heroic co-parent, my ex-partner in love but righteous soul sister in life. My confessor, ski buddy, consigliore, most-beloved BFF of 20 years, Cydney Bernard,” that was all she really needed to say. Instead Foster attempted to defend her right not to talk about the intimate details of her private life in front of an international audience via a speech about her private life in front of an international audience. It seemed, at the very least, self-defeating.
Dissents Of The Day
A reader writes:
Oh Andrew! Here you go again, eviscerating people who don’t conform to your expectations without any consideration of whether you stand on the same playing field or not. Hollywood is different than New York and DC; being an actor or entertainer is different than being a writer/editor/public intellectual. People are more forgiving of those whose “face” is incidental to their work than those whose public personae is integral to what they do.
How many years have you been doing this? And yet it is only now that you feel strong enough to ask people to pay directly to receive the benefit of your services. An actor has to count on individuals every day to lay down X amount of dollars to consume what they have produced, and the general public’s willingness to do that is directly linked to who they perceive you to be.
Foster has an estimated net worth of $100 million. Forgive me if I side with an out kid in high school over the pampered enablers of homophobia in Hollywood, who all the while preen about their liberalism. Another reader: “It’s none of my damn business – I can google ‘Jodie Foster girlfriend’ to find out that kind of stuff.” Another brings up Hinckley:
In a vacuum, I totally agree with everything you said about Jodie Foster. But on the other hand, when a stalker shoots the president trying to get your attention when you’re still in your teens, the media creates even more of a circus of your life when this happens, and you end up having to testify
at the trial of a presidential assassin, I think you have a completely different relationship to celebrity, privacy, and revealing anything personal than almost any other person.
I take that point and should have included it in my original post. Another:
On the main substance of this one, I have to disagree with you. Keep in mind that I am the mother of a 31-year-old gay son who came out to us when he was 16.
A brave young man, he also came out to his school with a beautiful speech at an assembly shortly thereafter. He has recently also revealed to us, and then publicly, that he is HIV positive. We are wildly proud of this funny, intelligent, kind man of ours and always have been.
So my feelings about this are in some ways personal. I watched Jodie Foster’s speech and I couldn’t help thinking that privacy is indeed, a beautiful thing, and that everyone has the right (or used to) to remain private about any aspect of their lives. Although I felt the speech was awkward, and a bit cringe-worthy, I think that’s because she is not the type of “celeb” who has ever put her private life in the public eye, for which, in many ways, I respect her. She seemed to be embarrassed, herself, to be there speaking publicly about private parts of her life. Most of us cannot imagine being thrust into the limelight by our parents at the age of three. She turned out to be a talented actress, but it seems to me that by the time she could decide about her own life plans that that part of them was already entrenched. Who among us can say that, under similar circumstances, we would have chosen to turn away from our seemingly pre-destined career?
So she remained an actress with a private life. No one has to support her work unless they want to, but having seen her films over the years it is clear to me why many fans do. It would have been great if she had shown the same courage my son did, but she chose not to, which was her right. Did she owe us, or in particular, the LGBT community anything more? I don’t think so, and I’m a bit surprised at the vitriol in some of the criticism, including yours.
As far as the Mel Gibson thing, though, I just have to ask – WTF?
Another:
As for her sitting with Mel Gibson – you can be an odd sort of Catholic, Mr Sullivan, with this pick and choose form of forgiveness. I find Foster’s loyalty to her incredibly flawed friend a fine show of character. We forget that Gibson’s core flaw is that he’s a near-terminal drunkard, and from that blackest river all other behavior flows. What is Foster to do, hide the good man she knows that struggles under the bottle in a closet until People mag decides he’s paid his penance?
You demand that Foster come out like men do in 2013 when she in fact has been very visible as a queer woman for years, hiding nothing. Or perhaps that she have come out back in the days when doing so would have promptly obliterated her career and denied queer and straight women of an icon of inspiration.
In the contest between odd sorts of Catholics, I think the raging, violent, misogynist bigot who opposes Vatican II in part because of its abandonment of poisonous anti-Semitism wins that round. And I simply have no tolerance for wife-beaters. One more reader:
Not once in her very long career did she imply or say she was straight. So why that headline? There are thousands of closested gays who have constructed artificial lives to hide this fact; she has never once did this. Whether she was gay or straight, I am quite sure she still would have been very private.
She did, in fact, come out to her friends, family and even acquaintances years ago, just as she said. She came out to everyone she actually met, as she said. I knew she was a lesbian because she was out at Yale, decades ago. So I don’t see why the word lie is attached.
All I can say is your lack of empathy for her situation is very bizarre. Just the fact that someone tried to kill the President to impress her is enough for me to forgive her being private. But from that first Coppertone ad (when she was shirtless at three … that sure as hell wouldn’t happen now!), she has been a part of our lives. People think they know her in a way you have never experienced nor ever will. Try getting out of yourself a bit and try to imagine her life.
And she didn’t exactly say she was retiring. She said she was changing in some way. We will see what that is.
In lieu of a comments section, more angry readers light up the in-tray:
WTF? So now Jodie Foster is an “enabler of homophobia“? How is that exactly? Has she made homophobic remarks or films? No. Has she pretended to be straight? No. Has she lied about her sexuality (as opposed to telling everyone it was her own business)? No. Where’s the homophobia, Andrew?
Moreover, she never “mounted an incoherent attack on the coming out of others.” Her plea for privacy was a cri de coeur against the ridiculous, celebrity-obsessed world in which live. It wasn’t an attack on other celebrities, out or otherwise. If anything, it was an attack on us, the general public, and our insatiable appetite for gossip.
Every gay person in the closet is an enabler of homophobia. Every single one. And in the past two decades, silence also equaled death. Yes, I feel strongly about this. I don’t believe in outing but I do believe in helping your community when it is besieged and dying in the hundreds of thousands. And yes, privacy is trumped by mass death. And she was attacking other out gay people with her absurd parody of what coming out entails. Many readers are dissenting along these lines:
So Anderson Cooper is out in his private life, but not out publicly due to privacy concerns (although it is widely known he’s gay). Then he comes out publicly via you and it is a great and brave thing. And Jodie Foster is out in her private life, but not out publicly due to privacy concerns (although it is widely know she is gay). Then she comes out publicly during an awards show, after having done something similar years ago, well before Cooper. But Foster’s actions are horrible, just horrible.
Not her actions. Her rhetoric. Compare Anderson’s honest, reasoned email with Foster’s incoherent, narcissistic rant and veiled attack on other out gay people. She attacked people for coming out at press conferences. Anderson didn’t. She effectively did. And I’ll just ask you one thing. What if she were Jewish, had hidden her Jewishness for “privacy” reasons, and then announced it publicly, while berating those who parade their public identity as Jews as some kind of grandstanding? When you think of it that way, you realize just how soaked in homophobia so much of our public discussion still is. Another:
And Hollywood royalty? Please. If Foster is, she didn’t inherit it; she worked her ass off to beat the odds. What really pains me is how easy it seems for critics to completely dismiss the fact that this woman fought to make the successful transition from child to adult actress and went on to be a director and producer in Hollywood, which, I don’t think I have to point out, is still a very rare occurence in that Boys’ Club. But helping knock down barriers for women in an industry that is shamefully every bit as sexist as it is homophobic counts for nothing because she didn’t officially come out the way that you think she should have?
So why did this feminist icon invite as her date a man who beat and threatened to kill his own wife, who has uttered vile anti-Semitic and homophobic rants? And why did she say he “saved” her? Seriously? You want her to be a feminist icon and ignore that? Why the fuck is he involved in this at all? Unless Foster’s politics are closer to his than we realize. Another reader:
Given that when accepting her Lifetime Achievement Award, the camera
kept cutting away to Mel Gibson’s hideous mug, it was kind of weird to
read a blurb on Wikipedia today that Jodie Foster has spent the past decade attempting to get a biopic of Leni Riefenstahl made, starring herself as the notorious Nazi filmmaker. Foster thinks Riefenstahl was “complicated” – that perhaps she got a bum rap. I hope Foster really is retiring now.
Maybe her date, Mel Gibson, will finance it. Another:
On the Foster speech, I think you are missing some of her broader point and perhaps willfully conflating her desire for privacy with the issue of sexuality. When I listened to her, I interpreted her statement that “Some day, in the future, people will look back and remember how beautiful it once was” as a simple statement that we’ll feel nostalgic about a time when we were not under 24 hour surveillance, tracked by the GPS in our phone, monitored in the books we read on our e-readers, or inspected by probing hands simply because we want to catch a plane. I feel that nostalgia. I can’t believe she was thinking that closeted sexuality was a beautiful thing. Really? I think you’re a more astute reader than to think she was speaking only in terms of sexuality. Part of the incoherence of her speech came from the complexity of our identities.
Another:
Sure, everyone is allowed to come out in his or her own way. I am not gay, so I would never presume to suggest there is a “right” way to come out. That being said, what I found most disturbing about Jodie Foster’s rambling and confusing speech (don’t get me started on her “date” Mel Gibson), is that she seemed to be declaring herself on the high road while disparaging anyone who came out publicly. As if protecting one’s privacy – though her speech was a direct contradiction to her argument for privacy – is nobler than standing up for who you are. As if she should be honored for not acknowleding her gayness because that’s how we do it in polite society. Forget that kids are bullied to death for
being gay. Forget that she has a fortress of success and money to protect her… SHE is the noble and persecuted one. Give me a break. She can live whatever life she wants, but her speech was disgusting to
me.
Jodie Foster Stops Lying, Ctd
This Onion report is priceless (sorry for the ad beforehand):
Some final reaction from readers on this week’s popular thread:
So you continue to assert and condemn Jodie Foster as having attacked other gay people. As I re-read her speech, her strawman was baiting the media, which would surely schedule a press conference, not other gays. Again, cite her language and show where she was attacking others, and say which others you mean. Repeating the assertion does not illuminate anything.
Here’s what I was referring to:
Now I’m told, apparently, that every celebrity is expected to honor the
details of their private life with a press conference, a fragrance and a
prime-time reality show.
This is both a straw man and a veiled swipe at those like Ellen Degeneres who showed real courage before Foster ever did and worked through the process and in turn made others’ lives freer and happier. I’m with Ellen’s courage, not Foster’s retroactive defensiveness. No one needs to know about the details of Foster’s private life, by the way, which she deserves to keep private. All anyone ever asked for was acknowledgment of the public fact of her being gay. And, as Mark Harris’s insightful EW story last year showed, the new wave is doing this simply, matter-of-factly and incidentally. No one wants a press conference or a fragrance or a reality show. And, by the way, on Here Comes Honey Boo-Boo, a redneck gay man, Uncle Poodle, is very effectively and elegantly integrated into the series and just revealed his HIV status. Now, that’s very 2013. Foster is still railing against 1989. How one reader translates her speech:
“Hi, thank you for this award and for acknowledging me for all the movies I’ve done, I’ve got a big announcement to make but I’m not really going to say it clearly, I’m just going to talk around it like Clarice Starling would do, and look, there’s my date Mel Gibson in the audience looking absolutely desperate and friendless and not weird at all, and I came out a million years ago, secretly, like a real hero, and don’t ask me what I came out of because that’s for me to know and you to only kind of know, and hey, get out of my business, entire world watching me on teevee now, this is private!”
On Sunday night, Jodie Foster just came out as weird.
Another:
My favorite part is how right before she goes off on privacy, she mentions how her publicist will probably be mad at her. I love it when a person with a publicist bemoans a lack of privacy.
Another:
You’re thinking too hard about Foster. She’s a narcissistic movie
star. I didn’t realize how repulsively full of herself she was until
she gave that speech.No modesty about receiving it at relatively young age. (Only three previous recipients have been under the age of 50.) No comment about being one of the few women to receive it. (Only 14 women have received it in the 60+ years the award has been given and the last one was thirteen years ago.) No account of what she’s learned from certain roles or other actors and directors or what a privilege her job is. No reflections on the craft and work of acting and directing.
Ms. Foster just rambled on about how hard it has been to deal with movie stardom, how long she’s done it, and how she had to overcome it and what it’s done to her privacy. From the narcissistic cocoon from which she seemed to be speaking, I don’t think she has overcome it. Stardom made her famous, powerful and a ton of money but it seems to have warped her perspective and humanity.
She’s not homophobic; she just doesn’t care. She doesn’t care about the gay community, other women, or what anyone thinks of her calling on Mel Gibson to be her date. Frankly, I’ve been shocked that anyone in the press lauded her speech. It was like Anna Nicole Smith without the drugs.
Another:
Perhaps, just perhaps, her friendship with Gibson exists in spite of his vile acts and the beliefs he has espoused. Perhaps, just perhaps, she sees that within this deeply troubled man there remains a spark of decency and she refuses to give up on it. Perhaps, just perhaps, like an alcoholic’s sponsor, she is one of the few people that can call him on his shit and guide him out of the darkness.
I was struck, during her speech, by the images of Gibson, who looked sad and small and grateful – grateful that one person had not given up on him, had not written him off. Perhaps, when she referred to him as having “saved her” she meant that by making the effort to stand by him, to do her best to right his ship, she had found in herself a deep well of compassion for even the lowest man. As a Christian that concept can’t be foreign to you.
Of course it isn’t. But it is the reverse of what Foster actually said. And another:
How would Foster being out of the closet have helped prevent gay men from dying of AIDS? Would they have reconsidered the risks associated with unprotected sex because Foster’s orientation was weighing on their minds or something? Would AIDS researchers have been extra-motivated in their work, knowing that America’s sweetheart, Ms. Foster, just might be the next to fall ill?
This is extremely silly, collectivist, identity politics. Jodie Foster is an autonomous individual with her own ambitions, her own thoughts, and her own desires, as we all are. Just because she happens to share your and your friends’ sexual orientation does not make her part of your “community” in any meaningful way, and it certainly does not make her obligated to take up the cause of this community’s self-inflicted health problems.
Go see “How To Survive A Plague” and witness the incredible support so many lesbians and straight women gave to their gay brothers and friends in an existential crisis. I’m the opposite of an identity politics maven. But when you are in the middle of a plague, community matters. Another:
In your latest about Jodie Foster’s emotional and clumsy speech on Sunday, you threw a piece of insult about silence equaling death in the general direction of someone who is undeserving of it.
Throw it directly Reagan’s way; I do. But Ms Foster is not responsible for the death of people who had AIDS due to her silence about her sexual life. She never once denied being a lesbian or pretended otherwise. Sorry but that was a bold choice 30 years ago or 20 years ago or even five years ago. Jodie Foster came out in front of a global audience of tens of millions on Sunday in her own, sometimes opaque way. But. She. Did. It. Can’t we honor all steps forward even when they stumble?
Yes, we can. Which is why I also said I was “thrilled” by her coming out. Another sees the stage differently:
Among all the reactions to Jody Foster’s speech at the Golden Globes, I haven’t seen anyone suggest that the venue was ill chosen. Certainly the award was in recognition of a lifetime’s work, but that made it someone even more inappropriate. At least I found it self indulgent. Here is a yearly event that is known for imbibing of alcohol and general frivolity, which doesn’t seem quite the place for an extended “I Did It My Way.” Even though there is certainly talk of who wore what, Ben Afflecks’s win, or Jennifer Lawrence’s Meryl Streep comment, most of the attention has been grabbed by the WTF ramblings of Foster.
I hear that Oprah is looking for people who want to get things off their chest.
The Dish 