Conscientious, responsible adults should be allowed to enjoy a good dirty joke, ethnic joke, cripple joke, dead-baby joke, fag joke, blonde joke, trailer-trash joke, Texan joke, Republican joke, Democrat joke, Michael Jackson joke, Christopher Reeve joke, ANY kind of offensive, off-color bit of humor we want every now and then, without feeling bad about it....IT'S JUST COMEDY, THEY'RE ONLY JOKES, GET OVER IT ALREADY, GIRLFRIEND! (Snap! Snap!

(I'm sorry I cannot make the correct attribution for the following, I no longer have the book it came from. Perhaps one of you can provide it.)

"The national media over the past 20 years have carried stories about two Laramie men who left Matthew Shepard to die on a Wyoming fence; the assailant who beat James Sappalorti to death on a lonely Staten Island beach; the two God-fearing Alabamans who took Billy Jack Gaither to a remote forest in Coosa County, Alabama, beat him to death with ax handles, and burned his body on a pile of trees; the hunter who stalked and gunned down a lesbian hiking with her mate on an Appalachian Trail; the gang of several men who lured Julio Rivera into an alley in Queens, NY and killed him with a claw hammer; the Vietnam veteran who was so ashamed that his last name was "Gay" that he opened fire in a Roanoke bar, killing Danny Lee Overstreet and wounding six others; the two Nebraska men who shot Brandon Teena to death in a wheat field; the New York man who shot and killed his nineteen year old step-son, Steen Keith Fenrich, for being gay, and then wrote "Gay Nigger #1" on the boy's decapitated skull; the two teenagers in Fairmont, West Virginia who stomped Arthur Warren to death, then drove over him repeatedly in an effort to mask the crime; the Oregon man who murdered a lesbian couple in their pick-up truck; the two young men in Happy Valley, California, who entered the home of a middle-aged gay couple who had befriended them and killed the middle-aged men in their bed; the gang of Idaho men arrested by the FBI as they attempted to blow up a Seattle gay bar with a pipe bomb; the two Oregon men who firebombed a Portland home, burning to death the young gay man who lived there; the three men in Tyler, Texas, who took twenty-three year old Nicholas West to a remote gravel pit and pumped nine fatal gunshots into him. And just the most recent killings in Queens, NY this past winter where a group of thugs with baseball bats beat to death a young Latino man who was walking down the street arm in arm with his brother to stay warm. The shouted anti-gay slurs as they murdered him. This is just a sampling. In the same sampling period that these stores were pulled from the national media, the same database contains no article about an event where a gay man, whether singly or in a pack, murdered a heterosexual for being that way."

No one has physically attacked, or beat to death the crippled, babies, blondes, trailer-trash, Texans, Republicans, Democrats or Michael Jackson for being who they are (or were). They have however attacked and beat to death people of color for being black, in fact, there's rather a long history of it in the United States. If this movie had been made by white people, in black face, ostensibly to lampoon black stereotypes and to "stick it in their faces" it would have never seen the light of day.

For forty years I have followed and been involved in the struggle for gay civil rights. Today I sit in a country that has continually refused to grant to a group of self-identified people their full civil and human rights for no other reason than who they are. I can be fired from my job in over 30 states for being gay. I cannot serve openly in the U.S. military as a gay man. I cannot order my personal life and my personal affairs in ways that fit my needs because I'm gay. There are situations and environments in which I might move that I must be careful and mindful that the other human beings in it might wish to do me harm simply because of my sexuality, having nothing whatever to do with my character. If you think this movie is going to help undo any of that, you're naive, at best.

Most of you posting here are obviously aware, educated, conscientious people who understand the interplay and intersect between art and real life, and which is which. I too can laugh with the best of them AT a stereotype. I've even told a few queer jokes, but not the ones that put down the queers. This film is going to do nothing to promote a greater understanding of gay lives or gay issues. It exploits a stereotype, outsized and ridiculous though it be, for profit, a stereotype that to one degree or another exists but accounts at best for only a small fraction of the out gay community. So while you are being all smart and in-on-the-joke most of the people who sit through the latest from SBC, most of whom probably have no first hand experience of the gay community, are not going to be laughing at the people in the film reacting to the queer stereotype, they're going to be laughing at the pansy.

Three years ago, Borat set out to expose the stupidity of America's xenophobia. Today we have a president named Barak Hussein Obama. Bruno is going to be 'laugh my big gay ass off funny', and it will probably do a lot to combat homophobia in the process. Some people have no sense of humor.

- of course as a German, subtlety is one of our strongest character traits - And you can put Bruno down all you want - with such a helpless shallow Sekundaer Literaur characterization which would make Bruno puke - And you have caught my eye before with too much words -

So consider yourself to be warmed!