Emmy Award-winning actress Roseanne Barr shared a video on her YouTube page on Sunday where she condemned the use of a homophobic term. She also may have come out as queer.
Sitting in what appears to be the driver’s seat of a van, Barr talks to the camera for about 75 seconds. She starts by examining the word “f-g” as hate speech, touching on queer linguistics and the social implications of the term. She then wonders who should be allowed to use it, before declaring that, well, nobody should.
“Uh, the word ‘f-g’ is a really hateful word, isn’t it?” she starts, then pauses for a few seconds, as if searching for the right words.
“Especially when it’s like one gay calling another gay guy that? Whoo! Have you ever been in the middle of one of them hate marriages? Whoof! It’s like: ‘wait a minute, we’re not supposed to say that word.’ ‘How come you’re saying that word?’ ‘What?’ Oh, I just can’t say the word. Well, I can when I’m in the house, but I can’t say it outside of the house. Okay, I get your rules.”
Then she appears to include herself in those who are allowed to use those “rules,” as she declares to be a part of the LGBTQ community.
“But it is a hateful word and we should get rid of it,” she said. “Get rid of it being spoken. All that LGBTQ stuff, okay let me just be real, I put the Q in LGBTQ. Okay? Cause I am queer as two motherf—ers. I’m queer, I’m alien, I don’t belong here with all these people. They makes no sense. They are very queer. And that makes me a queer, I guess. But I did put the Q in it. Bye!”
Barr, who has a gay brother and a lesbian sister, was the first recipient of GLAAD’s Vanguard Award, an honor presented to a member of the entertainment community who has made a significant difference in promoting equal rights for LGBTQ people. She shared the award with then-husband Tom Arnold in 1993.
However, her “well-documented transphobia, as well as her association with an anti-transgender ideology described as “the Westboro Baptist Church of feminism,” has received comparatively little media attention,” author Brynn Tannehill wrote on Slate.
