Two final (I promise) additions to the Jussie coming out thing, just for the record and because they're funny.

(1) I'd seen it mentioned several times that Terrence Howard had already outed Jussie before Malik Yoba did, but without specifics. I came across it only yesterday. It's in a promo interview that was made before the pilot had even aired, and which can be seen at [http://globalgrind.com/2015/03/09/terrence-howard-jussie-smolletts-sexuality-chappie-box-office/]. There is no way he could have tried to use the "I was misquoted" escape, or the "I was talking about the character not the actor" escape, since it's on video, and he says, i.a.: "He’s homosexual in his real life". It's amazing that this interview was sitting right there out in the open while the "Has Malik Yoba just outed Jussie Smollett?" thing was going on, yet it seems to have flown under almost everyone's radar.

(2) The best one-line comment I saw on a website somewhere about Jussie's rather awkwardly worded appearance on Ellen is this (I forgot to note where it's from, so I can attribute it properly, but it's a direct cut-and-paste):

"There's an annual Sound of Music sing-along???"

That, to me rather unfortunate, reference to the musical theater stereotype does remind me of something Nathan Lane once irritatedly said in an interview when he was asked why he, at the time, also refused to "say anything about his personal life". To paraphrase from memory, his reply was: "Look, I'm over 40, I've never been married, and I work in musical theater. What do you need, flashcards?"

 

Now on to other stuff.

 

Given that Jamal was the son of a supposed hip-hop legend and a recording artist of some celebrity in his own right, the show presenting it like no one outside of Empire knew about him being gay at all, rang false. It would be all over the hip hop blogs and black pop culture forums, that Jamal had a live-in boyfriend and maybe some photos of them in social settings would have leaked.

 

I hadn't even thought of the obvious role uncontrollable online gossip plays in such matters these days, and in an age where nearly everybody has a camera on them at all times. Until recently, I didn't even know there were whole websites solely devoted to reporting celebrity sightings by random members of the public - and the level of celebrity required to be mentioned on them seems very low indeed. You're right, it has become pretty much impossible for anyone with any level of celebrity to hide to such an extent. It can be a matter of interpretation though. To use the Tom Daley comparison once more: when he came out, it was retroactively discovered that there were lots of pictures and even videos of him and his boyfriend together already out there, mostly just selfies taken by fans, but one, from his 19th birthday party, even put on Instagram by himself. It's just that nobody had connected the dots and concluded that that guy he was with when they saw him at the shopping mall, or in a parking lot, or at the swimming pool where he was training, and who discreetly stood a way back in those pictures, was his boyfriend. After all, there are many, many more similar pictures of him around with other guys who aren't.

 

So it would be one of those things that some people "knew" but others who paid less attention, or didn't know where to look, or are generally oblivious to things like that, would have no idea, until his move at the white party. Kind of like what you saw after Anderson Cooper, Matt Bomer or Jodie Foster went public, and some people were very surprised by their news, and others were surprised that anyone was surprised, since they weren't exactly in hiding before.

 

The phenomenon known as the glass closet, which irritates some people tremendously. Which also often leads to the inadvertent outing phenomenon, when somebody else talking about them just assumes they're already publicly out. And as you said, a lot of people are just oblivious to things like that, and couldn't care less. I think that's actually the problem with a lot of the closetedness that is still going on in the entertainment industry: a lot of the people who work in that industry IMO tend to vastly overestimate the interest most people have in the sexuality of the people who entertain them.

 

He's Australian? I don't know the actor and was thinking, maybe British (don't they also say "arse"?).

 

They do. When I first heard him in a preview teaser, I thought too: what is that supposed to be, a British accent done very badly by an American actor? It took his first scene to identify it as Australian. I can understand that to American ears it sounds British, it's much closer to that than to American English. I once had to sit through a very boring lecture on the genesis of the Australian accent, of which I've forgotten almost everything, except that it arose very quickly after the first convict settlers arrived in Australia, and that a lot of its features can be traced to specific British dialects - those convicts weren't a cross-section of people from across the British isles, some areas were strongly overrepresented.

 

I've been having trouble understanding his dialogue in general.

 

Listening to an unfamiliar accent is always difficult. I have the same problems with some variants of American English, which I know are widespread but I simply don't get to hear that often. If it strays too far from let's call it Standard Middle American I'm sometimes left straining too.

Eka Darville can do an American accent though, although I'm not placed to judge how well he does it. If you want to judge for yourself, just search on YouTube on "Originals Diego" (the name of his character on The Originals), to listen to some snippets of him pretending to be an American vampire. Which is why the character must be Australian too, since they let him use his native accent. It actually fits in nicely with the general portrayal of Ryan's personality: he's obviously an ambitious guy who's already made a name for himself in his field, and ambitious enough not to remain in Australia but try to make it in the US entertainment industry.

 

I know that some issues can cut across cultural/national lines, like colorism, but with respect to homosexuality, I did find myself wondering if the cultural attitudes toward homosexuality among British blacks were the same or worse than they were historically, among black Americans (not that they are great among all white Americans, either).

 

Which I'll combine with something from another poster:

 

well the black british and black australians tend to be directly from Africa as in they can name the tribe, ethinicity and area their family is from and since the european conversion of western africans to christinaity lol they are ten times worse. From my what i've seen Africans and blacks in the carribean have attitudes toward homsexuality that would make some of the most die hard antigay republicians cringe.

They embrace some of british culture but are still very traditional especially Nigerians , Ethiopians,Somalians, etc the younger ones may be a little more open minded but only to a point.

 

The vast majority of black people in Britain aren't directly from Africa at all, but Afro-Caribbean, and they have no more connection to any tribe, ethnicity or area in Africa than any African-American. After WW2, labor was needed for rebuilding, and that involved importing workers from the West Indies. The symbolic moment that marks the beginning of that wave of immigration is the arrival of the Windrush Empire in 1948, the ship that brought the first large group of immigrants from Jamaica to Britain. Hence those people are called the Windrush Generation. We're now on the third or even fourth generation from then of course, and how that group has developed is markedly different from anything in the USA.

 

For starters, while I don't have any numbers at my fingertips, I'll go by something said by the geneticist Prof. Steven Rose in an interview on population genetics several years ago: of all the babies born in Britain at that moment, just over half with an Afro-Caribbean parent had just one of them. IOW: over half of those children are, to use that horrible term, "mixed-race" (and of course that one Afro-Caribbean parent might already be too). If that trend continues and accelerates, and there's no reason to presume it wouldn't, within a very few generations more, a mere blink of an eye in terms of population genetics, they will have ceased to exist as a somewhat identifiable sub-population. Those African-by-way-of-the-Caribbean genes will have been absorbed into the general British gene pool, with as its only remaining trace a somewhat larger variety in skin pigmentation and kinds of hair. Just as happened with earlier immigration waves that introduced small sub-populations, such as the Vikings or the Normans (who were also of course originally Vikings-turned-Frenchmen).

Most of that Windrush Generation arrived in an early-1950s Britain whose social attitudes in general weren't all that different from their own, and that was also deeply homophobic. Don't forget that gay men were criminals in Britain until 1967, and that even in the 1980s the then Thatcher government still thought it necessary to pass the vile piece of homophobic legislation known as Clause 28. Britain moved on to a society where same-sex marriage was introduced in 2014, on the watch of a Conservative-led government. The Afro-Caribbean community (in so far as it can still be called a community, with such high rates of intermarriage it is clearly already dissolving) simply evolved with the rest of society. That also includes the rapidly declining influence of religion. It's also important to remember that, while there was a lot of racism and discrimination in practice, initially quite severe, there was never any legal discrimination on the basis of skin color in Britain or anywhere else in Europe, and no segregation. The children of the Windrush Generation all went to the same schools as their white neighbors' children, and most of the initial racism seems to have dissipated pretty rapidly. Two great-uncles of mine worked in the manufacturing industry at the time these first black workers arrived. Since they were both considered "foreigners" by most people (despite being white, and British citizens from birth - I won't go into details), they had a keen eye for such things. They both told me that after an initial frosty reaction (to the working-class people from the North of England we're talking about, someone from London already qualified as pretty suspicious), it took a very short time for almost everyone to realize that there was nothing particularly distinct about these new arrivals. The class thing was much more important to them than anything to do with skin color, and a black doctor or lawyer (once they began to appear) was just as much of a disliked toff as a white one to them. And I have only second-hand reports to go on here, being neither British nor black, but black people from Britain visiting the US are often stunned by how segregated it is, and how many black people seem to live their lives in an almost exclusively black environment, with no white relatives, or even friends. That's inconceivable in Britain.

The much more recent immigration directly from Africa, people who are still at the first or at most second generation, is a whole different matter, and also one that cannot be generalized about. It's pretty absurd to think that, say, a Nigerian immigrant from an evangelical Christian background would have similar attitudes (not just about this one topic, but in general) to an Ethiopian from a Christian background, or a Somalian from a Muslim background. The whole concept of family, or clan, or tribal ties is also vastly different between all of those groups (with clans or tribes being as non-existent to Afro-Caribbeans as they are to white Britons).

The whole point is that talking about a "black community" really makes no sense. The African-American community, and the way the term "black" itself is defined in the US, is absolutely unique to the USA. So is the huge influence of a particular brand of Christianity on the history of that community, where the churches for a long time were the only form of formal social organizations. You can't just lump people together on the basis of similar skin pigmentation, or purely genetic links to parts of Africa from centuries ago. While those British Afro-Caribbeans, just like African-Americans, are descendants of initially the same kind of slave population, they came from countries were they weren't part of a minority, and into a country where they were but with no history of slavery or segregation on its own soil. And they came as immigrants of their own free will, determined to make a better life for themselves and for their children in their adopted country (which many of them had already considered their country all along - they were, after all, British subjects). They understood the importance of education in that, and the Windrush Generation were almost notorious for pushing their children as hard as they could in that regard, much harder than white working class parents at the time usually did. Most of them to begin with already had a schooling back in the West Indies that wasn't all that different from what white working class people of the time would have had (since most of them started out as working class, that's why they had been brought in in the first place). That made for a lot of upward social mobility within one generation. None of those things, happening within living memory, are part of the African-American experience. The experience of growing up as part of a clearly defined minority, rather randomly defined on the basis of skin pigmentation and a past in slavery, whose ancestors have been living in the country for centuries longer than the ancestors of many white people, and yet still dealing with all kinds of issues that should have been resolved ages ago, doesn't translate directly to anywhere else in the world.

 

I'm sure Lucious has hired and worked with people he knew to be gay in various contexts. But probably not too many who he wanted to document his own greatness, and not too many who are obviously a potential love interest for his son. I'm sure in real life there are some famous entertainment figures who are privately or publicly homophobic.

There obviously are. Even Lucious is smart enough to know that you can't let it show too much in public anymore, or with certain people. When he's meeting with Delphine in episode 9 (I haven't seen the last one yet), and she innocently tells him how proud he must be of Jamal for coming out (assuming what to her would be the normal feeling of any parent), he knows he can't let his true opinion show, and comes up with a half-assed compliment instead. Which is why I though Jamal's warning to Ryan, on their first meeting, that his dad might fire him if he found out, so odd.

 

Hetero people probably have a default presumption that absent stereotypical behavior people are straight, which is somewhat fair since roughly 90 percent are.

 

The statistical assumption would apply to gay people just as much, since they're also surrounded by mostly straight people. But what is the need to make assumptions about anyone's sexual orientation? There are vanishingly few situations in which it's relevant to anything. I have learned over the years though that it's not safe to assume anything about sexual orientation on the basis of someone exhibiting stereotypical straight behavior. Like, for instance, marrying someone of the opposite sex. (See how I SUBTLY brought this back to the topic of Jamal?)

Edited March 12, 2015 by SailingBy

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