Tracy Morgan has apologized to GLAAD, again:
“I know how bad bullying can hurt. I was bullied when I was a kid. I’m sorry for what I said. I didn’t mean it. I never want to use my comedy to hurt anyone. My family knew what it was like to feel different. My brother was disabled and I lost my father to AIDS in 1987. My dad wasn’t gay but I also learned about homophobia then because of how people treated people who were sick with that. Parents should support and love their kids no matter what. Gay people deserve the same right to be happy in this country as everyone else. Our laws should support that.”
GLAAD also reports that Morgan will meet with LGBT youth who have been hurt or left homeless by their families as well as Elke Kennedy, the founder of Sean's Last Wish in memory of Sean Kennedy, who was killed in a hate crime in South Carolina in 2007
Morgan has also appeared in GLAAD's upcoming PSA campaign “Amplify Your Voice" and is going back to Tennessee to apologize in person to audience members offended by remarks he made at his show.
Carl Siciliano, founder and exeutive Director of the Ali Forney Center, NYC's largest LGBT youth services and homeless shelter, talks about the Morgan controversy in the Huffington Post:
I have heard too many LGBT youths tell horrifying stories of violent abuse and rejection from their parents. The teenage boy from upstate New York, who, when his father learned he was gay, he beat him to a pulp, then threw him out of the house and told him that if he tried to come back, he would kill his son and bury him in the backyard. Or the boy from Florida whose father put a gun to his head and said "You are no longer my son. Leave the house now." The 17-year-old transgender child whose mother attacked him when she learned of his male identity, ripping out a piece of his scalp, and screaming homophobic abuse as her child fled. Or the 15-year-old boy who came out to his family at a picnic in rural Delaware. His father, a Christian minister, jumped on him and tried to strangle him. That evening he gathered his belongings into a few garbage bags and banished his son from his home. Or the family that drove their daughter out into the backwoods of New Jersey and tossed her from the car for being a lesbian. This is clearly not something to joke about.
On another note, a male caller to Michelangelo Signorile's radio show claimed that Morgan once made sexual advances toward him in a NYC restaurant.
Previously…
Tracy Morgan Speaks: 'I Would Love [a Gay Son] Just as Much as if He Was Straight' [tr]
