I watched the 2-DVD set of “Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back” this weekend. What I found most disappointing is that Kevin Smith was basically shaken down by GLADD. They clearly used him for publicity and strong-armed him into paying money. There’s nothing anti-gay about his films. Look at “Chasing Amy”. If any film ever made homosexuality mainstream, that was it. And he shouldn’t have caved. But that’s how films are made in the US. They have to pass GLADD, or they’ll call you a homophobe in public until you pay up. Then, after he made the donation, they acted as if it were an admission of guilt. Basically, they used it to say, ‘This is what one gets for offending GLADD’ and ‘See how GLADD can raise money for gay foundations by targeting even those who’ve demonstrably endorced homosexuality.” It was great publicity for them. I remember explaining how studios are held hostage this way to an associate back in the eighties, and he called me a liar, and suggested that even if I were right, making a point of it wasn’t the right attitude. You remember the eighties. People were scrambling to be intellectually fashionable, or at least above persecution, by choosing which facts to pay attention to. But all such duplicity creates an atmosphere of social, ideological, and economic extortion that is supposedly better than the simple freedom of speech. The film wasn’t even a pimple on “Chasing Amy”, but it was made sordid by the thirty pieces of silver.
