media post 2- Titus

The setting is an older television show called Titus, it was cancelled after three seasons on FOX. Titus has a good friend named Tommy, who throughout the show is very flamboyant and an outsider of the group would probably think he is gay. Well it turns out that his father is gay after 40 years of marriage. Thus provoking Tommy to believe that he too is gay. At the local bar Tommy’s father was beaten up because he was gay, and it happened to be by two of Titus’s friends. After being in this class I can really see that whole episode has the underlying theme that all people should be treated equal and that diversity is all around us and we need to accept it.

At the end of every episode Titus has a short black and white monologue and the one for this episode was really powerful. He says that once we start placing alike people together, we have the gays over here, the Jews over here and so on. While he is saying this he is of course pointing but he uses his whole hand and at the end of his spiel he ends up like he would be hailing Hitler, and he says “you see how this can get out of hand”. Thus reiterating the fact that we must embrace diversity, because, look what it did to us in the past when we didn’t.

The whole show was very controversial and dark, which is why it was cancelled. Most of the episodes would be a great representation of sexism but I chose to post on this episode of Titus because I knew that of all the “controversial” episodes this would be the best one to post about.

This episode reminded me of Johnson chapter 2, Privilege, Oppression and Difference. Chapter 2 talks about diversity and uses the Diversity Wheel. Johnson goes on to say “the trouble with diversity is produced by a world organized in ways that encourage people to use difference to include or exclude, reward or punish, credit or discredit, elevate or oppress, value or devalue, leave alone or harass”(page 17). Basically he is saying that because we see someone as gay, black, disabled or whatever it may be, we treat him or her different. This relates to this particular episode of Titus because a man got beat up because he was gay and the ones who beat him did not want him in “their” bar. They only saw that he was gay they did not care about anything else which is just like labeling a blind person only as blind nothing else (Johnson pg 19). All these thoughts are a result of our culture; we have been conditioned to judge people by their cover, so to speak.

I know that there are plenty of people in the world who are “homophobes” some of them are my friends and family members but I personally see absolutely nothing wrong with being homosexual. I know and am friends with many gay guys, so when I hear that certain family member talk about homosexuality being wrong or gross I get irritated. I suppose I could say it’s the generation gap, but that still shouldn’t matter. Different religious beliefs play a large role in the fact that being gay is wrong. But just look at the Catholic Church and all the priests, and they still say homosexuality is wrong, talk about being a hypocrite