Eddie Murphy - 'Faggots aren't allowed to look at my ass while I'm on stage'

Up until this evening, Eddie Murphy to me was a hilarious actor who had a string of funny films I remembered watching growing up. He was absolutely hilarious in Dr. Dolittle and The Nutty professor but his role as Donkey will always be special to me. I didn’t even realise he had done stand up until about two hours ago or that in one of his routines, he came out with some unbelievably homophobic stuff.

The routine is getting banded around online because Netflix only recently released it online and goodness me, to say it hasn’t aged well is an understatement. It pretty much opens with Murphy going on a rant about gay men and how he moves about on stage so that faggots can’t stare at his butt. By the way, he throws that word around like its nothing. I think that was one of the things that struck me the most about this video. I've spent a good five minutes debating if I should use the word and it just falls off his tongue. 

You’d maybe think that dropping the f-bomb would be the height of it but not so, his homophobia only gets worse. He continues about how we shouldn’t be horrid to gay people and it’s totally cool to play tennis with them. It’s just that after the game, as a straight man, you’ll want to go get a beer and they’ll want to suck dick and that’s where you should part ways.

Some are arguing that Murphy is engaging in high level satire to prove a point about what we now call toxic masculinity. Whilst I’d really love to believe that, it seems incredibly revisionist. I’m all about giving him the benefit of the doubt but when the set culminates in his worry that his girlfriend will get too friendly with a gay guy, kiss him and then bring back the AIDs virus thus killing Eddie; I very much doubt that.

Now where I will extend the benefit of the doubt is in that this was filmed in 1983. I want to make perfectly clear that what he said was inexcusable and wrong. It demonstrates the level of fear and misunderstanding around the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the early eighties, neatly demonstrating how culturally it was derided as a gay disease. We were not the victims but the enemies who deserved the disease but would occasionally infect the innocent straights. Not to mention the fact that it’s plainly homophobic, however to say that Murphy is homophobic and end it there would be idiotic.

Giving the show a one-star rating and imploring Netflix to take it off seems like the wrong reaction. It should stay there to serve as a reminder of how far we have come and the progress that we have made as a society. What’s far more damning that his actual words is the audience reaction. It isn’t very shocked at any point, the level of clapping and laughter remain high throughout. We can remove it and pretend that homophobia never existed on a societal level but to me that seems more dangerous than watching people we respect spouting such disrespectful and plainly wrong ideas.

It’s not only his lack of knowledge of HIV but his incipit homophobia. In one part he talks about his fear about Mr. T being gay and interestingly, he describes in detail how his fear is that Mr. T would be the receiver. He talks about how gay people can be okay because they might still play sports. It shows that even when he talks about accepting gay people, he really means that gay people are fine as long as they don’t talk about it and we can just pretend they’re straight.

Murphy apologised for his comments in 1996.
‘I know how serious an issue AIDS is the world over. I know that AIDS isn’t funny. It’s 1996 and I’m a lot smarter about AIDS now. I am not homophobic and I am not anti-gay. My wife and I have donated both time and money to AIDS research.’ 
You can argue that it’s too little too late and that the apology only came at a point when Murphy was becoming mainstream and so he had to backtrack on his earlier comments.

I’m willing to be more forgiving. For me, the routine is a symptom of a less accepting and tolerant world. Remember that in 1983, homosexual acts between men had been legal in Scotland for less than four years. The age of contest was not equal. The world was in a different place in which the LGBT community was fighting to prove that we were equal and this language wasn't acceptable. The world has evolved now and in the same country that was filmed, same sex marriage is legal. I sincerely believe that Murphy's views have evolved too and that whilst he should have to deal with the consequences of this video, he should not be labelled as homophobic today for the homophobia of his past.