In mid-November, on an otherwise splendid day in Manhattan, a paparazzi photographer approached Alec Baldwin and his family to snap a photo. Baldwin, who should have been familiar with such encounters at this point in his career, made it clear—in a threatening, assertive tone—that the intrusion wasn’t welcome. But when the photographer persisted, Baldwin lost control and, barely above his breath, called him a “cocksucking faggot.” The incident was captured on video and soon posted on the gossip website TMZ, before going viral. Two weeks later, Baldwin’s new show on MSNBC was canceled after less than two months on the air.
The decision was reportedly mutual, and ultimately blamed on poor ratings, though it would be difficult to dispute that Baldwin’s loose tongue had been the catalyst. In an interview with Gothamist, he struck a defiant, oddly petulant pose. “Faggot is not the word that came out of my mouth,” he said, suggesting it might have been “motherfucker,” or “maggot,” or, as stated on his Twitter feed, “fathead.” Baldwin continued: “You’ve got the fundamentalist wing of gay advocacy: Rich Ferraro and Andrew Sullivan. They’re out there, they’ve got you. Rich Ferraro, this is probably one of his greatest triumphs. They killed my show. And I have to take some responsibility for that myself.”
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Baldwin in November shoving a photographer (Reuters/Carlo Allegri)
This was hardly a mea culpa, and did little to make Baldwin appear sympathetic, let alone believable. He appeared to be equating his critics with terrorists, and implying some sort of conspiracy. But Ferraro seemed to take the brunt of Baldwin’s ire. Unlike Sullivan, a prominent journalist, I’d never heard of him before, but soon learned he was the vice president of communications for GLAAD, the New York-based LGBT advocacy group. GLAAD was formed in the city’s West Village in 1985 to combat defamation in the media, specifically the coarseness and sensationalism running through the New York Post’s coverage of the AIDS epidemic. Its mission and community have since expanded widely, though Ferraro, in his role as chief media advocate, still spends a good deal of time combating words and images that he feels are harmful.
I wanted to meet with Ferraro, to put a person behind the name. It seemed important, not just because of Baldwin’s belligerence, but because these incidents have a way of making me uneasy. When I was younger, and living in a suburban, provincial town in New Jersey, I hadn’t known anyone who was openly gay. In fact, “gay” was a kind of abstraction and, by association, so was “faggot,” which was an emasculating, humiliating thing to be called, though no one knew exactly why. We used to frequently mock one another with the word, deploying it casually and publicly, without regard. Then I moved away, met new people and gained at least a sense of empathy. If I had never left, however, I often wonder if I would have been prone to Baldwin-like outbursts.
Louis CK and the Word "Fag"
In an episode of his TV show, Louis CK discusses the history behind the term with his friends.
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Rich Ferraro (Vocativ/Ross Mantle)
Ferraro, 29, is a small-framed man with short, carefully styled hair, sideburns trimmed perfectly to the middle of his ears, and a clean, fresh face. When I met him in his small, minimalist office in Chelsea, he was wearing a crisp plaid shirt, neatly tucked into a pair of slim, dark jeans. His appearance was so fastidious that he resembled an accountant on a casual Friday. I took a seat opposite his desk, facing the window, against which leaned a blue “Vote No On Prop 8” sign. Ferraro sat across from me, beside a plaque that read: “Tomorrow can be a wonderful age,” a famous quote from Walt Disney.
For a while we talked about his work, which is often tied to the 24-hour news cycle. In 2011, for instance, during a standup performance in Nashville, the comedian Tracy Morgan said that if his son were gay, he’d “pull out a knife and stab him.” Kevin Rogers, a gay man who attended the show, posted the comment on Facebook, and Morgan’s remarks quickly snowballed into a national controversy. “After our name was in the press, Tracy called me,” Ferraro recalled. “He was upset because he hurt not only his fans, but his friends and family who were gay. I give him a lot of credit. He didn’t call with a publicist or a manager.” He folded his hands and leaned toward me. “It ultimately comes down to the individual, and the individual has to want to send a positive message. I’m not in the business of helping celebrity.” With respect to Morgan, that meant parental rejection. “It’s a big issue,” Ferraro said. “It leads to homelessness and violence.” GLAAD took Morgan to the Ali Forney Center, which provides housing for displaced LGBT youth in New York. Together, along with Elke Kennedy, a mother who had lost her son to a hate crime in 2007, they visited a home in Brooklyn. “Tracy met with a few teens there,” Ferraro continued. “But I thought, better than getting his voice in the press, was this mom. She could say, ‘I wish I could tell my gay son that I loved him.’ And also, there were these young people who could now tell their story.” Morgan, as a final gesture, wanted to return to Nashville, tell Rogers he was sorry, and refund his ticket for the ugly performance.
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Tracy Morgan in 2011 (Reuters/Jessica Rinaldi)
Whether or not he was genuine was beside the point—both men had larger objectives and they accomplished them. Baldwin, on the other hand, declined to work with GLAAD in the wake of his episode. He was incorrigible, and resisted Ferraro’s overtures. “I informed him that the origin of the word cocksucker, for me, was being shoved into a locker after third period, and being told to go suck a dick,” Ferraro said. I asked him if he wouldn’t mind telling me about his childhood, and he looked askance for a second, tapping the space bar on his computer, waking it up from power-save mode. It was a gesture he would repeat many times, at almost evenly spaced intervals, throughout the rest of our conversation.
Ferraro grew up in Shelton, Connecticut, a small suburban town 75 miles outside of New York City. His family was Italian and Catholic, and his mother went to church every Sunday. He was one of three boys, the second born, and he realized he was gay around seventh or eighth grade. For his freshman year, his parents sent him to a prestigious Catholic school. “I was really unhappy,” Ferraro said. “And I remember sitting down to talk with a priest and telling him I felt different. I didn’t use the word gay, but I knew that’s where things were headed.” He knew because he’d seen gay characters on television shows like Queer as Folk, which he secretly taped in his bedroom with the door locked, covering the recording light on the VCR as a double precaution. “In case my parents came by,” he explained. “I didn’t want them to know what I was doing. I just wanted something I could relate to.” The priest told him he should pray, but that the school would be accepting no matter what. Ferraro decided he would fair better, as an open person, in public school. So he transferred.
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A sign outside of Ferraro's office (Vocativ/Ross Mantle)
He came out at 15, though his hand was forced earlier than planned. He’d been writing about his dilemma with a pen pal, and his mother saw one of the letters. She didn’t care that he was gay, and was upset only because he hadn’t told her first. Together they determined it would be best to wait before telling his father, who, they worried, might be less understanding. But here too, his hand was forced. “We were on a ski lift,” Ferraro remembered. “My dad was asking about my friend Lauren. He wanted to know if I liked her; if maybe I was interested in going on a date. I told him I wasn’t, and he said, ‘Do you like girls at all?’ I was like, ‘No,’ and thankfully we were at the top of the lift, and just skied down the mountain.” To his relief, his father was compassionate, and Ferraro quickly started dating a boy his age, whom he met at a diversity conference while playing gay bingo. They were together for six years, and spent their first Christmas Eve dinner as a couple with Ferraro’s family.
School, naturally, was a more complicated ordeal. “I wanted to be visible,” he said. “I wanted people to know fully who I was.” But, he added, “I was effeminate-acting; I was the short, nerdy kid; I was also the gay kid. I was the only one out, and I think I was the first person to come out in the history of the school.” Students called him a fag and threw french fries at him in the cafeteria, so he often ate lunch alone in a private bathroom stall. He was scared to change in the locker room, and made an effort to stay away from there. When he was a senior, and president of the Spanish club, he entered a “Mr. Student Body” contest. “I did a pretty silly dance routine to a Britney Spears song,” he said. “Two kids shouted ‘faggot,’ and I didn’t care, even though one of the people who shouted was sitting right behind my dad, who almost beat the shit out of him.” For prom, he had to walk across an auditorium stage to buy tickets for him and his boyfriend. “They didn’t know how to handle it,” he said. “I had to give my date’s name, and there was this pause.”
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Ferraro's corkboard (Vocativ/Ross Mantle)
Ferraro looked visibly uncomfortable as he related these stories, hitting the space bar and constantly checking his cell phone. I suddenly felt a shameful urge to absolve myself. I started rambling about things I’d said in my childhood, when, I hastened to tell him, I hadn’t known better. He smiled kindly at me and nodded his head, as if my story was entirely familiar. “But you changed,” he said. “Some people don’t.” I asked him if he ever received any hate mail, and he took a letter down from his bulletin board. It was concise, just a few sentences, and concluded by referring to Ferraro as a “fucking idiot and a blind, cold-hearted godless waste of humanity.”
From a remove, the letter writer sounded like a crueler version of Jack Donaghy, the absurd Republican caricature on 30 Rock, whom Alec Baldwin, a self-described liberal, once played so well.
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