Hello, Chip Coffey. I hope you don’t mind my addressing you directly, since you are now apparently a reader of our webpage. And I hope you don’t mind if I am the first JREF staff member to publicly congratulate you for winning a Pigasus Award last week. Congrats, you old devil. You’ve earned it.
Of course, I would think so, since I’m the one that nominated you. I’m also the one that wrote the scathing editorial about your vicious, exploitive show — the one that sent you into spasms of frenzied Tweeting when you finally laid eyes on the thing last Friday. That’s right, Chip — it wasn’t James Randi. It was I. But how did you respond? By accusing Randi and the JREF of gay-bashing. Here’s your Tweet:
On Friday 2nd April 2010, @chipcoffey said:
How ironic is it that an article on Randi's website - written before he came out of the closet recently - negatively alludes to me being gay. Pot. Kettle. Black!
Heady stuff, that — and eerily reminiscent of the last time I was accused of homophobia. That was at my other job. (I am, by night, a professional theater critic.) When it was learned that The Westboro Baptist Church was coming to Fort Lauderdale to protest a production of Paul Rudnick’s deliriously sacrilegious play, The Most Fabulous Story Ever Told, the entire community went batty. The little theater producing the play — which had a history of shoddy work and poor audience turnouts — was suddenly receiving messages from the mayor, from local Democratic Party big-wigs, from the Gay and Lesbian Community Center. A counter-protest was planned. Writeups appeared in the local dailies, painting the theater’s personnel as brave, politically enlightened victims of homophobic bullying. For the first time in the theater’s history, ticket sales boomed. No one ever stopped to wonder how it was that The Westboro Baptist Church even found out that a little-known theater near the bottom of the Floridian peninsula was producing The Most Fabulous Story Ever Told.
Except for me, Chip. I wondered. So I did what any sane and well-composed person would do under those circumstances. I called the church and spoke to Shirley Phelps-Roper, who told me she’d found out about the play from the theater itself. She forwarded me the press release she’d received, and it looked just like the one the theater had sent to my office at The New Times — except that Shirley’s copy came with a foreword, which said: “This is the most blasphemous play ever produced; it depicts sodomy in the Garden of Eden; and if you protest it you will generate a storm of press coverage and reach a vast media market of 5+ million souls.” (That’s a paraphrase, but you get the idea.) The thinking was: Come, protest us, and we’ll both get something out of it.
Well, I believed then and still believe now that it was downright sleazy for the theater company to pretend to victimhood when they’d brought on their own damned trouble, and I said so in a blog on our paper’s website. Perhaps it was too strongly worded — I may have referred to the theater’s Executive Director as a “swine with thumbs,” or something like that — but it echoed what a lot of my colleagues at the dailies were thinking at the time. My analysis of the situation was correct, if not polite.
The response? The theater in question set about informing the world, through press releases and mass mailings, that I was a “gay-hating bigot” who “sided with the Westboro Baptist Church over a gay theater in his own community.” Of course, that wasn’t true. I’d sided with my community against some dishonest hacks who, as happens from time to time, happened to be gay. (And, as a result of my calling “foul,” the Westboroans gave Fort Lauderdale a miss altogether. As Phelps-Roper told me later: “We don’t like to be manipulated.”)
Chip: It is my opinion that you, too, are a dishonest hack who happens to be gay, though it wasn’t until this very article that I’d thought to mention your sexual orientation in print. What I did write in that previous editorial was this:
So we are expected to nod wisely when co-host psychic Chris Fleming and a pubescent medium, apparently independently, both detect a “female” spirit at the top of a staircase; or when one of the kids, channeling Coffey’s dearly departed mum, says something that makes Coffey smile. “That’s just like her,” he says. If this is an attempt to convince us of something, it’s breathtakingly lazy. In these moments, Coffey reminds me of Michael Jackson in his guise as the Pied Piper of Neverland; gaily leading children into a fantasy world of their mutual devise. It looks harmless, like two lonely and immature souls bucking up each others’ lovely delusions. In fact, Coffey often seems like the loneliest, most immature person of them all. Walking his charges up the darkened staircase of an allegedly haunted house, holding aloft a tiny lantern as though it were the only thing staving back the devil himself, he stubbornly ignores the question posed by one young medium: “How come we always have to wait until night to do this?” Because, sweetie, nobody’s afraid of the monster under the bed at high noon.
I assume this is the passage you referenced in your Tweet, and I assume the word that got your knickers all a’twist was “gaily.” Was that it? Are you really unaware that “gay” is a word with multiple meanings? Is it possible that a man to whom parents entrust their children could be so dense?
I don’t think so. It has not escaped my attention that in the whole, withering critique, “gaily” was the one word you found worthy of rebuttal. Never mind that the paragraph in question actually does, and very explicitly, accuse you of being infantile, and that elsewhere I strongly hint that you earn a living by imperiling the psyches of children. These are points beneath your consideration. You’d rather forget them, and discuss instead an issue on which you actually can claim the moral high ground: Gay rights.
Smart gambit, Chip. Men and women of goodwill all over the world support gay rights and are instinctively sympathetic to those who claim “discrimination.” (Which, as some writer or other pointed out, is actually the opposite of “discrimination” — though that’s a whole messy digression that we should perhaps pursue some other time.) Unfortunately, when the issue under discussion is neither gayness, nor straightness, nor blackness, nor yellowness, nor whiteness/oldness/youthiness/Puerto Rican-ness/whathaveyou, but is in fact the rather less delicate question of whether or not one is a child-exploiting liar with an immature mind and wonky ideas… well, making the issue one of prejudice is really just a craven way of changing the subject. Ignoratio elenchi, as they say.
I’m sorry if I’m coming down on you rather too harshly for what was, after all, just a Tweet, but please understand — this is how rumors get started. Anyway, my boyfriend, the journalist Penn Bullock, gets very antsy when he hears that I’ve gone gay-bashing, and I can’t have you disrupting my domestic tranquility.
In conclusion, you’re a ridiculous man and I’m going to try not to write about you anymore. But for now, I thank you for ramming home an important lesson: Beware of people who change the subject, especially when politics are involved. It may be that they’re trying to distract you from something sickening.
And that sickening thing, that point you still fail to address, is this: You almost certainly cannot do what you claim to do, and you are messing with children's minds. Take our challenge, please. We'd be delighted to be proved wrong. But until you at least try, take your award and hush.