Billy Crystal, who rose to fame playing one of TV’s first openly gay characters, says he’s had quite enough of the gayness on the small screen now, thankyouverymuch.
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The actor, who is busy promoting his new series, The Comedians — his first TV series since his groundbreaking turn on Soap — said while speaking at a panel for the Television Critics Association that while back in his day he took offense when the audience would express discomfort at his own gay scenes, now it all just goes too far.
“Sometimes I think, ‘Ah that’s too much for me,'” Crystal said. “Sometimes, it’s just pushing it a little too far for my taste and I’m not going to reveal to you which ones they are.
“There were times where I would say to [the actor who played his boyfriend], ‘Bob, I love you,’ and the audience would laugh nervously, because, you know, it’s a long time ago, that I’d feel this anger. I wanted to stop the tape and go, ‘What is your problem?’ Because it made you sort of very self-conscious about what we were trying to do then. And now it’s just, I see it and I just hope people don’t abuse it and shove it in our face — well, that sounds terrible — to the point of it just feels like an everyday kind of thing.”
Get that? Billy Crystal does not want anyone thinking that gay people having sex is an everyday kind of thing, regardless of the fact that it is actually very much an everyday kind of thing.
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When confronted about his comments after the panel concluded, Crystal told Xfinity that he really doesn’t understand what the problem is with what he said and, frankly, he doesn’t want to see a lot of graphic hetero sex, either. And PS: Mind your own beeswax.
“First of all, I don’t understand why there would be anything offensive that I said,” he explained. “When it gets too far either visually… now, that world exists because it does for the hetero world, it exists, and I don’t want to see that either. But when I feel it’s a cause, when I feel it’s, ‘You’re going to like my lifestyle,’ no matter what it is, I’m going to have a problem and there were a couple of shows I went, ‘I couldn’t watch that with somebody else.’ That’s fine. If whoever writes it or produces it… totally get it. It’s all about personal taste.
“We live in a very scary time in many ways,” he complained. “You can’t say this, you can’t say that, you can’t offend this group, that group. People come up to you and ask if you were offended. I don’t understand that. I understand it why everyone is watching out for the other person. That’s offensive to me.”
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We think this Twitter user summed up the situation best:
I don't mind Billy Crystal, just don't shove him in our faces to the point where he feels like an every-day kind of thing.
— @[email protected] (@rmi) January 19, 2015
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