“This might sound messed up, but I don’t care, she dying,” he said Friday on New York-based radio talk show the “Breakfast Club,” the Washington Post reported. “I can’t deal with that. No, I can’t do that.”
Lil Duval — his real name is Roland Powell — uttered his statement after one of the hosts asked him how he’d react if he found out a woman he’d been dating and having sex with turned out to be transgender.
“That ain’t a girl, I met a boy,” Lil Duval clarified. “That mean I met a boy.”
And after Lil Duval declared the hypothetical transgender woman would be “dying,” host Charlamagne Tha God replied, “That’s a hate crime, you can’t do that.”
“No, you manipulated me to believe in this thing,” Lil Duval pressed. “My mind … I’m gay now. I’m gay.”
“I can’t live with that, bro. I can’t …. ” he said. “This would never happen if this never happened. So you don’t have to worry about me killing nobody.”
As to whether transgenders should be punished if they don’t disclose their birth-genders to sex partners, Lil Duval said, “There should be some kind of repercussions for that if you do that to somebody. Until then, I’m going to have my own repercussions.”
When one of the hosts noted he “can’t go around killing transgenders,” Lil Duval seemed to soften his earlier statement.
“I’m not gonna kill transgenders,” he countered. “I said if one did that to me and they didn’t tell me, I’m gonna be so mad I’m probably gonna wanna kill them.”
As the whether comedians have to be politically correct, Lil Duval noted, “We do, but we shouldn’t.”
“I can say what I want and do what I want, people understand where I’m coming from. They know I’m not coming from a place of malice,” he said. “They know I’m just speaking my mind. Just like how Joan Rivers used to be. That’s the best thing about being a comedian I think … you say what you want to say, and you say how you feel. And people take it, some people don’t.”
And as you might imagine, more than few people didn’t like Lil Duval’s words about transgenders.
Transgender actress Laverne Cox, who appears in Netflix’s “Orange Is The New Black,” took the comedian to task.
“Some folks think it’s ok to joke about wanting to kill us,” Cox wrote on Twitter, the Post said. “We have free speech but that speech has consequences and trans folks are experiencing the negative consequences with our lives. It hurts my spirit cause this isn’t funny. Our lives matter. Trans murder isn’t a joke.”
Lil Duval wasn’t alone in feeling the heat.
While Charlamagne Tha God, one of the hosts of the “Breakfast Club,” spoke at a media and politics convention in Pasadena, California, a group of transgender advocates stood up and started yelling at him.
“The trans community is boycotting the ‘Breakfast Club’ because your music and your ideology reinforces transphobia that kills us!” one person said. “We are not a joke!”
The Post noted Lil Duval’s defenders as well, saying one tweeted that the comedian said “what any straight man would say.”
Here’s a video from the Post on the controversy:
No comments:
Post a Comment