Rose McGowan Needs to Brush Up on Her Gay Culture!

Clearly Rose McGowan has never met a gay man.

How else to explain her having the audacity to make a comment as preposterous as this one: "Gay men are as misogynistic as straight men, if not more so. I have an indictment of the gay community right now, I'm actually really upset with them"?

Well, guess what, Rose: Most of us probably never gave you a second thought before, but now the feelings are entirely mutual.

The unenlightened actress made the comment to author Bret Easton Ellis (of course!) in a podcast last month. Then she went even further, taking gay men to task for not mobilizing politically in support of women's rights around the world. Hmm... And what exactly have straight men collectively done for the female cause lately?

The biggest problem with McGowan's comments is that they completely ignore the fact that women are such a huge part of gay culture. Drag queens are basically an over-the-top celebration of women, and gay entertainment revolves around female artists, from dance divas to pop divas to R&B divas to Broadway divas to soap divas to our obsession with Oscar-caliber actresses. (It's all about actresses.) Every single one of our icons from the beginning of time has been a women. What's so misogynistic about that?

McGowan did make one decent point when she mentioned an unfortunate tendency of oppressed groups to ignore the plights of other oppressed groups. I've seen it in the way some gay men disregard minority gay men, in the way some blacks dismiss gays, and in the way many women treat other women. But I don't think the gay movement has to simultaneously be a women's movement to not be anti-women. And for her to say that gay men have most of what they've fought for shows how little she knows.

It sounds to me like McGowan was grasping at straws, trying to justify throwing a party at the Brunei-owned Beverly Hills Hotel. Brunei is notorious for its anti-gay laws, but that's no problem since, in McGowan's eyes, gay men hate women. We deserve to be stoned to death. I wonder if she's checked Brunei's record on women's rights.

She'd be way better off in a gay club. If any of them would welcome her after spouting such misguided drivel.