Fox News host Tucker Carlson
(Getty Images)
Fox News host Tucker Carlson is being condemned as homophobic for his entry in a 1991 Trinity College yearbook in which he appears to make a joke about the murder of Harvey Milk, California’s first openly gay elected politician.
Under Mr Carlson’s photo, it lists he is a member of the “Dan White Society” and Jesse Helms Foundation. Dan White shot and killed Mr Milk and San Francisco mayor George Moscone in 1978. Jesse Helms was a conservative former US senator from North Carolina, who called gay people “disgusting” and opposed funding for AIDS research and treatment.
Mr Carlson has not directly addressed the yearbook page, but Trinity College confirmed to TheWrap it appears authentic, and that it doesn’t believe there was a Dan White Society at the school.
He did, however, go after Washington Post media columnist Erik Wemple in recent days, after the writer reportedly was calling Mr Carlson’s old acquaintances to ask about his background, saying Post owner and Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos “had one of his minions, a mentally unbalanced middle-aged man called Erik Wemple, pull our dusty college yearbook and call around and see if we’d done anything naughty at the age of 19.”
Fox News did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Mr Carlson has been condemned for the photo.
“I’m rarely at a loss for words, but this is truly despicable and well beyond the garden variety homophobic crap we’ve come to expect from this guy,” LGBTQ activist Cleve Jones, who was a friend of Mr Milk’s, told the San Francisco Chronicle.
“Dan White was an assassin who murdered the Mayor of San Francisco and a San Francisco City Supervisor in cold blood. I just can’t wrap my mind around the depth of his depravity.”
Ray Mabus, the former secretary of the Navy under president Barack Obama, criticized the joke as well.
“Harvey Milk was a Navy diver, one of the toughest jobs there is, who was kicked out only for being gay,” Mr Mabus wrote on Twitter. “Made our Navy weaker. I named a ship after Harvey Milk because he represented our values and he served. Still trying to learn which branch Tucker Carlson served in.”
It’s not the first time critics are saying the popular Fox host engaged in homophobic conduct. During appearances on the “Bubba the Love Sponge” radio show, Mr Carlson regularly used racist, sexist, and homophobic language like “f—,” according to the liberal watchdog group Media Matters for America.
He also called efforts to repeal the prohibitions on gay people serving openly in the military “propaganda,” and once lamented that 2018 Democratic Vermont gubernatorial candidate Christine Hallquist, the first openly trans nominee for a major party governorship, benefitted from “transgender privilege.”
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