I had never seen Ash Beckham before last week, when a video of hers, on the subject of coming out of the closet (in all its forms), went viral. If you haven’t seen that video yet, I’ll post it below, but first, enjoy this amazing talk on changing the culture of calling things “gay” that are clearly neither happy nor homosexual:
And here’s that video of Ash talking about coming out of the closet. As she explains, coming out is no more than a “hard conversation.”
She is delightful.
In related news, a Massachusetts high school student found something disturbing in Apple’s built in dictionary, in perusing the definitions of the word “gay”:
Becca Gorman, 15, said she first found the pejorative definition for the word while doing a research project for school last week. According to a screen capture she took of the dictionary application on her MacBook Pro laptop, the third, informal definition of gay was listed as “foolish; stupid,” with the example, “making students wait for the light is kind of a gay rule.”
“At first, I was kind of in disbelief,” the Lincoln-Sudbury High sophomore said, adding she couldn’t find any other dictionaries that used that particular definition except to denounce it as derogatory.
Gorman, whose parents are lesbians, said she’s used to hearing the term “that’s so gay” thrown around in everyday conversations around her, but was hurt that a “humongous company” like Apple would legitimize it in its own application.
“I felt like they had to take care of it,” she said.
Becca received a call from Apple soon after sending the letter, but the changes haven’t been made as of this writing.
[h/t David Badash]
