Matt Siegel, a fixture on Boston radio for 40 years as the host of the “Matty in the Morning” show on Kiss 108 FM, abruptly signed off Wednesday after being told to “stop talking” about pop star Demi Lovato’s announcement that they are non-binary.
The Boston Globe reports it’s not clear if the dramatic mic drop, which stunned listeners and sponsors, marks the end of “Matty in the Morning.” Reached Wednesday, WXKS 107. 9 FM general manager Alan Chartrand seemed to downplay the controversy, saying “everything is going to be fine.”
But when asked via text if he’ll be back on the air Thursday, Siegel replied, “No.”
At issue Wednesday were comments Siegel made while discussing the announcement by Lovato that the singer now identifies as non-binary and as such would be changing their pronouns. Siegel said his boss at iHeartMedia, which owns WXKS-FM, called and told him to “stop talking about what I’ve been talking about.”
“I was going against the ‘woke thing,’ okay?” Siegel said, according to a recording of the segment uploaded to YouTube. “Against the Demi Lovatos of the world and all that kind of stuff.”
Siegel said he’d received a similar call prior to the November presidential election when he was criticizing Donald Trump.
“This is why I got rich, okay?” Siegel said on air Wednesday. “Because I told it like it is to my listeners for 40 bleepin’ years. They pulled the plug on me and they said ‘you cannot talk about what you’re talking about.’ ... If I’m left wing and I go anti-Trump, I get in trouble, and today I was anti-wokeness and I can’t do that.”
He added that he’s now barred from being “a funny comic, telling it like it is about what he’s thinking.”
So, Siegel said, he was “ending my portion of the radio show right now. ... I just want to say, I love my listeners ... and it’s been a hell of a run, but I think it’s coming to an end.”
He reiterated that he was being muzzled by the station. “It’s a joke, the whole binary thing,” he said. “I don’t care what Demi Lovato does. But now we have to worry about ‘you might offend someone.’ “
He concluded his rant by saying, “they said, ‘shut up Matt, stop talking,’ well, I hope you’re happy because I just stopped talking. Matty out.”
Advocates for the LGBTQ community condemned the statements. “Public understanding of what it means to be non-binary is growing and listeners expect better from the media and people with a platform,” Rodrigo Heng-Lehtinen, deputy executive director for the National Center for Transgender Equality, wrote in a statement to the Globe.
Mary Emily O’Hara, GLAAD News and Rapid Response Manager, said via email, “Respecting someone’s authentic identity, including using their pronouns and names, is not only a basic human courtesy, but it can be lifesaving, especially for transgender and nonbinary youth. Media personalities have a responsibility to be accurate as they never know who is listening to them, whether a vulnerable young person, or a person looking for an excuse to exclude, marginalize or make anyone feel unsafe.”
Chartrand said he planned to meet with Siegel Wednesday afternoon and hoped to resolve the issue.
Siegel told Boston.com in a phone interview after Wednesday’s show that “I’m against her binary thing; I think she’s a troubled woman and a lot of young people are taking her seriously and it bothers me,” stressing that “of course, it’s a comedy show, so I did it in the context of jokes.”
Though he called Lovato a “woman,” many non-binary people do not identify as either gender, so pronouns such as “her” would not accurately describe them; they is the preferred pronoun in such cases.
No comments:
Post a Comment