I finally heard back from Radio One, which manages the station on which I heard homophobic comments Friday morning. The station itself doesn’t have a webpage as yet, so I got the e-mail address of the manager and wrote to her.

Hello,

I am writing in reference to commentary I heard on Majic 102.3 on Friday morning, September 24th. Around 8:20am, your hosts made reference to Governor McGreevey’s visit to an elementary school promoting New Jersey’s new school lunch program. For the next several minutes, the two male hosts made extremely homophobic remarks, laughing at themselves the whole time. Adopting the voices of young children, they tossed out lines like “guv’ner, where’s yer dress?!” and “my mama told me not to stand next to people like you!” These are just two of the comments I was able to remember, but there were many others made over a three or four minute period. The female host jumped in with a few comments of her own, but the two male hosts were the primary speakers, and they seemed to think this kind of behavior was acceptable.

Commentary like this is simply appalling. It perpetuates the homophobia that is common in portions of our society, and it is not acceptable coming from authority figures like radio disc jockeys and hosts. These comments displayed your hosts’ ignorance, intolerance, and bigotry in a disgusting manner. I hope that you will counsel them that this is highly inappropriate behavior, and I hope they will never make such inflammatory comments again.

Sincerely,

I decided to leave out the part about not being a regular listener of this station. The fact that I happened to catch this while on the shuttle bus to work (contractors have to park in a satellite lot, and then they shuttle us back to the building) has nothing to do with it; the driver is entitled to listen to the radio if he likes, and he has no control over the hosts.