We’re two days into June and Pride Month has already been hijacked by utter nonsense, from the furor over the timing of an ‘intimate’ JoJo Siwa photo to batshit insanity over the death of Jonathan Joss, who voiced John Redcorn on King of the Hill. Before ranting about any of this I’d like to note that even typing the name ‘JoJo Siwa’ makes me feel like an idiot who is dressed in a clown suit. If she was on Dance Moms during the time Ex insisted we watch it, I have no recollection of her, and my sisters are old enough that I never saw her on Nickelodeon. But she had a wacky signature hairdo and was a celebrity to kids who ditched her as they aged, and now she’s barely holding on to a sliver of fame.
In her late teens she came out as lesbian, which angered Candace Cameron Bure on Jesus’s behalf. But apparently she walked that back ahead of this year’s Pride Month and now she’s “queer” or “pan” — an 8″ x 8″ nonstick Mainstays pan, in my estimation, whereas Miley Cyrus is a colorful contemporary reimagining of a Bubble frying pan and Angelina Jolie a 12″ x 12″ Le Creuset Signature Every Day Pan (in cerise). Whether Siwa’s nonbinary yet is something you’d have to ask Siri: I do everything within my power to avoid knowing anything about her and haven’t read any articles addressing what I’m about to complain about. My righteous Grandpa Simpson fury is based solely on a couple of headlines skimmed yesterday.
Those headlines mentioned Internet outrage because Siwa’s new boyfriend, an older famewhore she met on a sleazy reality TV show, rang in Pride Month by sharing a photo of the two of them in bed together that looked so painfully awkward it made me laugh each time I saw it. The outrage itself — how dare she do something heterosexual in June! — made me sigh because half of the Internet, including men of all stripes, currently identifies as lesbian. Approximately 97% of those people are actually straight, even if most are still navigating the first four of Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s five stages of grief about it. “You’re so close to getting it!” I’d like to tell any of Siwa’s fellow “queers” who scolded her for this grave offense. And then I’d offer to call them every June 1st for the next 30 or 40 years and ask who shared their bed the night before.
This highlights the offensive folly of modern Pride, which is built on the fraudulent and spectacularly misguided premise that anyone who doesn’t feel completely “cis” or “straight” at all times is LGBTQ+. First Pride was seized by corporate sponsors that stripped it of its meaning by commercializing it beyond recognition; now it has been captured by disparate non-gay demographics that made those sponsors flee. It’s a month in which teenagers overspend on rainbow accessories and social media is deluged by AI-generated memes and articles serving fictitious accounts of gay history to clueless youngsters and allies who ‘heart’ it and share it because they don’t know any better.
The sprinkle-coated icing atop the garish rainbow cake is that many of the same people who glory in Pride currently reject concepts like biological sex and criticize gay men and women for having “genital preferences” if we aren’t interested in dating trans partners. (When I write an academic treatise on this, it will be called “There Is No Dana, Only Zuul: Modern Ennui and Meaningless Trends in Self-Identification.”) This brings us to the death of Jonathan Joss, who many of us loved from King of the Hill and Parks & Recreation. He was fatally shot this weekend by a neighbor and tearful posts calling it a homophobic hate crime are being shared left and right on social media by people who haven’t kept up with Joss in recent years.
Though it’s true he was involved with a trans man at the time of his death, those of us who followed Joss online know that his partner (they called themselves married but it’s unclear whether they’re legally wed) hasn’t been in the picture for long — and that there are highly questionable elements to the story he’s shared online about the shooting. Joss’s feuds with neighbors are about as well-known as Julie Newmar’s, but with many more threats of physical violence. It’s also a saga that easily predates the romantic relationship he unveiled as ‘new’ in late 2024. If the timeline Joss presented on Instagram is correct, the partner has spent considerably less time in the neighborhood than what’s implied in his statement: a house fire kept them away from it for most of this year.
The claim that Joss was murdered for being in a gay relationship is bizarre for several obvious reasons, including the fact that no one who saw him with his partner would mistake them for a gay couple. At first glance, even with the partner’s whiskers, they looked like father and daughter. But the Internet is running with his statement anyway because it fits a popular “queer” victimhood narrative, even as law enforcement and neighbors contradict some of the partner’s most incendiary claims.** I don’t want to say much more about this because Joss’s long downward spiral, which was quite public, and his violent death are upsetting; the more salacious details of the story are less important right now than reflecting on the loss of his life and talent.
It’s just unfortunate that bad actors within the TQ+ segments of the community have a tendency to seize and distort the narrative around stories like this (or the death of Nex Benedict) and run with it like Usain Bolt. The distrust it sows harms ‘real’ LGBT people much more than it does identity tourists with marginalization fetishes, and that’s nothing to be proud of.
* That’s a John Redcorn line, for the uninitiated.
** It doesn’t help that this happened in Texas — people who’ve never lived in red states often fail to grasp the size and strength of their gay communities. Also, sorry for overusing ‘partner,’ but I’d rather keep their name out of search results.