Michelle Shocked has published a retraction/ apology for her Yoshi's "rant," as it's being called. At the same time, the audio of the same is also now online, with the relevant section starting at around 4:40. When she asks rather archly if someone would Tweet that she said "God Hates Faggots," she gets a LAUGH, which seems to be the reaction she intends; this seems exactly what I thought - she's commenting, ironically, on the likelihood that people will overreact to what she's saying. So: yes, to some extent she's being misquoted.
However, the thing that she's saying they will overreact to is when she asserts, apparently non-ironically, that gay marriage is a sign of the end times, and that priests are going to be forced to marry homosexuals at gunpoint, which will herald the return of the saviour. I'll leave it to other courts to decide if this is the selfsame as "God Hates Faggots" or not; given that these headcase Christians are ROOTING for the return of their saviour, who the fuck knows what they think is good or bad, apocalypse-wise - if gay marriage means they'll get to hang out with Jesus sooner, maybe they should be supporting it! (I personally am all for the end times if it means fundamentalist Christians and the like are going to get spirited away somewhere; good riddance to their hateful lunatic nonsense, I say! Grr!). It's still a bizarre, confused, and un-queer-friendly statement, even if it does NOT (exactly) equal "God Hates Faggots."
It's also interesting to note that she seems to waffle a bit as to whether this is HER opinion or the that of some OTHER Christians, whose fear she is trying to explain to her audience - she speaks first of "their" view and then corrects herself from trying to bail on her co-believers and shifts to "our;" in her retraction it's "their" again. What I suspect based on this is that she is having a very, very hard time reconciling her own sexuality (past, present, disowned, closeted, or what-have-you) with her religion. She must be constantly having to perform mental gymnastics to allow her to be a like-it-or-not queer icon AND a Born Again Xian club-member at the same time, which, you gotta admit, would be a difficult move to pull off. (It's kind of like being a Jewish Nazi, a black Klansman, or a Canadian supporter of Stephen Harper). What we see here is her stumbling and falling in a spectacular way as she tries to bring her inner gymnastics routine to the public stage. And then when she starts praying in Spanish, apparently trying to retreat from what she's set loose... that's one broken mind on display.
So: I think the only conclusion I can draw from all of this is that Michelle Shocked is a definite damage case. The best deprogrammers in the country probably couldn't put her bits and pieces back together again, if this is how confused she is. What she offered at Yoshi's was not so much HATE SPEECH as the spectacle of a really confused, fucked up woman short-circuiting under a spotlight as her inner contradictions were dragged glaringly to light - a sad performance which she's compounding by trying now to pretend didn't happen.
Perhaps it's not a bad time for her to retire, or seek help, or something. Kinda sad, really, but I think I'm ready to look the other way...
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