Dictator > gay > aging child star?

BY ROB SALERNO – Belarus and Germany had a minor diplomatic tizzy this week, after Germany’s openly gay foreign minister, Guido Westerwelle, criticized Belarus’s government as “the last dictatorship in Europe.”

Belarussian president Alexander Lukashenko, who has been in power for more than 20 years and is known for brutally cracking down on opponents, fired back, “It’s better to be a dictator than gay,” which led to widespread criticism in Europe, although Germany seems to be taking the high road.
Westerwelle, pictured below, says the statement speaks “for itself.”

Closer to home, it may be apt to say, “It’s better to be gay than an increasingly irrelevant, aging child actor whose only recent credits are in widely panned religious recruitment direct-to-video melodramas about the rapture and the evils of sex.”

Scene from Left Behind, or what patrons did to the theatre after having to watch Left Behind?

Kirk Cameron — formerly Mike Seaver on Growing Pains — told CNN’s Piers Morgan that homosexuality is “unnatural” and “ultimately destructive to so many of the foundations of civilization.”
The comments sparked outrage from much of the Hollywood elite and also from Cameron’s former Growing Pains costars Alan Thicke and Tracy Gold, who tweeted in support of queer rights.


However, Cameron did find support from another loopy former star, Stephen Baldwin, whose erratic and threatening behaviour Xtra has encountered in the past.

So just to be clear, the new math is dictator > gay > aging former child star.

Rob Salerno is a playwright and journalist whose writing has appeared in such publications as Vice, Advocate, NOW and OutTraveler.

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