Glee Takes on Newsweek

Given the massive success of his FOX tele-musical, Glee, Ryan Murphy is probably not someone you want on your bad side. But it’s too late for Newsweek columnist Ramin Setoodeh, whose April 26 column entitled “Straight Jacket” (“Heterosexual actors play gay all the time. Why doesn't it ever work in reverse?”) asserted that Glee star Johnathan Groff plays a “theatre queen” on the series. On Monday, Kristen Chenoweth condemned the column, and now Murphy has penned his own disapproval. Murphy calls the article “damaging, needlessly cruel, and mind-blowingly bigoted,” noting that “it shocks me because Mr. Setoodeh is himself gay.” He goes on to ask if Newsweek would have published an article that substituted racial distinctions in place of the sexual orientation based ones Setoodeh invokes. Murphy calls for a boycott of the magazine that will only end with an apology, but saves his harshest words for Seteoodeh himself—calling him “a gay man deeply in need of education” who should think “before he picks up his poison pen again to work through the issues of his own self loathing.”