The Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Center held an event on March 21, 2013, to raise money for homeless gay and lesbian youth. Amy Pascal was one of the speakers at the event. Pascal advocated to Hollywood folk to change the way homosexuality is portrayed and written, for the overall greater good.

Her idea to turn the common social stigma of homosexuality to something else — the stereotypes so often used which make homosexual characters defined by their sexual preferences, rather than by the character’s overall personality — is a good one.

Film after film, sitcom after sitcom, homosexual characters are more often introduced by their sexuality, and the character traits written for them are centered around the more flamboyant or politically-driven homosexual stereotypes.

Yes, the gay man that has a lisp and speaks with descriptive terms such as “fabulous” is a real thing, and I know men who act in such a manner. But not all gay men act or speak that way; most don’t.

So why are these the major default traits in character presentation?

The answer is because many television viewers and movie-goers still subscribe to outdated terms and descriptions in order to attempt to understand the rapidly changing world around them.

That, and Hollywood is happy to pander to them because it is easier overall on the narrative side.

Changing homosexuality on page and screen to be a generally trivial detail when the plot is not specifically about homosexuality is the way to go. So there is the good part. The bad part is a bit more complicated.

Pascal said, “How about next time, when any of us are reading a script and it says words like fag, or faggot — homo — dyke — take a pencil and just cross it out. Just don’t do it.”

That is an incredible, and from my view ill-conceived, proposition.

Yes, it would be nice if actual derogatory, hurtful and directly harmful uses of “fag” or “homo” or “dyke” were stricken from the vocabularies of all people across the world when dealing with other human beings.

However, simply nixing those words from movies and television when they are a part of day-to-day speech isn’t going to stop people from using those words hatefully.

The entertainment media is a powerful machine, but like the issue of violence, cutting an element of reality out of what is seen and heard in fictional representations of life is not going to make the world hold hands and sing “Kumbaya.”

Pascal’s plea is a wholeheartedly heartwarming attempt to make this world a better place. But sentiments like that are rarely the answer.

To use an extreme example:

“The film is a based-on-actual-events drama, set in, say, 1991. It involves the fearmongering tactic of blaming all HIV outbreaks on homosexuality or general derangement of “traditional” sexuality.

A rich and powerful antagonist has found out his young and lovely daughter has HIV. She claims she was raped by a deranged, perverted homosexual deviant when she was passed out at a party.

Her claim is backed up by her sort-of macho boyfriend who was at the same party and claims to have seen some low-life guy talking to her. Conveniently, the boyfriend was not near when it happened; he was drinking somewhere else.

The protagonist is a struggling middle-class man. He is bisexual and has hooked up with the boyfriend before and other partners, as it was the early 1990s and people weren’t as prone to safe sex practices.

He has recently contracted HIV and is contacting everyone whose name he knows with whom he has had sexual relations.

The boyfriend, rather than admitting he was the likely one to infect the girl and have gay sex, is on the blame-the-openly-bisexual-man-for-rape train.

The protagonist has to struggle against the various sex-related phobias from people he meets, the law, the rich father and his own new reality of being infected. Along the way he learns from others infected and meets some people in the final stages of full-blown AIDS.

It is a heart-touching epic of lies and deceit, where the audience prays the right people get what is coming to them, all the while being saddened by the events of disease unfolding around them and being educated about how a person with HIV could lead a fairly normal life.

Magic Johnson could make a cameo with his announcement of being HIV positive as a deus ex machina to bring clarity to the lie by the girl and boyfriend. (And yes, this is a part from a script I happened to write back in the day that does exist, in case anyone was wondering.)”

Now, is a film like that supposed to become a politically correct trip, rather than remain more historically accurate? 

Yeah, I don’t think so either.

Pascal’s suggestion to cross out hate words is noble but not viable. Even if negative words are cut from our language, some folks will continue to use them.

When we strike words from our language just because those words are used in an ugly manner, we give those words more power. 

We have to allow the words to exist and try to let people come around to seeing how certain uses can be hurtful. We must maintain the freedom for people to say what they please, within accordance of the Supreme Court rulings, of course.

When we deny certain words, we are no better than the ignorant school boards and other such people that banned “The Catcher in the Rye” and other such books for “vulgarity” and other nonsense.

I am fairly certain Pascal had no intention of wanting to stifle words and art, but she did make the slip-up. And when a media figure makes a mistake, it needs to be called out before any damage is done.

Hopefully the overall message from her about making homosexuality a normality will come to fruition. But along the way, we still must be careful about what we tell others to say or not to say.

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Gabriel Stoffa is a graduate student in political science from Ottumwa, Iowa.