Gay TV anchor Charles Perez on firing from Miami ABC affiliate: “Why I committed career suicide”

Since I don’t live in Miami, I know Charles Perez mainly from the very first season of The Real World back in early 90s when he was dating Norm, the franchise’s first gay cast member. Then a few years later, Charles got his own syndicated talk show and I thought he was just dreamy but annoyed that he wouldn’t acknowledge being gay.

Well, geez, who can blame him when you consider what he says has happened to him in a column on The Daily Beast. Here’s part of it:

I was fired four days after filing a sexual-orientation discrimination claim with Miami-Dade County’s Equal Opportunity Board against my employer, Miami ABC affiliate WPLG, owned by Post-Newsweek Stations.

Bottom line, I believe they sold me out as soon as my being gay became too widely known. It made them uncomfortable and made me, in their eyes, less advertiser-friendly. They’d demoted me two weeks earlier from main weekday anchor to weekend anchor. It was a move I quickly recognized was leading to the door, and I wasn’t prepared to watch my career circle down the drain.

My ex-employer will never admit this, but if the past decades have taught us anything, it is to be much more subtle about our prejudices. Getting rid of “the black guy” or “the woman” or “the gay guy” or “the Jew”—not to mention many other select groups—has given way to “we really should go in a different direction.” Or “we’ve really got to consider what’s the least objectionable choice.”