I wish I could cancel Matt Damon. It’s outrageous to joke about hateful gay slurs in 2021. – USA TODAY

If I had the unilateral authority to “cancel” people – anointing them pariahs that are banished to the dustbin of popular culture – my list would include the usual suspects:  Donald Trump, Tucker Carlson, Kevin McCarthy and Sarah Huckabee Sanders. As of Sunday, I’d add another name to that list: Matt Damon.

On a promotional tour hawking his new movie “Stillwater,” Damon sat down with the Sunday Times of London for a wide-ranging interview. The interview first came to my attention in a series of tweets that alleged Damon had admitted referring to gay men using a homophobic slur.

In an age when people manipulate reality by taking comments out of context or making them up out of whole cloth, I was skeptical. Before sharpening the guillotine, I wanted to make sure another public figure was not being canceled for no legitimate reason.

Public relations backpedaling

I tracked down the Sunday Times piece and clicked on it, expecting to find a reasonable explanation – like a character played by Damon, not Damon the man, had used the slur. After hitting a paywall, and subscribing to a free month of access that will undoubtedly continue to bill my estate upon my death, I got to the original source.  What I read was even worse than what the Twitter mob had revealed in its 140-character outrage.

In the past few months, while eating a meal with his family, Damon made a joke and referred to a gay man as a “f—–.” This upset one of his daughters, and when Damon defended himself by saying he had used the word in a 2003 movie, suggesting that if it was in a movie it was OK, his daughter was having none of it. She went to her room and wrote what he called a “treatise” on why it’s wrong to use that word to refer to gays. It was his daughter’s effort that persuaded Damon to, as he put it, “retire the f-slur.”

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So we’re clear, the “f-slur” is a hateful term used by people to demean gay men. It is frequently connected with the threat of violence – like when a bunch of thugs thump baseball bats on the side of their truck and scream it as they drive by a gay man. And it is often twisted into the malevolence of actual violence – like when one of the men who murdered Matthew Shepard referred to him as a “f–” who “needed killing,” after beating Matthew bloody, tying him to a rail fence and leaving him to die on a cold Wyoming prairie. 

That it took Damon’s daughter, in 2021, to explain to him why it’s wrong to use this slur left me in a state of nausea composed of equal parts shock, anger and sadness.

On Monday evening, after more than a day of backlash, Damon issued a statement claiming that he had “never called anyone” the f-slur. The problem with his new statement is that before he recounted the story of his daughter schooling him on standards of decency, Damon noted that he considers his words carefully when he gives an interview because every word is “parsed” by editors looking for “clicks.” 

So his current position seems more like public relations backpedaling than an effort to correct a misstatement of events. That leaves me inclined to believe what was published in his interview and not his new twist on a story that has landed him in hot water.

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What makes Damon’s latent homophobia so much worse than just using a gay slur is his apparent belief that revealing it to a newspaper would not be a problem for either his career or the movie he is promoting. The not so subtle subtext is that the public will not give a damn that he used a homophobic slur to refer to gays. I looked through the first 20 or so public comments included below Damon’s interview. Not one of them even mentioned the slur – so maybe he was right. 

Anti-gay slurs should be taboo

I have to wonder whether Damon would have been as comfortable confessing that he uses the “N-word” when making jokes about African Americans. Would he have defended the practice by claiming that a character he played in one of his movies used the racial slur? I don’t think so.

Unlike epithets based on race, slurs against the LGBT community remain acceptable, or at least easily forgiven, in some circles. They are still used among people whose words are not splashed across headlines in newspapers. For years, I heard them from a small contingent of law enforcement officers when I was a prosecutor. And there are well-documented cases of virulently anti-gay statements from celebrities like Mel Gibson, 50 Cent, Blake Shelton and Joy Reid – an MSNBC commentator who was recently given her own show.

Even the author of the column in which Damon’s interview appears, Jonathan Dean, recounts the offensive admission but wraps it in a puff piece that paints Damon as an artist-hero on a mission to save American cinema … while dressed “down in a T-shirt and open shirt.” For God’s sake, a big celebrity just admitted that he used a homophobic slur to refer to gay men and the author is more interested in Damon’s fashion choices than asking him how he thinks that’s acceptable.

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None of this is OK. Many of us in the LGBT community have come to expect attacks from a segment of this country that prides itself on demanding respect but offering only hate. What is especially painful about Damon’s comments is that he had convinced a lot of us that he was the “Hollywood liberal” he described himself as in Dean’s interview. It’s tough discovering that someone we think is an ally is actually part of the problem that makes our lives less secure.

As long as anti-gay smears are met with anything less than condemnation and serious repercussions, as a country we will continue to send the message that it is fine to treat members of the LGBT community as undeserving of the same respect and equality as everyone else.

The headline that precedes Damon’s interview asks the question: Is Hollywood “A-lister” Matt Damon “one of a dying breed?” Let’s hope so.

Michael J. Stern (@MichaelJStern1), a member of USA TODAY’s Board of Contributors, was a federal prosecutor for 25 years in Detroit and Los Angeles.