This should be passed on.

Do you get emails that forward things someone famous supposedly wrote or said -- Andy Rooney, Robin Williams, Ben Stein -- on patriotism, the good ole days, immigrants, Katrina, etc.? More often than not, these offend me and have been falsely attributed, and I either delete without response or email back with a Snopes link.

This, however, is a letter truly written by the person it is attributed to. Jeff Whitty, a NY playwright, wrote Jay Leno this letter/email which is circulating on the net and was featured on a CNN story this morning. He is gay, he is tired of being joke fodder, and he is spot on with this letter.

Some snips here, but read it all for yourself.

"When you think of gay people, it's funny. They're funny folks. They
wear leather. They like Judy Garland. They like disco music.
They're sort of like Stepin Fetchit as channeled by Richard Simmons. . .

"When I think of gay people, I think of the gay news anchor who
took a tire iron to the head several times when he was vacationing in St.
Maarten's . . . . I think of a countless list of people who took their own lives
because the world was so toxically hostile to them . . . . I think of
a silent holocaust that is perpetuated by people like you, who seek to minimize
us and make fun of us and who I suspect really, fundamentally wish we would just
go away."

A gay friend of mine was badly beaten in a McDonald's parking lot and, as stupid as this sounds, he wasn't doing, saying, or wearing anything to have provoked it. Probably too many of us can relate. It would be nice if more of us circulated messages like this.