Me and Jon Stewart Part 3

In today's post I am going to talk a little about Jon Stewart. Trust me, it will be interesting. The best way to read this post is to read, first, the posts Me and Jon Stewart, Me and Jon Stewart Part 2 and The Disease of the Left to provide some context.

In the previous posts, I said that I started to watch The Daily Show in 2008. Jon appealed to me immediately for his humor, his moral integrity and his intelligence. More than that you can sense that he genuinely loves people, and wants to loved. This is why he tells jokes. In particular, he loves the downtrodden and the victimized. There were certainly people he hated. He hated Bush and Blair for the Iraq war, and he hated racists and bigots of all stripes.

There is a downside to being a lover though. There is always a possibly that love might get mixed up with sex. Jon certainly loved women, but his way of defending himself against the possibility of 'tainted love' with men was to divide the world into gays and straights and, I think, to avoid or at least be vigilant around gay men. I have no evidence of this: I just intuit it. Certainly he liked making jokes that ridiculed people he thought might be gay. I remember, for example, his glee after the Larry Craig scandal broke: "Closet homosexuals in the Republican party!"

The Daily Show didn't screen in New Zealand between the summer of 2010 and the beginning of 2014. When it started screening again, I had just been put under the Mental Health Act; I felt, as I said in the earlier post, that my imaginary friend, had returned to help me when I needed him. What I believe is that in 2013 and 2014, and starting perhaps earlier, Jon suffered something like a crisis of sexual identity or slight psychotic episode - I know this an extraordinary claim that probably plays into the hands of idiot Republicans but I believe it to be true. In the first episode I saw Jon ran a blow job joke; a later segment, for instance, was titled "Jon Stewart puts his hand in your pants". Jon had always done sexual jokes but now he was directing the Gay jokes at himself. Perhaps he found it cathartic.

The big issue of these years was Gay marriage. In one episode Jon talked about the views of "ordinary heterosexuals" - I think Jon was clinging to the fact of his heterosexuality but felt he could no longer truthfully describe himself as an ordinary one. In another episode he told Seth MacPharlane that Seth was "beautiful" - I don't think Seth quite knew how to react. Generally, though, Jon stuck with his old self. When he interviewed Tom Cruise, he tried to gently cajole Tom into coming out. Tom took offense and retaliated by asking if Jon had 'experimented' when younger; Jon replied by saying, "I was too busy chasing girls!"

Now, I have, despite myself, some sympathy for Tom Cruise. I was hearing voices at this time and, that night, I suggested (via telepathy of course) to Tom that he get in touch with with The Daily Show and tell Jon that he knew Jon's secret. A little later Tom reappeared as a guest. Early in the episode Jon did a bit where he was asked by his correspondents if he would "Love, Fuck or Marry" previous male correspondents, such as Steve Carrell and Stephen Colbert. "Oh, I fucked them all!" and mentioned something about especially liking to nuzzle into Stephen's neck. When the interview with Tom Cruise happened, it was much more cordial.

Thing reached a head shortly before his last episode. He did a full piece supporting Gay marriage and you could sense how conflicted and messed up he was about this issue; after I saw the episode I told my mother that I was worried about him. He quoted the Bible: "If a man lies with another man, they both shall be stoned to death". Ostensibly he was pillorying the religious Right but I think there was a part of him that believed it. Later in the episode, he turned to camera and said, "My friends - we live in trying times, but we are blessed." This had special resonance for me. The girl I was in love with for a long time, the one I call Jess, is really called Elizabeth which means "Blessed by God."

I feel it would be graceless to talk about Jon without talking about myself. Starting in 2013, I experienced a psychotic episode that lasted most of the next three years. It resembles in some way a crisis of sexual identity. It started with an impulse to kiss men. I worried that I might be starting to find men attractive. Early in 2014, I had a couple of nightmares in which the women I was making love to turned into males. (These dreams stopped when The Daily Show started screening again.) The worst symptom I can only describe with reference to The Daily Show. In one show, Jon made a fun of a Mental Health program in the South in which they treated homosexuality as a treatable illness: "when the wind blows from the South-West, I feel an urge to give people blow jobs." 

It was awful. During all this time, I held onto my sense of who I was: there was no way I would turn gay at the age of thirty-five. I knew I was what I was experiencing were psychotic symptoms, that they came from the outside, and that eventually the episode would pass. I never acted on any of my impulses. Finally the symptoms went away. Partly, I think, this was because I managed to convince the Mental Health Service that I had been misdiagnosed (as I was, when I first came into the service). Partly it was through talking to people in my life about my experiences. I take an immense risk talking about all this but I feel I should, that it is important. The personal is the political.

Concerning Jon… Just to be clear, I am not suggesting that Jon is gay or a repressed homosexual. That would be fucking stupid. There is no such thing as a 'repressed homosexual'. I am suggesting, rather, that he may have had some kind of mild psychotic episode over those years and that, as it passed for me, it passed for him. I can't say what I think caused his episode without sounding like a flakey hippie but I know what caused mine. It was my treatment by the Mental Health Service.