Nash Grier, a teenage Vine star who earlier this year made a mockery of your film studies degree by inking a movie deal, has offered a tepid apology for posting a video to the web wherein he blamed the spread of AIDS on “fags.” Color me surprised that a kid whose art is characterized by hacky jokes about women and black people is also a certifiable homophobic dickwad.
Grier posted the offending Vine months ago, and took it down after the backlash started. But because the internet is forever, someone grabbed it before he pulled it, posted it to their own Vine account, and, thanks to the mysterious mechanizations of the internet, it blew up over the holiday weekend. Now it will live on in infamy, forever.
I apologize for anything negative that I’ve said towards gays and for that matter, anyone. I was young, ignorant, stupid, and in a bad place. I’ve moved on and learned from my mistakes and I am so truly sorry to anyone I have offended. I have nothing against anyone or anything that promotes equality. Sorry again
Why did he opt to post a screen shotted tweet draft rather than just making a Sincerity Vine apologizing for what he said? Why not write a blog post? Why not write something somewhere in a form that isn’t a screen shot? Is it because he doesn’t want people to be able to Google “Nash Grier fag apology” and find evidence of what happened? Am I doing a tiny part to undermine that attempt to give answering for his fuckery the dodge by writing “Nash Grier fag apology” in quotes here, on this “Nash Grier fag apology” post right now? Whoops!
Grier has a bit of a history of posting gay slurs on social media and then getting away with it because his fans think he’s cute, as evidenced by this treasury of screenshotted Nash Grier homophobia that has made several rounds on Tumblr.
For a man with such strong opinions on how women should dress and groom themselves, Nash Grier sure seems obsessed with what other guys are doing with their dicks. (Many of the above tweets can still be found in Grier’s Twitter feed, if you can stomach wading through unending barely legible self-promotional tweets).
Grier’s movie deal is split with his buddy and fellow Internet Thingamajobby star Cameron Dallas (incidentally, “Nash Grier” and “Cameron Dallas” sound like stage names of male strippers with large gay audiences but I digress). The company giving the teens a discouraging amount of money is a teen-focused media company called AwesomenessTV. AwesomenessTV recently announced a partnership with Seventeen magazine and DreamWorks, two institutions that I’m sure would be less than happy to serve as hapless cheerleaders for the career of an unabashed homophobe.
Then again, 8.7 million devoted fans are nothing to sneeze at. I’m sure there’s plenty of money to be made off this dumb kid before he blows it all and shows up on a D-list celebrity reality show about former Vine stars who start a house cleaning business to pay their child support bills.