Hitchens’s bizarre ‘lesbian’ jibe

The American-based English writer and polemicist Christopher Hitchens is evidently unconcerned about endearing himself to the feminist community. Fresh from provoking a deluge of hate mail with his Vanity Fair article, “Why Women Aren’t Funny”, he appeared on MSNBC and called his co-host Andrew Sullivan, another US-based Englishman, a “lesbian”.

Hitchens (pictured), who is a regular guest on the channel’s Tim Russert show, was discussing Rev Jeremiah Wright, Senator Barack Obama’s controversial pastor. Sullivan, the openly gay editor of the right-wing Daily Dish political blog, was in mid-flow when Hitchens blurted out his jibe...

HITCHENS: He [Wright] thinks only Jews are going to object to [Rev. Louis] Farrakhan and [Libyan leader Moammar] Gadhafi. Excuse me?

SULLIVAN: No, he didn't say ‘only’.

HITCHENS: No, but -

SULLIVAN: Again, you keep playing with that quote. We're happy to have it on the record. And now you've made me forget my second point, which is -

HITCHENS: Oh, well, don't be such a lesbian. Get on with it.

SULLIVAN: I'm sorry, I've forgotten my second point.

Hitchens was recently described by the Huffington Post writer Rachel Sklar as a “sexist, war-mongering, blowhard”, while the Guardian’s women’s editor Kira Cochrane called his Vanity Fair article a “ridiculous, tedious rant”.