“This conversation with my daughter was not a personal awakening.”
Matt Damon has come under fire after revealing his daughter encouraged him to stop using a homophobic slur a few months ago.
The actor admitted that his daughter was left furious after he used the “f-slur for a homosexual” in a recent joke.
He told The Sunday Times, “She left the table I said, ‘Come on, that’s a joke! I say it in the movie Stuck on You!’
“She went to her room and wrote a very long, beautiful treatise on how that word is dangerous. I said, ‘I retire the f-slur!’ I understood,” the dad shared.
Damon tried to defend his use of the word by saying it “was commonly used when I was a kid, with a different application”, but as far as I’m aware it’s 2021 and not the 1970s anymore.
If you need your teen daughter to tell you to stop using homophobic slurs then you’ve got some serious work to do.
Damon has since apologised for any ‘confusion’ caused by the recent interview.
He told The Hollywood Reporter: “During a recent interview, I recalled a discussion I had with my daughter where I attempted to contextualize for her the progress that has been made – though by no means completed – since I was growing up in Boston and, as a child, heard the word ‘f*g’ used on the street before I knew what it even referred to.
“I explained that that word was used constantly and casually and was even a line of dialogue in a movie of mine as recently as 2003; she in turn expressed incredulity that there could ever have been a time where that word was used unthinkingly.
“To my admiration and pride, she was extremely articulate about the extent to which that word would have been painful to someone in the LGBTQ+ community regardless of how culturally normalized it was. I not only agreed with her but thrilled at her passion, values and desire for social justice.”
He continued, “I have never called anyone ‘f****t’ in my personal life and this conversation with my daughter was not a personal awakening. I do not use slurs of any kind. I have learned that eradicating prejudice requires active movement toward justice rather than finding passive comfort in imagining myself ‘one of the good guys.’
“And given that open hostility against the LGBTQ+ community is still not uncommon, I understand why my statement led many to assume the worst. To be as clear as I can be, I stand with the LGBTQ+ community.”
