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Alexis Arquette Suffers Backlash After ‘Outing’ Will And Jada Pinkett Smith On Social Media

By Patricia Ramirez
Published on: 10:58 PST, Jan 20, 2016

Alexis Arquette (the beautiful, blonde, and openly transgender Arquette sibling) clearly doesn’t think much of Jada Pinkett Smith’s call to boycott the upcoming Academy Awards. Pinkett Smith has called on conscientious movie lovers to boycott the Oscars due to the lack of racial diversity among nominees; this is the second year in a row that nominees in all major award categories have been white. When it comes to Alexis Arquette, though, her call to action has fallen on deaf ears. In fact, Alexis is so upset about Jada’s newest cause that she’s taken to social media to air her grievances.

However, Arquette’s problem with Pinkett Smith’s call-out of the annual Academy Awards seems to have less to do with who Pinkett Smith is defending than who she’s not.

According to a VH1 report, Alexis Arquette used her Facebook account to publicly “out” both Jada Pinkett-Smith and her husband, Will, who Arquette claims are both gay. In the Facebook post, which has now been deleted, Arquette accuses the Hollywood power couple of hiding sexual secrets in a “gilded closet” and demands that they come out if Pinkett Smith expects her support in her Oscar-boycotting endeavors. Amid a plethora of insults and graphic descriptions, Alexis goes on to describe outing as “healthy” while inferring that Jada and her husband are enemies of the LGBT community.

Facebook Screenshot
[Image via Alexis Arquette/Facebook]

So far, neither Will nor Jada Pinkett-Smith have publicly addressed the very public “outing” they received from Alexis Arquette. Pinkett Smith’s Oscar boycott is, if nothing else, generating plenty of attention for her cause. Some of it positive, such as the support she’s received from Spike Lee, Michael Moore, and Rev. Al Sharpton, and some very negative. In addition to the highly public bashing from Alexis Arquette, Jada has been called out by her husband’s former Fresh Prince of Bel Air co-star, Janet Hubert. Hubert had some harsh words for Pinkett Smith, reports the New York Times.

“I was looking at this ridiculousness people called a historic moment and I was annoyed. I was annoyed because it dilutes the movement when you only stand up for yourself. I’m a real freedom fighter. I’m not a pretend freedom fighter. I stand up for other actresses, other people. The Smiths just irked me because they are such pretenders, and everything is a photo op. It’s just self-contrived because her hubby didn’t get a nomination.”

Ouch.

Not quite as nasty as Alexis Arquette’s deleted Facebook post, but Hubert definitely gets her point across.

While it’s clear that not everyone in Hollywood agrees with Jada Pinkett Smith’s methods, Alexis Arquette is getting some negative feedback herself. Not surprisingly, much of it is coming from the very same community she was claiming to defend with her insult-laden Facebook tirade.

VH1 reporter Christopher Rosa, a member of the LGBT community himself, cuts into Alexis Arquette in a scathing article. In a nutshell, Rosa describes Arquette’s “outing” as a huge invasion of privacy, whether what she posted was the truth or not.

“For Arquette to even allude to the Smiths’ sexualities is invasive, insensitive and seismically regresses the LGBTQIA movement.”

Rosa describes Arquette’s statement about outing being healthy as an “error,” adding that coming out on one’s own terms is healthy, while being forcibly and publicly outed is not. He also writes that being publicly outed against your will by a fellow member of the LGBT community “is even more sinister.”

Folks on social media have responded to Alexis Arquette’s public “outing” of Will and Jada in much the same vein, with the overwhelming undertone being that Arquette definitely crossed a serious line.

Ultimately, though, the sexual preferences of Will and Jada Pinkett Smith are rather irrelevant when it comes to Jada’s calls to boycott the Oscars. Her complaint is legitimate. This is the second year in a row the predominantly white Academy has selected an entirely white group of nominees for its major categories. Despite Alexis Arquette’s refusal to “hear” Jada’s comments regarding racial disparity in the Academy Awards nomination process, the Academy is listening, and has even responded, promising change in the future.

What do you think? Was attacking Jada Smith’s sexuality an appropriate response to what Alexis described as “an enemy” to the LGBT community, or did Alexis Arquette go too far?

[Photo by Stephen Shugerman/Getty Images]

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