Josh Rivers is sorry, and he wants you to know that he means it.
The 33-year-old become the first BAME editor of Gay Times before he was fired, after only a month in the role, in a very public scandal when a string of old antisemetic, homophobic, misogynistic, racist tweets were brought to light.
The tweets were bad… really bad. Now, Josh says he’s more than willing to pay the price for what he said.
‘I will apologise as long as I need to. An apology is the least I can do,’ Josh tells Metro.co.uk.
‘But you have to back up your apologies with work, then people need to be able to see a demonstration of your remorse, of your regret, of your grief, of your apology. Otherwise, it’s nothing.
‘There aren’t a lot of great examples of people who are owning their mistakes and then doing the work to rectify that.
‘People seem more concerned with protecting their reputation.’
So, what is Josh doing to actively demonstrate his remorse and regret?
He has rededicated his efforts to amplify voices from his community; the queer black community. He launched a podcast – Busy Being Black – to start the vital conversations that he says would have helped him to feel less isolated when he was growing up.
His episodes discuss reconciling homosexuality with religion, the connection between transphobia and anti-Blackness, questioning if there’s a space for queerness in hip hop.
Josh says the response to the podcast has been overwhelmingly positive – he tells me how he called his mother in tears after receiving a message from a listener who said one of the episodes made him feel proud to be black and gay.
This validation is much needed. When the news of the offensive tweets broke, Josh found himself in the firing line of everyone he had pissed off – which was pretty much everyone – and it almost broke him.
‘It was devastating, obviously,’ Josh tells Metro.co.uk.
‘I don’t think anyone wants to have their mistakes made so public. But I did make them very publicly. So it kind of follows that this kind of thing might happen.’
He calls what he said on Twitter in his early to mid 20s ‘heinous s***’. He says people responded ‘as they should have’, with outrage.
‘I think that people’s response to that was, for the most part, fair,’ he continues. ‘If people weren’t upset by what I said, that’s kind of a problem, right?’
We live in a moment where our every action, opinion, argument is played out in the public sphere. An ill-thought-out comment or poorly-judged tweet can lead to an online pile-on, a mass public shaming that can cause anxiety, reputational damage, or even get you fired.
‘Cancel culture’ can be corrosive and damaging, but the flip side of that argument is that it also allows for people in prominent positions to be held accountable for their actions.
Josh doesn’t think what he went through can be conflated with ‘cancel culture’ or ‘outrage culture’. He says it’s all too easy for people to call out the unfairness of public reaction, rather than take responsibility for what they did.
‘I think that I paid a dear price, but the right price, for my very public mistakes,’ says Josh.
‘It’s right that we speak up when someone makes a mistake. And the onus really is on the person who’s made that mistake to go; “I’ve really f***ed up, how can I make this better?”
‘This “cancel culture” thing is almost like a disavowal all of our individual responsibility. The issue is not that people are calling you out for your bulls***. The issue is that you’re galloping around the world like a d***head. That’s the issue.’
Josh is certain that he’s doing the work to put things right. Both for himself, and, more importantly, for the people he wants to help. He says that regaining the trust of his community is one of the biggest challenges for him.
‘I’m really interested in making sure that the people I’m here to serve trust me,’ he says. ‘And know they can rely on me to work in service of them and our collective liberation.
‘I do consider myself an activist. My activism is amplifying the voices of people who have historically been silenced.
‘I operate at the very specific intersection of queerness and blackness. That’s where I do my work. And that is who I’m doing this work for, so I’m not interested in what the people I’m not aiming to serve think or say.’
Josh says losing the support of the community he identifies so strongly with in the aftermath of getting fired was ’emotionally devastating’. He had spent years of his life devoting his career and personal life to be an active part of the queer community, and he felt like he lost it in a matter of hours.
‘But in some ways, it kind of made it easier for me to focus,’ says Josh. ‘I was like, right, you’ve been knocked off a path, but your purpose is to serve people. What are you going to do now? Now what?’
Now what, was building a new platform to centre black queerness.
‘I’m speaking this into existence: Busy Being Black will be a multimedia platform for queer black voices and experiences,’ says Josh.’
But is it a consolation prize after losing a position at one of the most influential gay publications in media? Josh doesn’t see it that way. He says this podcast is a powerful amalgamation of ‘collective and collected wisdom’.
It means a lot to him because it was born out of struggle, and with the help of the people who were there for him during one of hardest times of his life.
‘I was surrounded by all these incredible queer black people who were admonishing me, saying; “you really f***ed up”, but were also holding me up at the same time, telling me I was gonna be okay, I was gonna get through this.
‘It was less about me and my very public mistakes, but rather about this remarkable wisdom that they were sharing with me. I just felt like people need to hear this.
‘There will be other people who have made really public mistakes, or private mistakes, that they regret, they will be searching for something. I thought; maybe I can take this experience that I’ve had and turn it into something useful, positive and good.’
What has Josh learned in the two years since his very public fall from grace? He says he has spent time looking inward and addressing the root causes of his behaviour.
He says he had a distinct lack of role models when he came out; he doesn’t say this as an excuse, but hopes it at least offers some explanation.
‘My idea of gay culture was very white. It was very acerbic and it was very mean,’ Josh tells us.
‘I think I learned growing up, as did many of my generation, that to survive being gay, you had to be this incredibly witty, sardonic, devastating person in order to protect yourself.
Josh says he never had any black, gay people that he could look to for inspiration, or guidance – and that is what he is hoping to change for the next generation.
‘As I’ve come into my own, had various awakenings about my queerness and my blackness, and the very particular intersection of both, I think it has been so important for me to make public, some of my own learning, mistakes, failures, hopes and dreams, so young brown boys don’t feel so excluded or lost.’
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source https://metro.co.uk/2019/10/31/fired-editor-gay-times-still-apologising-problematic-tweets-paid-fair-price-11013994/
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