I have an email folder devoted to hate mail. It is called, predictably enough, “Hate Mail,” and every once in a while I receive a new email and think, “This is hate mail. I have a folder for that!” Receiving hate mail is an unfortunate byproduct of writing for a living, especially if you happen to write about things that people feel strongly about (race, sexuality, marriage, or Notre Dame football, to name a few.)
Hate mail can be disheartening, particularly when people haven’t read the article they’re hating on, but it provides a good opportunity to practice WWBD, or What Would Buddha Do? The key to responding to hate mail is to meditate before you do anything. If you’re too annoyed to meditate, try reading a few pages from Marianne Williamson’s book, A Return to Love. Because the last thing you want to do is respond to hate mail with more hate mail. (Hate isn’t a real emotion, anyway. It’s fear masquerading as something else. And fear isn’t real, either, as Marianne reminds us. Only love is real. But don’t bother explaining all of that in your email.)
My typical response to hate mail (if I’ve meditated and read a few pages of A Return to Love) is this: “Thank you very much for taking the time to write. With best wishes, Benoit.” When I deviate from that script, I tend to make a mess of things, like the time I wrote, “Thank you very much for taking the time to write. I hope we can agree to disagree.” This prompted the emailer to respond, “NO, I will NOT agree to to disagree. I will agree only to the fact that you’re an IDIOT.”
Fortunately, my “Nice Mail” folder is significantly longer than my “Hate Mail” folder. But, for reasons that aren’t exactly clear to me, I feel inclined to highlight some of the best hate mail I’ve received during the last decade. (I have cut some for space reasons, but I’ve left in the spelling and grammatical errors. Most haters could use a good copy editor.) Here we go…
Arguably my favorite piece of hate mail came in response to my New York Times Magazine cover story about the movement to ban alcohol in fraternities. The emailer makes many assumptions about me, most of them incorrect, but he does pen arguably the best first line—and most absurd last line—in the history of hate mails:
Hey buddy I’m a 20 year old college student who thinks you’re an asshole. I’ve known pleaty of good girls who were RAPED by daddy-buy, trust fund elites like you while in fraterity and ALCHOHOL was almost always involved. I’m sorry some resposible adults have finally smacked some sense into you babies, but YOU”VE DONE ENOUGH DAMAGE TO SOCEITY ALREADY. If you wanna have a kegger, go borrow your daddy’s yacht. Don’t bitch about how you can’t do it iin plain view of respectable educational instiutions anymore. A defender of rapists is guilty of rape himself. If your article influences the dicision making of one college official and allows more alcholol onto campuses, you sir should be at fault. Perhaps for your next article you look back achingly upon the benifits of Hitler’s “final solution”???
My Slate piece, “Can you you be white and “on the down low?”, which ran with the above cartoon, hit a sore spot with some readers. This first email isn’t really hate mail, but it’s funny and worthy of inclusion:
Hey, that’s great that you had sex with an attractive
guy from Long Island and got to write about it!
But what’s more indicative of white male privilege,
closeted white gay men referring to themselves as on
the Down Low, or you posing as cultural and racial
arbiter of that term?
Here’s another email about that article:
Having read your recent article posted to Slate.com on the subject of – as you put it with an amazing lack of eloquence – “white guys” on the DL, I must say that I think you are a reverse racist. What I mean is that you refer to white men (European-American?) as white guys throughout, in a manner I read as condescenion. Perhaps I am wrong. However, you continually refer to blacks as the much more formal and classy “black men.” Curiousity strikes me as you seem to have made such an obvious choice to refer to the two races in such a contrasting way, without even bringing up the plainly derisive “white boy.” You perpetuate the double standards that exist with such rubbish. Stop thinking like bigoted caveman. Thank you. P.S. I realize you are a white boy
The above New York Times Magazine cover piece about young gay married couples in Massachusetts upset a whole lot of people, many of them gay. (Surprisingly, straight allies liked the piece more than some gay people did. So did one religious conservative.) The email below was actually the first one I received about the piece, and it foreshadowed much of the ensuing criticism, which tended to focus on the photographs and the fact that all of the couples I profiled were white and college educated. Still, the first rule of writing a critical email about an article should be to read the article, which this emailer—and some of the loudest critics of the piece—didn’t actually do. Notice his last sentence, where he wonders if I’m gay, a question that is answered early and often in the piece.
Howdy, your NYT Magazine article “Young Gay Rites” has been a hot topic this morning among many of my gay friends, and all of us (17 at last count) are fairly horrified at the overall tone and depiction of the couples – they’re all such cartoons, all so obviously playing dress-up and all so cliched that it’s safe to say many of us found it rather debasing. The word “bigoted” has also been tossed around. Nobody I’ve been talking with feels a sense of kinship or familiarity with the couples you chose to write about, and I’m talking with a fairly diverse gay male demographic covering a pretty broad spectrum of age and background. If you’re a gay man, I find it truly surprising that you’d paint such a caricatured portrait of young gay couples – and if you’re not a gay man, then shame on you.
Here’s another emailer who dislikes the piece, and the rest of my work:
I read your article in the NY Times, and this is the second time that you have chosen to write about a part of the gay culture and yet still get it all wrong. First you write about being on the “DL” in the black community, and now you profile gay marriage and only use caucasians as your subjects, as if to say there are no blacks that want to get married. So my only question to you is, What kind of boring, tired , pathetic gay writer are you..? Answer : A worthless one. I wish the NY Times will devote its space and money to a more educated insightful one, whit something really good to say. Signed, One that despises your work to the core.
My most recent New York Times Magazine cover piece, about kids coming out in middle school, was, to my surprise, the most universally well liked of any story I’ve ever written. Most gay people loved it, as did straight allies. I was prepared for an avalanche of hate mail from social conservatives, but I only received one, from a man who wrote this:
I’m so glad I never had kids. When does the “lowering the age of consent” or defense of Mitterand articles come out? The gay movement is becoming so predictable.
I have yet to respond to his email. Any suggestions on how to respond—with love?
