Lena Dunham ‘request’ for NYC Pride parade met with bafflement
‘Girls’ creator has been accused of ‘using allyship to glorify herself’
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Your support makes all the difference.Lena Dunham has baffled social media users with a “request” she made for the New York City Pride parade.
“When I go,” she tweeted on Sunday (2 October), “I want my casket to be driven through the NYC pride parade with a plaque that reads, ‘She wasn’t for everyone, but she *was* for us.’ Who can arrange?”
The Girls creator, 36, has been criticised many times in recent years for her white feminist gaffes – and this latest tweet drew confusion as it sees Dunham brand herself as an LGBTQ icon, something that many people in the community do not see her as.
“Gonna start living my life with whatever amount of confidence Lena Dunham has that makes her think she’s an LGBTQ+ icon,” wrote one Twitter user.
“Lena Dunham was truly the voice of a generation: white women in the 2010s using allyship to glorify themselves,” added another.
“Lena Dunham’s ability to occasionally write insightful commentary about millennials’ flagrant narcissism is negated by her inability to ever wonder if she’s part of the problem,” a third posted.
A fourth wrote: “It’s called gay pride not straight shame.”
Another posted: “I was like, ‘Why is Lena Dunham trending? I will scream if they reboot Girls.’ Then it was this weird tweet where she forces herself on a minority group as a ghost… which feels like a C plot in a Girls reboot.”
Dunham, whose new film Catherine Called Birdy is out now, is known for her LGBTQ advocacy. In 2016, she produced a documentary, Suited, about a clothing company that caters to transgender men. She has also been vocally supportive of her non-binary sibling, memoirist Cyrus Grace Dunham, and received a 2014 Horizon award for her advocacy.
At a gala where she received the award, Dunham said that she was “disappointed” that she is not gay.
“I have always felt a strong and emotional connection to members of the LGBTQ community,” she said. “It was actually a huge disappointment for me when I came of age and realised that I was sexually attracted to men.
“So when my sister came out, I thought, ‘Thank God, now someone in this family can truly represent my beliefs and passions.’”
Dunham has caused much controversy with statements she has made over the years.
In 2017, Dunham apologised to actor Aurora Perrineau for questioning her allegations of sexual assault against Girls collaborator, writer Murray Miller.
“When someone I knew, someone I had loved as a brother, was accused, I did something inexcusable: I publicly spoke up in his defence,” she said. “I didn’t have the ‘insider information’ I claimed but rather blind faith in a story that kept slipping and changing and revealed itself to mean nothing at all.”
She was also criticised for likening the act of speaking out against Bill Cosby’s sexual misconduct allegations to the Holocaust.
“It’s sort of like saying someone’s obsessed with the Holocaust,” she said. “This is a huge issue, and it speaks to the way that we abuse power and the way that celebrity allows for injustice.”
She subsequently posted an apology to Instagram, saying: “I’m already aware comparing Bill Cosby to the Holocaust wasn’t my best analogy.”