Posting this over here so as to not derail the Yggy thread. This entire situation stuck in my craw a bit, so I'm going to say my peace about it:

In 1993, I was at University of Michigan with friends as part of a Triangle Foundation demonstration - the group of us were trying to push the regents to pass an ordinance barring sexual discrimination on campus. A counter-protest formed and ran the group of us back to our cars. The angry mob overturned our Honda Civic, kicked in the windows, and dragged us out of the vehicles. I got out of it with a few minor laceration and abrasions; the mob beat one of my close friends until he was almost unrecognizable. I can still remember the reason they targeted him over me: I was in a flannel, he was wearing a fishnet shirt. Don't ever say that grunge never did anything for anyone.

This was five years before Matthew Sheppard was strung up on a fence in Wyoming.

While less frequent, violence against LGBT/Q individuals is still a problem. In 2003, another close friend and I were pulled over coming out of Palmer Park in the early hours of the morning. We drove through the neighborhood to get back to home quicker; the police assumed that my friend was picking up a gay prostitute. (In this story, I was the gay prostitute.) The only thing that kept them from beating me with maglites was that they realized that my friend in the drivers seat was a girl with boy-cut hair. Just four years ago, one of my students (a theater major who performed in Sesame Street Live) had his face beat to a pulp at a BP in Detroit because his assailant simply thought he was gay. This is to say nothing about the violence that LBGTQ individuals do to themselves. I spent a year volunteering for a gender-queer emergency helpline at Affirmations in Ferndale, MI. The internal struggles are often more frequent and taxing than external ones.

There is a reflexive relationship between representation and response, portrayal and reaction, that makes comments - even jokes - still matter. This might sound like I'm on the side of the "PC Police", and in some ways I am. I think that quite a large amount of our stereotypes (negative and otherwise), attitudes about gender, feelings about other religions and belief systems, [Insert Identity Politics Here], etc. etc. are reproduced through day-to-day vernacular transmission modes. Jokes are one of these modes, an especially powerful one as they combine taste preference ("sense of humor") with value judgement ("do you find it funny or not?"). If someone calls another person on a joke, the genre provides numerous minimizing tropes to defer, deflect, and obfuscate.

But here's the place where I think that most people here and I would both agree: complaining in some vague, secondary, unconnected forum isn't going to help anything. If someone has a problem with something that Mike said, the solution is to confront Mike - either privately or publicly - and talk to him directly. Do you think that the UofM Board of Regents would have done anything if our group had simply wrote editorials in the local LBGTQ newspaper complaining about what bothered us? We did write editorials in Between The Lines and they didn't do damn thing. Our demonstration did. If a person believes something is in bad taste, then they should say so. If someone thinks something isn't funny, they should stand up and speak up. Don't take a screen cap and run elsewhere to complain about it.

The above isn't coming from some sort of hyper-masculine "man up"-type ethos. The goal of confronting another person in these types of situation isn't to tell them that they are wrong or to engage in some sort of public shaming tactic. And posting a screen cap, at this point multiple screen caps, in another public venue is certainly that. The goal should be to engage in discourse, trusting that the o ther person is capable of hearing what you have to say. In the best case scenario, the other person sees the validity of the complaint and moves forward more aware of how something they wrote made another person feel. I guess it comes down to deciding what a person wants to produce with their critique.