But hes gay mt everest

“Right after the break, we’re going to interview Erik Weihenmayer, who climbed the highest mountain in the world, Mount Everest, but he’s gay—I mean, he’s gay, excuse me, he’s blind.”

Back in the early 2000’s a young news anchor in New Mexico had a slip of the tongue on live TV that has enterred the annals of news blooper history.

Gay Mount Everestwww.youtube.com

Cynthia Izaguirre had just gotten done reporting on a separate story discussing activism for gay rights, and was setting up a segment with the first blind man to climb Mount Everest, and her thoughts got twisted on the way to her mouth, resulting in a 14-second clip that would live on in infamy.

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It’s such a simple moment, but—especially out-of-context—it’s hard not to laugh at the emphasis she puts on the word “gay,” as the big twist in the headline.

She was reporting for the Albuquerque and Santa Fe Market, for KOAT Action 7 News, broadcasting to hundreds of thousands of homes, and a notable slip-up like that would be sure to get her bosses’ attention, and had the potential to derail her budding career.

Fortunately Izaguirre was talented and personable enough that it didn’t come to that.

Straight people can and do contribute to our lives in important ways. We rightly celebrate our own work, our jokes, our art, our memes, all the things that contribute to what is important to us culturally.

No one is as put together and unflappable as anchors and reporters in cities around the world pretend to be for a living.

For hours each week these people put up a facade that blends approachable friendliness, earnest sincerity, and impossible professionalism. In 2020 this category has evolved to include loved ones and pets interrupting the at-home broadcasts.

With all those components in a delicate balance, even the tiniest mistake can end up cracking through that surface—showing the sloppy, or giddy, or hateful human underneath.

Live broadcasts have always entailed some of that risk, but now that anything and everything on TV can be recorded and uploaded for the world to see, there are countless hours of these moments collected into “News Fail” compilations all over YouTube.

It’s an entire genre that has swallowed up way too much of my time and mental energy.

When you need to keep a straight face, any corny joke or slightly funny image can break through the composure and reduce broadcast professionals to fits of irrepressible giggling while they try to pull themselves together. These are the purest peek behind the curtain—when people don’t know they’re being watched, and let their true colors show.

Sometimes that just means getting caught daydreaming or fixing their hair.

But, I think it’s important to occasionally touch down to earth. But other great examples include the Anchorage reporter who quit at the end of her segment with an ad-libbed “**** it,” or an anchor in Philadelphia letting their “playful jabs” at a meteorologist reach the level of high school bullying.

Anchor vs.

Funny! With the possible exception of Brian “Boom Goes the Dynamite” Collins—does college news really count?—Izaguirre’s slip-up was the first of its kind in viral news anchor screw-ups.

While not quite at the level of the “Grape Lady” video—of an injured Atlanta reporter, uploaded around the same time—the clip has still been endlessly reposted, amassing millions of views.

Yet, nearly 20 years later, those 14 seconds remains her greatest claim to fame.

Boom Goes the Dynamitewww.youtube.com

Once upon a time that kind of mistake would have existed only for the live audience, and maybe on a few VHS copies in the area. To one extent or another, we all adjust our behavior to fit a particular context.

Those of us with social anxiety tend to be hyper-aware of the performative aspect of socializing, and can start to panic that the performance will falter, and we’ll be unmasked as frauds to our intense shame.

From that perspective, there’s something cathartic about being reminded that even the people who code-switch at a professional level—who put on a live public performance every working day of their lives—occasionally falter.

On the other hand, taking a moment to consider how horrifying that exposure must be for people whose livelihood depends on successful fraud—the fact that careers can be damaged or even destroyed in these moments, leaving just a painful and public memory—can kind of put a damper on the whole genre.

We must allow ourselves to admit that every so often, things that bring us joy or laughs or good vibes are from…the heterosexual community. Other times that means shouting and swearing, and has lost some people their jobs. It’s Bill O’Reilly being violently incapable of understanding the phrase “play us out,” when recording an episode of Inside Edition.

Sometimes it happens with a disagreeable guest, or a passerby who wants to interrupt the show, but more often than not, there is some underlying tension between people who work together every week, and the right trigger sets them off while they’re live on-air.

The classic example is a spat between a reporter and an anchor at Fox 5’s NY Good Day that was preserved for posterity in 2001, before the era of Internet video.