Courtesy of the NY Daily News
Fay Carmona brings openly gay voice to Luis Jiménez Show
ERASMO GUERRA
Thursday, June 12th 2008, 4:00 AM
Fay Carmona on the Luis Jimenez Show studios.
Fay Carmona, the leggy, lip-glossed, lesbian co-host of the Luis Jiménez Show, should have been thrilled by news two weeks ago that New York would start recognizing gay marriages from out of state.
Instead, Carmona ranted on the radio: “Now my partner is gonna want to get married — and I’m gonna have to pay for it.”
It wasn’t the response one might have expected. But then Carmona, a brash and bright-eyed, 31-year-old Puerto Rican-Colombian, was just saying what was on her mind.
“I don’t know how to censor myself,” she admits. “There have been shows where I’ve been like, ‘I said that?’”
Even with a leading host as free and loose as Jiménez, Carmona says, “There’ll be times that he’ll cut off the mic or, after a break, he’ll be like, ‘Man, te pasaste un poquito’ (Man, you went a bit too far).”
Other times she’s been scolded for “gaying up” the broadcast. It’s such a routine on-the-air occurrence that the entire studio crew performs a sing-along to let Carmona know she’s way off the gay-o-meter.
“That pisses me off a little bit,” she says. “It’s like someone saying something about your nationality or about your mom. I don’t mean to ‘gay everything up’ but that’s my life.”
Still, she knows that her presence on the show teaches tolerance and educates.
“I’m showing what it means to be gay to a lot of people that probably don’t know anybody gay — or think they don’t, because every family has one, even if they’re in the closet.”
Her hope? “That even people that say the most ignorant things might think, ‘Fay has taught me this: Her life is just like ours. She goes home and her partner gets mad at her for not taking out the garbage.’”
She’s also gotten used to the gay bashing and being labeled a man-hater from some callers.
But she confessed that before taking the job a year and half ago, she was worried about whether she was strong enough to endure Jiménez.
“There were all these blogs and stories about his utter disgust for the gay community and certain things he’d said or done. And I was like, ‘Am I really gonna go interview with this dude?’ And I literally came in like, ‘Hey, I’m gay. I’m not gonna be in the closet for a show. I’d rather live under a bridge.’”
He didn’t have a problem.
“If anything, Luis is the biggest chick I know,” says Carmona. “He dresses well. He’s very metro. He watches certain movies and likes certain things that are very girlie.”
Carmona was on the show when it was suspended for a month in May 2007 after the gay rights group GLAAD protested a song parody about lesbians.
“It was nothing derogatory,” says Carmona, who’s a GLAAD member herself, and says that no one from the group ever contacted her.
A self-described radio geek who was raised in Passaic, N.J., Carmona sailed the airwaves from South Beach to the Bay Area, returning home when she took her current job.Carmona has since moved to Bay Ridge, Brooklyn.
Oh, and despite her previous on-air fit, she’s glad about the new gay-marriage rights to come.]
posted by Fay @ 7:25 PM
