Morrissey and Michelle Shocked: On liking problematic things

I found a couple good posts on what happens when an artist you respect turns out to be a bigoted asshole: Janes Pratt's on Michelle Shocked's recent homophobic rant , and Joshua Alston on being a black Morrissey fan with Morrissey's history of racist fuckery.

I've said this before, and there are some great posts out there about liking problematic art, but this is less a case of liking a piece of work that's problematic than liking an artist who is. I think it's worth mention that both Shocked and Morrissey are part of a pre-internet, pre-Twitter, pre-Facebook, pre-YouTube generation, and neither were mainstream artists during their peak. Not that being "lol, old" is an excuse, but I think people my age and older tend to forget the immediacy the internet provides, or, at least, aren't realizing the impact their words have, especially when their fanbases have, historically, been small and insular. What's disappointing (especially in Shocked's case) is that both of them have long been thought of as queer icons.