Was An Anchor Fired For His Sexual Orientation?

Former WPLG Miami anchor Charles Perez has a very personal piece up on DailyBeast where he alleges that he lost his anchor job because he’s gay.

He writes:

Bottom line, I believe they sold me out as soon as my being gay became too widely known. It made them uncomfortable and made me, in their eyes, less advertiser-friendly. They’d demoted me two weeks earlier from main weekday anchor to weekend anchor. It was a move I quickly recognized was leading to the door, and I wasn’t prepared to watch my career circle down the drain. 

Perez says he was dismissed four days after filing a sexual-orientation claim against WPLG, which is owned by Post-Newsweek.

Perez claims his superiors frequently make thinly-veiled suggestions to play down his homosexuality.

One of my colleagues, a higher-up at the station, told me: “The weekends will be better for you, anyway, Charles. You and Keith [my partner] want to have kids. It’s a lot less high-profile there.”

It was a suggestion that never would have been made to one of my straight colleagues, male or female. The only thing I could take from it was that my profile as a gay man, especially if I were to have kids and, God forbid, get married, would render me less promotable and less advertiser-friendly.

In fact, over the previous five months, I’d been told, “Don’t get married, Charles. We don’t need that.” I’d also been told not to have children. In essence: “You’re the main anchor and you’re gay, but let’s not push it.”