The Suicide Squad, Peacemaker and F9 star John Cena is apparently in the process of being canceled for homophobia. Except he isn’t. A new bout of internet outrage has erupted based around a 2006 interview he did with Howard Stern about late wrestler Chris Kanyon.
Kanyon, who committed suicide in 2010 after a history of depressive episodes, portrayed himself as an openly gay wrestler. But this wasn’t a character – he eventually came out as gay out of the ring. Cena’s statements in the interview (which took place four years before Kanyon’s death) are blunt: “he wasn’t very good”, with Cena criticizing his gimmick and saying that he couldn’t entertain the crowds to professional standards:
The story goes that Cena is now being ‘canceled’ because this is homophobic, but after a while searching on Twitter I can’t find actually find anyone calling for that. The worst I could find is a single tweet (with no likes or retweets) from a guy with 195 followers who says “It’s shows @JohnCena was homophobic and disrespectful to kanyon back then.” Hardly a tidal wave of fury.
What I did found were legions of people furious at the idea of Cena being canceled. Here’s a selection:
And so on and so forth. Fortunately, some people have noticed that the story appears to be complete nonsense:
It’s worth remembering that the much-feared “cancel culture” doesn’t actually exist. People who have been ‘canceled’ generally continue to maintain a high public profile, all the while shouting to an enormous audience how unjust it is that they’ve been silenced. If cancel culture exists at all it’s people being held accountable for saying dumb things – and the obvious solution to that is to stop saying dumb things in the first place.
So to recap, John Cena isn’t being canceled and everyone is mad about something that isn’t happening. Welcome to the internet.
You can next see him in Peacemaker on HBO Max in January 2022.