Fired Gay Anchor Charles Perez Speaks Out | Rob Kuznia–HispanicBusiness.com

Charles Perez, the news anchor from Miami who last week accused his station of firing him for being gay, wrote in a guest column for today’s Daily Beast that he was told by higher-ups at WPLG-ABC to avoid having kids or getting married.

“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,” he wrote.

“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.’ To me, having the family I want is not pushing it. Living with love, commitment, and dignity is not pushing it.”

Perez, former host of the nationally syndicated Charles Perez Show, was demoted on July 22 — about a week-and-a-half before being fired.

At the time, Perez was embroiled in a high-profile legal dispute with his ex-partner over allegations of domestic abuse.

Perez, 46, filed a complaint against WPLG-ABC with the Miami-Dade County Equal Opportunity Board, in which he said that his supervisor criticized him for smiling too much on the air, and that he and co-anchor behaved “like girlfriends,” TMZ reports.

In the complaint, Perez said it appeared the station demoted him due to its “discomfort over the increasingly high profile of my sexual orientation.”

A few days later, he was fired.

In the Daily Beast piece, Perez criticized the media for prioritizing advertising dollars over integrity. As an example, he cited a case in the lead-up to the war in Iraq. Perez said he wanted to cover a story that was buried in the New York Times: a major United Nations official was saying there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Perez said he was denied permission to cover the story from the station for which he was working at the time, WSVN — Miami’s Fox News affiliate.

“Today, the major news outlets are held hostage by what they ‘think’ their advertisers—and by extension their audiences—want to see,” he wrote. “Sacrificed is the news we may need to know. As a result, they contribute to building a less-educated electorate that only wants more of the Twinkies it has been fed.”

Likewise, he said, WPLG-ABC was afraid of offending advertisers, prompting them to force Perez “to the back of the bus.”

WPLG officials have said Perez’s claims are baseless.

“WPLG is disappointed that the actions of Charles Perez left us no real choice other than to terminate his employment contract,” WPLG Vice President and General Manager Dave Boylan said in a statement to The Miami Herald. “WPLG emphatically denies Perez’s claim of discrimination. The document he is circulating is filled with misstatements and untruths.”

Perez, meanwhile, admitted that he will probably never work in the news business again.

“Honestly, who’s going to hire a newsman, as good as he may be, who litigates against his employer? It’s not exactly a career builder.”