Wanda Sykes is courting controversy
with remarks she made Wednesday
on CNN's Larry King Live.
The openly lesbian comedian spoke with
King about her coming out, Ken Mehlman's coming out and Sarah Palin,
who's increasingly backing anti-gay candidates and groups.
Sykes, who announced she's gay in 2008
to protest California's passage of a gay marriage ban, Proposition 8,
said she came out late in life because she was concerned about how
her parents would react.
“I have parents who are still alive
that's why and you suppress all that, you bury it to try and fit in,”
she told King. “I'm 46, so back then, religion everything else.
You weren't exposed to gay people. … I know without a doubt my
family, they love me, we're working on it.”
She wasn't holding anything back when
King asked her about former vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin.
“She's smart in the way that she's an
opportunist but she's not smart enough to pull it off,” she said,
referring to Palin's presidential aspirations. “All you have to do
is just give her enough rope and she's going to say something
stupid.”
“He's family, I didn't know,” Sykes
said about former RNC chief Ken Mehlman, who
came out gay last week. “Here's this guy, he says it's taken
him like 43 years to be comfortable with himself. Which I
understand, it took me awhile to publicly come out. But when he was
in the Bush administration, they knew he was gay and he had to sit
there and listen to all this anti-gay stuff.”
“[Mehlman] probably took so many of
those showers that, you know, rape victims take, they're scrubbing
themselves. He probably had a lot of those kind of showers.”
Sykes is the host of The Wanda Sykes
Show, which premiered on Fox in November.