**One more update: details available here. Update: Tamar Iveri has issued an apology on her Facebook page. The short of it is that she insists she’s not homophobic, and that her husband was the one who published the hateful letter on her page, not Tamar herself. Read it here.

Georgian soprano and disgusting homophobe Tamar Iveri just got outed. In May of 2013, she posted an open letter (translated into English here) to Georgian president Mikheil Saakashvili, who had condemned the violence that erupted during an LGBT activist rally in Tbilisi, Georgia. Tamar wrote to President Saakashvili, “yesterday, I was quite proud of the fact how Georgian society spat at the parade, organized by your (and not just your) team.”

Despite a quick reference to her so-called friends and relatives who are gay, she called homosexuals “fecal masses” and stated that their behaviour ”is actually a sexual deviation.” She offered up some of those old nauseating arguments, like how homosexuality “is acquired because of following the trend or because of entering some kind [sic] of groups of people.” Believe it or not, she doesn’t stop there:  ”Instead of Irakli, George, Zurab… should we, in the future, hand Tbilisi over to the guys with Louis Vuitton bags? Dolce&Gabbana shoes? Christian Audigier shirts?….You know very well that this category of boys would rather go to Saint-Tropez and relax on the beaches of Nice rather than fight for Sokhumi.”

I can’t even.

But I will. When I read the English translation of her letter (now removed from her Facebook page), the first sentence of Tamar’s that made me rush to begin this post is this one: “Mr. President, it is clear that in recent years you have been bending your head to the West, regardless of its good or bad you have been doing it tirelessly” _Bending your head to the West? _Are you kidding me?? One look at Tamar’s repertoire list shows an entire career singing roles by Verdi, Puccini, Donizetti and Mozart. It’s riddled with Western music. She’s been earning money singing some of the most enviable roles in opera. Including Tatiana in Eugene Onegin, written by one of opera’s most well-known and well-outed gay composers, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky. I suppose she didn’t mind singing a gay man’s music for pay. What hateful, blatantly hypocritical filth.

You know, for a fraction of a fraction of a second upon first reading the letter, I thought “Opinions are opinions.” But before I even finished that thought in my own head, I threw it out like a “fecal mass”. This is uneducated, willfully hateful trash. Tamar has been a busy lady, traveling throughout Western Europe, working with plenty of people in this high gay-per-capita industry; it’s incomprehensible and inexcusable to hold these opinions, publicly, no less, and still expect to continue her career. Tamar is currently at Opera Australia, in rehearsals for Otello, scheduled to sing Desdemona. OA is getting plenty of encouragement to fire this mean-spirited lady. I hope it happens.

May she never work again. Help make sure that happens by signing this Change.org petition. Get her passport revoked and get her off the stage for good.