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Turn On, Tune In, Come Out of the Closet
by Adam Finley
art/Marty Kelley
If you've seen Bravo's Queer Eye for the Straight Guy–which I can only assume is a show about homosexuals donating their eyes to heterosexual blind people and spending the rest of the show packing their empty eye sockets with gauze–it probably made you stop for a moment. When was the last time a show so blatantly portrayed gay men, their attitudes and lifestyles? And not pretend-gays like Billy Crystal on the TV series Soap or Yoda in The Empire Strikes Back, but real, honest-to-goodness, able-to-breathe-underwater-and-bend-time-and-space gays?
Realistically, Queer Eye probably didn't shock too many people. Showtime has been airing Queer As Folk since 2000 in order to show our repressed puritanical nation that homosexuals are people with real feelings and emotions who sometimes act in really crappy TV shows. There's also diluted facsimiles of gay culture in shows like Will and Grace and dismissible heaps added to the reality TV pile such as Boy Meets Boy.
My stance on homosexuality has always been one of fierce unwavering indifference, but television has been ruled by male heterosexualism for too long. If the gays want to try and destroy this empire, then more power too them. I'm not so much interested in more gay programming as I am in a complete eradication of the male heterosexual arrested development that dominates the airwaves. I would be just as happy if a group of super-intelligent asexual starfish took over the networks, but as far as I'm concerned, the ends justify the means.
In the spirit of this much needed revolution, I offer a few suggestions for programs that would show gays in a positive and non-exploitive light:
Gay Guy Making A Sandwich
Every day, Gary Martindale makes a sandwich, and he's gay.
The Man With Gaydar
A man equipped with gaydar is able to detect homosexuality within a ten-thousand mile radius. He uses this gift to find affordable housing, locate missing pets, and eventually take over the world, which he then destroys with a gargantuan laser cannon bolted to the side of the moon.
Can A Pumpkin Be Gay? And Other Questions About Homosexuality
In this mind-opening series, host John Waters finds the answers to questions about the gay lifestyle that people are often afraid to ask. Such as:
If a lesbian looks directly at a solar eclipse, will she absorb the sun's energy and obtain X-ray vision?
In what part of the body is gayness located? If it's located in the nasal cavity, then wouldn't I be able to score with an allergenic lesbian when the pollen count is around 8.5 or higher?
If a black gay man met his doppelganger in a parallel universe, would it be a straight white woman; a bisexual Spanish boy; or an albino cephalopod with no reproductive organs and a vertical mouth located in the back of its head?
I'm currently working on scripts for all three of these programs, though I believe Gay Guy Making A Sandwich will be mostly ad-libbed. These shows may seem outrageous and even offensive, but we must chip away at our straight male-dominated culture, a culture that, through TV shows, advertising, and fashion magazines, tells us there is something profoundly wrong with the way we live our lives and the way we look. We will no longer tolerate this kind of interference when Queer Eye makes it so obvious that what we really need is gay men telling us what's wrong with us. Either way, we really need to stop thinking for ourselves.•
Email your feedback on this article to editor@impactpress.com.
Other articles by Adam Finley:
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