Playing gay

Arizona Daily Wildcat

I'm not alone in these worries. Founder of Liberty University and moral majority leader Jerry Falwell spotted another seemingly harmless object that speaks in tongues of its homosexuality. And this gay language is being spoken to innocent children.

Teletubbies are gay. Or one specifically, who goes by the name 'Tinky Winky.' Teletubbies is a PBS children's show that hit the airwaves in 1997 and has quickly become a favorite among children. It features four characters with Pillsbury boy-shaped costumes (though in different colors) with doughy faces and antennae of various shapes.

Their influence on children is on the scale of Barney and the Power Rangers. Teletubbies videos sell in the top ten of Blockbuster's 'Hit List.' Products like dollies are being sold to kids. All of which alarms Falwell, who is calling for the nation to halt this homosexual penetration.

Falwell's on-line National Liberty Journal reports the specifics of what makes Tinky Winky a gay role model. 'He is purple,' it states, 'the gay-pride color.' And his antenna is 'shaped like a triangle, the gay-pride symbol.' Tinky Winky also carries a red purse, just like gay men everywhere.

This isn't the first time the Teletubbies have proved a problem. Last fall, in Watertown, New York, a Teletubby doll at a K-Mart instructed a young boy to 'bite my butt!' The Teletubby speaks, like its TV counterpart, in a kind of cutesy gobbledy-gook language of 'Eh-oh's and such. So the words he heard are rather interpretive.

I consider it naive to assume that the kid is being on the level. It may have been the first time the kid got to say 'bite my butt' without being scolded. He even got to say 'bite my butt' to management when his parents complained. What did the toy say to you? they ask. 'Bite my butt!' he replies. Then the evening news wants him to repeat for the cameras what he heard the Teletubby say. That night he gets to say in front of a million people, 'Bite my butt!'

It's a Bart Simpson dream.

We must consider the source in situations like this. Is the kid or Jerry Falwell speaking objectively? I would trust the kid if he spoke of the Teletubby's intellectual currency in a nation of grown-up sots (which is why The Little Prince works on more than an infantile level). I would trust Jerry Falwell if he for once saw something that was obviously gay in meaning and called it harmless. But in both of these cases, the person is confirming his own temperament.

William James explained to his readers in Pragmatism that philosophers never give you objective answers to existential questions because each philosopher represents the universe according to his temperament.

And Thoreau writes in Walden about a robust poor man who praises a fellow townsman because he is kind to the poor, meaning himself.

I think like the kid in the toy store, Jerry Falwell is speaking in his own interest. He wants to get wider press coverage. It shows the conservative team is strong. It still has the power to startle like homosexuality itself used to before we all realized the power to startle lay in the remembrance of something dark and repressed within ourselves.

Freud has enabled us to get to know ourselves so that we can no longer be startled by ourselves. And biology has helped us know ourselves so well that we can now tell that each of us is a homosexual.

According to conservatives, life begins at conception. But a baby doesn't exhibit signs of gender until after a significant amount of time in the womb. That means we are for a while both male and female. In the conservative view, everyone is somewhat homosexual. I used to be part female. I am also attracted to females. There's something kinky about that.

As for that Teletubby being a model homosexual, I say sure, why not?

I used to play with Star Wars figures and make Luke say things to Jabba the Hut like 'Okay fat-boy, let's get it on.' It was funny because Luke would never say something like that in the real Star Wars. So I think we should continue playing our own private interpretive dramas. And if Falwell wants to play his on a grander scale, well, good for him. It's the religious equivalent of photocopying one's butt.