The Lesbian Kiss
Television programmers are as attentive to the calendar as farmers. The rates that advertisers are asked to pay are based on viewership numbers gleaned in the months of February, May, July and November. In media-speak these anxious months are known collectively as “sweeps.”
It is in the financial self-interest of the programmers to increase viewership during sweeps, so the programmers have an incentive to feature unusual plot developments that will attract viewers. Unusual developments are the reason motorists slow down to ogle car wrecks; in this same spirit, programmers want you to idle and rubberneck their sweeps offerings. Garry Marshall, the creator of the “Happy Days” series once described his old-school approach to sweeps this way: “You either have a wedding, or you burn down something. That’s what you do during sweeps week.” These things might infuse new life into fading plot lines; they share the virtues of being visually entertaining…and cheap. What could be better?
From the programmer’s point of view anything that will increase the rate base is something “better”, even if that something erodes the underpinnings of traditional American culture, even if it provokes indignation. Controversy, after all, is just another word for word-of-mouth advertising. It’s buzz, and programmers love buzz. The only bad controversy is one that drives viewers away.
It was in this spirit of amoral grasping that the programmers began to exploit the lesbian kiss. Back in 1991 “L.A. Law” became the first network primetime series to exploit the sapphic smooch: C.J. kissed Abby in an episode titled “He’s a Crowd.” The Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation declared the kiss “historic,” but the plotline went nowhere.
The programmers tried again three years later when big “Roseanne” got a bus from guest star Mariel Hemingway. That episode, “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” was the top rated show that week. That was enough encouragement for both Ellen DeGeneres and her sit-com character to pop out of the closet in front of 36.2 million viewers in 1997. After that “Ellen” became entangled in humorless gay issues and nosedived to a merciful cancellation.
In 1999 Julia came on to her lesbian professor in “Party of Five,” but went on a date with a man in the following episode. Next, Ling and Ally McBeal shared a kiss. A cranky Glaad spokesman dismissed this kiss as “nothing more than just straight man’s titillation.”
It was Willow and Tara who set the record for the longest running lesbian relationship for main characters on the network series “Buffy the Vampire Slayer”: 2 ½ years. They kissed for the first time in 2001. That same year “Friends” was in a ratings slide and not even Rachel’s two same-sex kisses in a single episode could reverse the downward skid.
So the whiz kids in programming have returned to this ploy about once a year since 2001, and the gals keep getting younger. The kissers and the target audience are finally teenagers. Now it’s February 2005 and two gorgeous California girls on “The O.C.” are moving beyond hand holding. On the WB’s “One Tree Hill” the sexually confused Anna jumped sweeps by a week by kissing a female friend. Anna entered sweeps still grappling with her sexual identity as she went looking for love at a matchmaking website, clicking “either” when asked which sex she preferred.
This is a recent history of the homosexual home invasion. This intrusion is being promoted by profit-driven programmers and by homosexuals within the television business. It is simultaneously being encouraged by numerous gay-activist groups that are eager to “Talk about gays and gayness as loudly and as often as possible,” to quote queer theorists Marshall Kirk and Erastes Pill, on the theory that relentless exposure to homosexual behaviors will make those behaviors seem normal. Once the youngsters have been convinced, their future pro-gay voting behaviors are assured. The loving, always photogenic, lesbians also “Make gays look good,” another prime objective of the Kirk/Pill gay-propaganda agenda. Do any of these TV lesbians even slightly resemble the squat, mullet-headed, plaid-flannel shirted, Birkenstock shod basket weavers with bollo ties who congest the gay pride rallies? Of course not!
Lesbian-Kiss Toxic Fallout
Few young women want to be unfashionable. Gay activists want to influence young women. So what better way to influence young women than by making lesbianism fashionable. This is what television programmers are now doing. The programmers may piously say that they are simply presenting the true state of human affairs, but in truth they are making gay behaviors fashionable and therefore acceptable to young women. Women are suckers for fashion; after a world-wide fashion history that includes breast binding, breast reduction, breast augmentation, foot binding, skeleton-deforming corsets, tattooing, hair plucking, toxic cosmetics, neck stretching, skull deformation, scarification, foolish diets, risky surgeries, stiletto heels and the god-awful middie skirt, there is no denying that lots of women would rather be caught dead than out of fashion. Feminism had no social traction with the average woman until the alcohol and tobacco advertisers began using slick color spreads in women’s magazines to show women how to strike a fashionable feminist pose. The Virginia Slims “You’ve Come a Long Way Baby” campaign alone set countless young women on the road to ill health and a painful death.
Now gay activists and greedy programmers are working together to beam messages into your home about how fashionable homosexual behaviors can be. Are these messages influencing your children?
A lengthy report in the Sunday Newark Star Ledger (2/23/04) titled “Student orientation,” bears the subtitle “More teenage girls are testing gender boundaries.” Author Peggy O’Crowley begins: “As sexual standards and practices loosen – with same-sex marriage in the headlines – and as kids are exposed to a hyper-sexual culture at younger ages, experts suspect a new behavior among teenage girls may be developing.
“An increasing number of high school girls and coeds, they say, may be experimenting with same-sex relationships or acting suggestively with each other in a bid to attract the opposite sex. Experts who deal with adolescents don’t know how to explain it, even though such behavior can be seen on MTV and in other youth-oriented media.”
Experts can’t explain it? It’s happening because “such behavior can be seen on MTV and other youth-oriented media.” A well-funded industry is hard at work to make lesbianism appear glamorous, edgy, exciting and fashionable.
The author continues: “Whatever the reason, however, the behavior appears to be happening in suburbia, at parties where school- and college-age girls kiss each other suggestively in front of boys.”
Promotions of gayness as a fashion pose encourage inexperienced young women to retreat into a familiar female sameness and to avoid encounters with the other half of humanity. On some campuses young women who experiment with same-sex relationships are called BUGs – Bisexual Until Graduation.
Psychologist Karen Zager, author of “The Inside Story of Teen Girls,” says “I’m hearing more of this in my practice. A lot of kids are much more free to say, ‘I think I’m bisexual.’ It’s almost a badge of honor to be experimenting that way.” She added that forty years ago, smoking a cigarette in the school bathroom was considered edgy behavior, but now even pot smoking is commonplace. Referring to the new sexual experimentation she observed that “in the process of teenagers defining themselves, this is a new frontier.” It’s also a well-financed and slickly promoted “new frontier.”
Self-promoting cultural icons aren’t helping matters. When middle-aged Madonna planted a big spit-swapping kiss on Britney Spears at the televised MTV Music Awards she was broadcasting a message about the acceptability of public homosexual behavior; she was making a fashion statement to America’s young females. It was also a creepy echo of a central theme of the homosexual counterculture: inter-generational pair bonding.
MTV and other programs that target the youth audience now spotlight same-sex hijinx among girls on spring break. An episode of “The Gilmore Girls” features college girls encouraging Rory and her female friend Paris to kiss in public as a way to bring boys around. They do, and it does. What message does that send to your daughter?
This behavior has become common enough to prompt its own vocabulary, such as “heteroflexible” and “gayish” to connote an openness to behavioral experimentation. Once the straight kids start acting gayish the oddness of gay manners seems less odd. All of this is happening under the approving gaze of the queer theorists; this trend is going according to their plan.
The Newark Star Ledger goes on: “Paradoxically, a sexually saturated media, constantly looking to push the envelope, is depicting sexual activity between girls – a voyeuristic male sexual fantasy and a staple of pornography – as edgy but more mainstream.” Of course they are, that’s the plan!
And: “As more images of ‘girl-on-girl action’ are seen on shows like MTV’s spring break specials, the more high school- and college-age girls are seeming to emulate it, young women said.”
Sex draws viewers (voyeurs), viewers draw the advertisers who then fund more sexually-explicit programming for young viewers who then use it as a blueprint for their social interactions. And once again our culture’s moral matrix is eroded by countercultural behaviors. Without your consent your home has been subjected to a moral re-zoning, a sort of cultural home invasion.
With the encouragement of propagandists for the gay subculture, a gay-friendly entertainment industry and gay-agenda school curricula, young people are ever more willing to openly commit to a life-long sexual orientation at increasingly younger ages. By the year 1995 the age of “coming out” had dropped to 18 years. Five years later it had dropped to 15. Nan Bloom of the North Jersey Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays says that in past years her group was mostly parents of adult children, 20 years and older, but recently “we’ve been seeing it skewing to parents in their 40s with teenagers.”
Gays Without Guardrails
Before the minor porn punctuations of sweeps lesbianism, there were the scattered gay network icons: Jody Dallas from “Soap,” Matt Fielding from “Melrose Place,” and the sapphic sidekicks, Xena and Gabrielle, from “Xena, Warrior Princess” and more recently Will from “Will & Grace.” But the networks have always been restrained by the rules of the Federal Communications Commission, which apply to broadcasters.
Broadcasters emit their signals as airwaves which, as a matter of law, are owned by the American public. The public’s elected representatives have made laws to regulate the content of messages beamed toward your home television receiver. The cable companies, by contrast, do not broadcast, they sell their signals to paying subscribers, so the FCC rules don’t apply to them. Free to follow their money lust, the cable programmers have built a few racy fast lanes without any network-type guardrails.
Years ago, Ilene Chaiken pitched a series concept to Showtime, a series about glamorous lesbians living in Los Angeles. Showtime turned her away, but after their success with “Queer as Folk,” an American remake of a British series about gay males in a working-class town, Ms. Chaiken pitched her idea again in 2001 and was given the green light a day later. According to the creator of Showtime’s “The L Word,” “From 1999 to now, gay issues entered the political zeitgeist and the television landscape changed dramatically.”
Showtime’s chief executive, Matt Blank, is banking on “The L Word” to become his station’s version of HBO’s “Sex and the City,” which recently aired its final episode. “Right now we’re on this really strong upcurve,” said Blank, “It’s the most beautiful cast of women on television.” Viacom, Showtime’s corporate parent, won’t release any financial data, but the research firm Kagan estimates the channel’s last-year’s profit at $300 million, which is well up from its bottom line of seven years ago: zero dollars. Showtime now enters 13.5 million homes every day.
America’s premier lifestyles newspaper, the New York Times, gave its Sunday readers an adoring profile of the gay Ms. Chaiken. Alison Glock described Ms. Chaiken’s entrance at a “No Limits” seminar on gay television before an almost exclusively female audience this way: “Ms. Chaiken, 47, with brown shoulder-length hair and the sinewy body of a martial artist, appeared from backstage and strode the length of the platform in a whisper of a skirt, pink dress shirt and vicious three-inch heels.” Whistling filled the air; someone shouted, “Yeah baby!” The lesbians, “young…wearing low rider jeans, shrunken tees and modern asymmetrical hairstyles” went wild.
The Times calls “The L Word” “the first television program devoted exclusively to the social lives of lesbians,” and a “monsoon” of lesbianism after a prolonged drought. Said Ms. Chaiken, “Now I’m the poster child for dykes.”
Lesbians “were suddenly able to watch lesbian characters living complex, exciting lives, [and] making love in restaurant bathrooms and in swimming pools,” effused the newspaper of record. There was no gentle audience courtship. “Instead there was sex, raw and unbridled…” The Times writer says of Ms. Chaiken, “Like so many high school boys, she just wants to see girls kiss on television.”
“I won’t take on the mantle of social responsibility,” says Ilene Chaiken in an outlandish and unintended understatement. The lesbian activist group Power Up ranks Ms. Chaiken among the Top 10 lesbians in Hollywood, as Out magazine calls her one of their 100 most powerful gay people; she gets lots of role-model awards, “generally a large chunk of inscribed crystal.”
Not every critic was thrilled. Alan Sepinwall of the Newark Star Ledger said that “Like ‘Queer as Folk,’ ‘The L Word’ is essentially a mediocre soap opera in soft-core porn drag. There’s lots of hot, sweaty, half-naked bodies, but the heads attached spend so much time droning on and on and on about their mundane lives and loves that the sex scenes just feel like an intermission in between all the tepid girl-on-girl dialogue.” But then again, it’s a show about female bonding; blabbing and blubbering is the way females bond.
Another New York Times review (1/16/04) calls “The L Word” “a manifesto and visual candy for men.” “This is not the case for Showtime’s other ground breaking series, ‘Queer as Folk,’ about the sex lives of gay men,” says Alessandra Stanley. She wonders aloud, “For whatever reason,…few women report being aroused by the sight of men kissing each other.” For whatever reason? Perhaps women don’t much like being totally excluded as a gender class. Gayness pretty much excludes everyone of the other gender and ninety-eight percent of all humanity.
The author correctly notes that “it is surely belittling to reduce lesbians’ sexual identity to a form of heterosexual foreplay. The contradiction sticks out, even if it has become fashionable to view it as post-feminist – a way to exclude men while still attracting them.”
How sweet. The cutting-edge, fashionable, post-feminist lesbians crave men’s desire as a validation of their womanhood, even as these same lesbians shun men because, as lesbians, these females lack the indwelling neurology of true women. Gender is an expression of the neural network. Lesbians are female simulacra posing as women; they are a distinct female gender without a gender complement. Female is a biological category, but woman is a social construct and lesbians simply fall outside our culture’s social definition of woman.
Ms. Stanley laments that the pilot show was “in such a rush to pander to male viewers that at times it seems less like an American television show than a hastily dubbed Swedish ‘art’ film. Each new plot development works as a perfunctory excuse to introduce another sexual variation…” She observes that “In a sense, ‘The L Word’ conveniently fits in with a trend currently preoccupying magazines, afternoon talk shows and parents’ meetings: young women, including high school students, who experiment with bisexuality both for a sense of female empowerment and as a way to seduce men.”
So lesbian behaviors have replaced cigarette smoking as an emblem of female empowerment? And public displays of homosexual tendencies are a new way for girls to attract healthy heterosexual males? Wow. It’s hard to imagine that someone once called television a vast wasteland.
Mia Kirshner plays the role of Jenny on “The L Word.” She says of her show that “It shouldn’t be considered a gay show…I don’t care if people think I’m gay. Gender is of no consequence to me. It’s a person’s brain that counts.” This is vapid hokum. Lesbians are lesbians because of their lesbian brains. Their lesbianism is a consequence of their neurology. Gender is a consequence of the neural prism that filters all of the perceived universe; it’s a way of seeing the world. Gender has consequences every minute of everyone’s life; it’s the supportive endo-skeleton of everyone’s personality.
Reality Check
The reality of lesbian life in the big city exists in squalid contrast to the fantasy world of “The L Word.” The entire New York City lesbian bar scene consists of only six dingy dyke bars: Henrietta Hudson, the Cubbyhole, Ginger’s, Meow Mix, Rubyfruit Bar & Grill, and Julie’s on East 53rd Street. Sometimes the boy bars offer a girl’s party on an off night, usually a Sunday night. One lesbian theorized that there were three stages to lesbian bar life in New York: lesbians went to Meow Mix in their twenties, then moved on to Henrietta Hudson, and eventually, in middle age, came to rest at Rubyfruit.
Then there is that small cluster of circuit parties that, after twenty years, has become a constantly rotating institution kept alive by the simple fact that it comprises the only social life of so many lesbians. Some of these parties are “invitation only” while others, like benefits for the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation Media Awards, are not. Said Jennifer Hatch, a partner of an investment-management firm, “If you hold events just for women, they will come out for them; they’ll make the effort. We want to be around each other, women like ourselves.”
In other words, radical gay activist groups are energized by more than political idealism: these lesbians are terribly lonely. It’s the desire to “be around each other, women like ourselves” that keeps groups such as the Gay and Lesbian Alliance chugging along. Activism fills the social calendar of lesbians with “women’s events.” To put that another way, if lesbians weren’t so odd they wouldn’t be so lonely, so they gather and socialize in activist groups that strive to convince the rest of humanity that lesbians are not so odd, which is odd. Lesbianism began as a sexual identity which came to resemble a fringe political party which has morphed into a social calendar.
Cutting Edge Lesbianism
Would you question the mental health of a lesbian who wanted her breasts sliced off and tossed into the trash? In the present era, when it is politically incorrect to question the behaviors of any self-described oppressed minority, you might be branded a bigot for being so insensitive. Nonetheless, here I go again. . .
The January 12th, 2004 issue of New York magazine includes an article titled “Where the Bois Are” by Ariel Levy. The article purports to tell us “Why some young lesbians are going beyond feminist politics, beyond androgyny, to explore a new generation of sex roles,” which sounds as upbeat as the old Star Trek intro.
In the first sentence, the author is deep in the nocturnal urban dyke demimonde of Meow Mix, a lesbian dive. She’s scoping out “a girl in a newsboy cap and a white T-shirt with rolled up sleeves. . . Her chest is smooth and flat: She’s either had top surgery – a double mastectomy – or more likely, she binds her breasts.” What? The fact that such glib expressions as “top surgery” and “top job” even exist in the lesbian subculture and are used to casually describe the unnecessary elective surgical removal of a physically mature person’s identifying sexual characteristics is a big mental-health red flag.
In any case, the lesbian in the white T-shirt is talking tough, complaining to her friend about how clinging some femmes can be. Her friend commiserates: “Bois like us, we’ve got to stick together.”
Bois? It’s the plural form of boi, pronounced “boy,” not “bwah,” like a French forest. It’s the latest addition to the lesbian vocabulary that gave us womyn, pronounced “woman,” in a dopey attempt to topple the patriarchy.
Ms. Levy tells us that it is not by chance that the chosen identification is boi and not some mutant form of the word man. “Men have to deal with responsibilities, money, wives, careers, car insurance. Boys just get to have fun and, if they’re lucky, sex.” Ms. Levy snags a quote from a lesbian in a baggy T-shirt and jeans with bleached hair that has been gelled into a stiff fin “like the raised spine of a Komodo dragon.” The lesbian says, “I never really wanted to grow up, which is what a lot of boi identity is about. I wanted to go out and have a good time! I want to be able to go out to a bar at night and go to parties and go to the amusement park and play.” She has the emotional disposition of a 14-year-old, but she’s only three years shy of her 40th birthday. Lissa Doty says she doesn’t want to be a butch, “If you’re a butch, you’re a grownup: You’re the man of the house.”
Although both bois and butches share a studied de-feminization and a quasi-autistic uninterest in men, their sexual preferences are distinctly different. Ms. Levy is our guide, she informs us that “in the contemporary young gay women’s world, what you like and what you do and who you do it with are who you are. In the ‘scene,’ the back-and-forth migratory ladies’ pipeline that runs between San Francisco and New York City, sexual practices and preferences are parceled out and labeled like cuts of meat. Within the scene ‘lesbian’ is an almost empty term, and ‘identifying’ requires a great deal more specificity and reduction, like: ‘I’m a high femme,’ or ‘I’m a butch top,’ or most recently and frequently, ‘I’m a boi’.”
What the defenders of traditional cultural institutions such as marriage should glean from the last paragraph is that lesbians, who are already a minority of the very small minority of American homosexuals, are further fragmented into micro-minorities within the “lesbian community.” Lesbians are a community only in a political sense; they rally together occasionally in a common cause. But socially, lesbians are a very loose federation of micro-minorities with emotional needs and sexual tastes so specialized as to rightly be called fetishistic.
The immaturity of the bois resonates with those who believe that homosexuality in general is marked by a reluctance to move beyond the first adolescent stages of emerging sexuality. Even among the bois there is fragmentation, with some bois echoing gay-male S&M role playing by being submissive to dominant butches (tops). Some bois are female-to-male transsexuals in various stages of surgical refurbishment. Some bois date only bois and imagine themselves to be “fags.” Others date only femmes. Some think being a boi just means being cool and promiscuous. What they all share is a desire to extirpate every hint of girlishness from their personas and social presentations.
Ms. Levy interviewed another lesbian who thought “the whole b-o-i business” was silly and who “never feels more proud than when she’s on a butch’s arm.” This lesbian confides that “It’s gotten to the point where I see men on the street and go, Damn, If that were a woman?. . .I look at pictures of Johnny Depp longingly and think, If only you didn’t have a penis.”
This makes about as much sense as anything a candid lesbian is likely to say about her sexual psyche. And now lesbians want access to the institution of marriage, they want to remodel that institution to suit themselves. What would it look like afterward?
The Subversive Power of Lesbian Style
Striking the right fashion pose is not enough. Today’s gayish teen also needs the proper wardrobe, a sexually flexible style that blurs the boundaries between men’s and women’s wear. So now we’re treated to the sight of teenage girls in wifebeater undershirts. Hairstyles are important too. The choppy boyish shag that incubated in Hollywood dyke bars jumped onto Meg Ryan’s head thanks to celebrity stylist Sally Hershberger and was soon replicated on the heads of women across America, though few of them knew that they were adopting a lesbian fashion statement.
The Sunday Styles section of the New York Times included “The Subtle Power of Lesbian Style” (6/27/04) which informs us that “It is the subtle incorporation of butch and femme dualities – the traditional poles of lesbian sartorial identity – into mainstream fashion that most clearly signals the influence of gay women in the garment industry, a group that few outside the business are aware of.” When asked her opinion of what it is that distinguishes lesbian fashion, Ilene Chaiken, the lesbian executive producer of “The L Word,” ruminates that “It’s probably that they are celebrating that play with gender, that provocative style that pulls from rock ‘n’ roll, boy icons of the past, the street and high-end couture type glamour, but that starts with a lesbian sensibility.”
Self-consciously artsy people talk this way, so allow me to translate. By “celebrating that play with gender, the provocative style that pulls from . . .boy icons,” she means cross dressing. By “pulls from . . .the street, she means that it imitates dyke drag kings. When clothing designers start using expressions such as “gender playfulness,” they are promoting transvestism.
A showcase for lesbian style was the HBO series “Sex and the City” in which Sarah Jessica Parker’s character Carrie was a weekly clothes horse for dyke-inspired do-rags, newsboy caps, and garishly femme ballerina outfits. These grotesque get-ups would then be imitated by fashion-impaired women everywhere. The show’s lesbian fashion designer, Patricia Field, happily admits to moving lesbian style mainstream. This now-defunct series has since gone into heavy rerun rotation on another channel.
A previous stylist for “Sex and the City,” Rebecca Weinberg, informs us that even men who never read the fashion pages are influenced by the subtle power of lesbian style. She says the whole Von Dutch trucker cap phenomenon originated with a bunch of gender-obsessed lesbians. “Trucker hats, wallet chains, cowboy boots and straw Stetsons, all that started with gay women and was transformed into street fashion,” says Ms. Weinberg. Suzanne Ethier, a Manhattan retailer, supports this bit of fashion history: “The straight boys didn’t realize that they were rocking a style originated with a bunch of dykes.” This could be unsettling news to the guys down at the grain elevator.
They Call It Bustergate
The programmers at the Public Broadcasting Service fancy their products to be a cut above the MTV spring break specials. PBS says its mission is to use “the power of non-commercial television. . .to enrich the lives of all Americans through quality programs and education services that inform, inspire and delight.”
Recently they sought to “enrich” the lives of America’s children with an episode of Postcards from Buster, a show that mixes animation with live action. In the episode “Sugartime” the animated bunny Buster Baxter heads off to gay-friendly Vermont where he meets some real girls and the two lesbian couples who are the girls’ caretakers. The camera follows the adults as they farm and harvest maple sugar. Buster’s mission on behalf of PBS was to “inform” your children that kids raised by two lesbians are every bit as well-adjusted as kids with both a mother and As true as that may be, the truly subversive dimension of Buster’s encounter is not the lifestyle portrayal but the associated message that a home environment awash in lesbian-subculture values is “normal,” is every bit as enriching as bearing daily witness to a man-&-woman marriage.
Even though PBS kept the “Sugartime” episode in the can, the Boston public television station WHYY-TV aired it on February 2nd, and WGBH, which produces Postcards from Buster, plans to make “Sugartime” available to other stations and to air it on March 23rd. A spokesman for PBS said the letter from the Secretary of Education had nothing to do with its corporate decision to withhold the episode from its 349 stations. Liberal groups didn’t buy that for a second; they were furious. “Ultimately, our decision [to pull this episode] was based on the fact that we recognize this is a sensitive issue, and we wanted to make sure that parents had an opportunity to introduce this subject to their children in their own time,” said Lea Sloan, vice president of media relations for PBS.
No doubt Secretary Spellings would agree. “Congress’ and the Department’s purpose in funding this programming certainly was not to introduce this kind of subject matter to children, particularly through the powerful and intimate medium of television,” said Ms. Spellings. Nicely put. Children are commonly left alone while watching children’s programming and PBS shouldn’t be having intimate private values-altering sessions with them about so confusing and complicated a matter as homosexuality – even if those sessions are as folksy and low-key as two lesbian couples happily gathering maple sap with their girl children. The Department of Education had bankrolled the federal Ready-To-Learn program, which funds Postcards from Buster, to the tune of $100 million. Secretary Spellings requested that PBS refund the amount PBS spent on “Sugartime” and remove the department’s seal from that episode “in the interest of avoiding embroiling the Ready-To-Learn program in a controversy that will only hurt” it.
Back in 1999, PBS broadcast “It’s Elementary – Talking About Gay Issues in School.” Its director, Debra Chasnoff, called the film “a documentary” though its purpose was to mainstream gays and gay values; it was a values film. Said Ms. Chasnoff, “The film shows how and why schools are finding age-appropriate ways to address gay and lesbian issues in education. . .[and] helping students discuss gay related topics. . .and reading books that have characters with gay parents.” And why would schools go to the bother of finding “age appropriate” ways to “address gay issues” unless the schools were engaged in the gay-agenda enterprise of “making gays look good” and “talking about gays and gayness” as often as possible. Under the guise of teaching tolerance, all criticism of the gay agenda is branded as bigotry. Even tolerance is disparaged for being something less than total acceptance.
The public was not fooled. This film provoked more letters of protest than any other PBS program. PBS ignored the letters and aired “It’s Elementary” on 300 stations around the country. Promoting the gay agenda is now a PBS tradition. Every year, around the time of gays on parade and dykes on bikes, PBS transforms its evening line-up into a gay filmfest, airing wall-to-wall “independent films” and sanitized “documentaries” that make gays look good.
The flap over Buster Baxter the bunny’s excellent gay adventure couldn’t have come at a worse time for PBS. The Public Broadcasting Service is a far-flung fiefdom of 349 stations and is cumbersome to manage; its continued financial health assumes a great deal of taxpayer funding, uninterrupted high levels of corporate-image advertising and no competition, which is no longer the environment in which PBS functions.
One anonymous “high-level executive at PBS headquarters in Washington” told the New York Times (2/17/05) that new managers at the Corporation for Public Broadcasting were “concerned” about a “perceived” liberal bias at PBS, as well as difficulties in fundraising. Gee, could the two be linked? To quote Tim Graham of the Media Research Center, “Conservatives do not want to give more tax dollars to television stations that attack their ideas.” As the New York Times observed: “Corporate underwriters have been less willing to finance PBS programs, which left the network increasingly dependent on Washington, where Republicans criticize its programming as elitist and liberal.” And with good reason.
The PBS view of the world was typified by the way Bill Moyers slanted the news solidly to the left. Bill recently retired from his news spot. His parting shot was a rip on the increasing popularity of conservative political commentary, which he characterized as “a freak show of political pornography.” Bill will be remembered as the guy who enriched himself over the years by producing lengthy leftist infomercials, masquerading as programming, which promoted the ever-expanding Bill Moyers videotape collection which was prominently for sale on what is cynically called non-commercial television.
Jeffrey Chester is the executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy and a long-time advocate of taxpayer funding for public television’s social agenda. “I’m concerned that PBS is so desperate for funding that they’re willing to sell their legacy,” fretted Mr. Chester. He worries that the PBS gang “could forgo their historical mandate to do cutting-edge programming.”
What “historical mandate”? He’s referring to the historical desire of the PBS programmers themselves to produce “cutting-edge programming,” which all too often just meant edgy programming, such as the protracted annual gay-film festivals and getting acquainted and comfortable with seemingly ever-so-normal lesbian couples on Postcards from Buster, a show targeted at children ages 6 to 8.
The whole Bustergate flap raises the bigger question: Is there any compelling reason for PBS to exist? In today’s America 85 percent of the population subscribes to cable or satellite television. Everything that once made PBS distinctive, such as historical dramas, wildlife documentaries and its children’s shows, are now in competition with equally good programming on the History Channel, Discovery, A&E, the National Geographic Channel, BBC America, Nickelodeon, Noggin, Animal Planet and The Learning Channel. So who needs PBS?
With lesbians now smooching on the networks, with “Queer as Folk” and “The L Word” on Showtime and with Viacom ready to launch its all-gay all-the-time programming on Logo this year, PBS is no longer needed to promote the gay social agenda.
Who’s In Charge Here?
So the gay home invasion is driven by profit-hungry programmers, liberal ideologues and gay activists, some of whom are also programmers and producers. These types cooperate to produce the increasingly lewd and foul-mouthed fare that is pumped into American homes. Ilene Chaiken couldn’t interest Showtime in producing “The L Word” until Showtime turned a profit on “Queer as Folk,” after that Chaiken got the thumbs-up within 24 hours. Her shaggy-dog immorality story about a clutch of absurdly glamorous lipstick lesbians manages to simultaneously reduce its characters to the status of walking pornography while presenting them to America’s young women as fashionable, thereby exposing them to the seductive influence of a deviant stylishness sprung from an anti-heterosexual counterculture.
Bob Thompson, the director of the Center for the Study of Popular Television at Syracuse University, says he’s talked to sixth-graders who can quote at length from HBO’s “Sex and the City.” That’s the show where Sarah Jessica Parker dresses in lesbian-influenced fashions and wonders why she can’t find Mr. Right. HBO is a premium channel and most cable systems offer a “parental control” feature to lock out programming that is hostile to the moral health of minors, programs like “Sex and the City.” Remember the V-chip? Squalid messages seep into young minds because parents won’t lift a finger to switch them off.
If your kids saw “Sex and the City” or “The L Word” or “Queer as Folk” at a friend’s home it’s because the friend’s parents are crappy parents. If your kids are watching trashy sexual behavior in the privacy of their bedrooms it’s because you fluffed off warnings against allowing an amoral profit-driven industry to have private teaching sessions with your children. Even the friendly folks at PBS, the ones who brought you “Sesame Street” and “Mr. Rogers Neighborhood,” are now working on ways to slyly introduce your children to “age appropriate” lessons about how homosexuality is just another value-free lifestyle, a harmless eccentricity without consequences for the moral health of the host culture.
Protecting children from the trashy influence of contemporary programmers is a greater challenge than it was a generation ago. But you are not powerless. Nothing comes into your home that you do not allow. Ultimately, the moral environment of your home is your creation.
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Thomas Clough
Copyright 2005
February 21, 2005