So, we decided to be gloriously lowbrow for a night, and check out Celebrity Circus, mostly to see Peter Brady garf it. (In fact he, or Christopher Knight I should say, was the best thing we saw on the show.) We didn’t know it was a full-blown reality show; we figured it would be just one of those silly things that fill summer programming, like the old “Circus of the Stars” when I was a kid.
No, as it turns out this is an elimination, and each contestant is going to be judged and up for elimination each week. The judges on the show represent half the vote, and the audience calling toll-free numbers represent the other half. Well, whatever, we watched the Biggest Loser and that came down to the audience as well. We’ve never seen any of the talent shows that play, at least not more than an accidental episode here or there, and this one could be entertaining in a schadenfreude sort of way, so why not?
Then we met the judges. Some trapeze artist, some Olympic gymnast, and then we have… the choreographer, an alleged guy named Louie Spence. A man in a purple jacket sporting a lisp… I was just waiting for a Z snap. Listening to this person, all I could think of was an episode of the Simpsons, in which Homer says in response to finding out that a friend is gay, “I like my beer cold, my TV loud and my homosexuals fuh-laming.” He’d like Louie.
I am aware that as long as I choose to watch television in this day and age (and in fact throughout the history of television), gays and lesbians will be involved in it, just like every other sin. Yes, I am going to trot out the tired old truth that God has declared this behavior to be sinful. Having said that, my favorite television show has often starred a publicly gay man (Doctor Who, John Barrowman as Captain Jack Harkness). Captain Jack the character is the equivalent of the Bishop of Bath and Wells in the Blackadder II episode “Money” (”I am a colossal pervert. Animal, vegetable, or mineral, I’ll do anything to anything”)… and yet when I see that WWI outfit and that big grinning face yelling for the Doctor, I smile. One of the highlights of the last season of Doctor Who was Derek Jacobi’s stint in the episode “Utopia.” I love Lord of the Rings (the movies, as well as the books), and we all know where Ian McKellen’s coming from. And I laugh along with the laugh track when Mr. Humphries, played by John Inman, says or does practically anything on Are You Being Served?
And there are plenty of other sins where those came from. Billie Piper is hardly a paragon of virtue. Tom Baker ran in the same circles as Douglas Adams and Richard Dawkins, people who have been happy to dismiss the existence of God. So, the question is, why am I picking on Louie?
I think it’s because he’s so “out there.” I mean, to flaunt homosexuality is to flaunt sexuality. And as usual I tried to classify exactly what it is that I found offensive about him, and I think I have found it. I think I know why Louie bothers me in a way that John Barrowman, or even Ian McKellen, does not. (They bother me in different ways, more cerebral ones.) It isn’t the “eww” factor; it’s the fact that a man who has to keep bringing up his attraction to men and his lack of attraction to women is not the opposite of a normal heterosexual man. A normal heterosexual man does not have to constantly point out his attraction to women and his lack of attraction to men. He does not have to exaggerate his masculinity. Even Tim Allen’s grunting isn’t really a sexual statement about being a man.
In fact, I tried to think of somebody, or some archetype, of a heterosexual man who has to constantly emphasize his sexual desire for women. And then I realized it.
The classic construction worker stereotype. You know what I’m talking about: a woman walks by a bunch of men with lunch boxes open, wearing hard hats, sitting on iron girders a story or two off the ground, and they wolf-whistle and make suggestive remarks. “Watch out for those curves, baby,” they say, or equally stupid things. Such people likely still exist, although in our litigious society I’m guessing they’ve dropped off a bit. The classic sexual harassment lawsuit waiting to happen. The women ignore them and keep walking, and in response the men just make louder and more brazen comments about what they’d do with her, or to her, if they had a chance.
The fact is, the effeminate “flamer” is the opposite, not of any normal straight guy, nor even of someone like Tim Allen’s comedy routine, but of a construction worker. Louie is a gay construction worker. And as such, he can say things to anybody in the competition that Mitch Gaylord (married to a woman, with children), if he said them to one of the women, would be crucified for saying.
Hooray for homosexual super-rights. How do we combat this? By laughing at Louie, not because he’s cute when he hits on men (and women, last night anyway), but because he’s ridiculous. He’s a hard hat and a lunch box away from being, not a member of the Village People, but a self-parody.
Excuse me. Thelf-parody.
