I’ve seen some pretty disgusting pictures painted of gay people recently, but some of the mindless utterances in Garrison Keillor’s revilement of an article on family, marriage, and monogamy really take the cake.
First, he takes on the apparently bankrupt institution of heterosexual monogamous marriage (conveniently leaving out the part about being in his 3rd). It’s the standard drivel, only with an extra helping of stupid — apparently in an attempt to appeal to the mindless among us who readily respond to grotesque caricatures:
I grew up the child of a mixed-gender marriage that lasted until death parted them… Back in the day, that was the standard arrangement. Everyone had a yard, a garage, a female mom, a male dad, and a refrigerator with leftover boiled potatoes in plastic dishes with snap-on lids…
[Emphasis mine]
How fitting it is, that someone so keen to trivialize the complicated nuances of family dynamics (gay or straight) by the crudest form of childish reductionism, is so so fond of caricatures. The first sign that this man is a blathering fool should be that he invokes the disgustingly idealized “young married couple with a little house on a hill, son, daughter, barking dog and white picket fence” myth as the ideal family arrangement.
But again, Mr. Keillor: the devil is in the details. Prior to “the day” which he so vacuously babbles about, marriage was primarily a property arrangement. Very rarely did love, at least in the sense that we think of it today, play a part in it. Women were treated as chattel, and were married off to men for reasons that were mostly related to economics, and had more to do with strengthening the relationship between two families, rather than two individuals. In this, Keillor is hopelessly nearsighted as he practices a kind of historical cherry-picking: He is eager to extol the virtues of the the supposedly ideal family structure that he grew up in, claiming it to be “traditional,” while ignoring the embarrassing history of the institution of marriage as a whole.
Apparently not having spouted enough nonsense, Keillor then declares that gay people are unfit to be parents. To argue this point, he crams 6 stereotypes about gay people into a single sentence, and then vomits it onto the page in what is surely the most breathtaking display of stupidity and ignorance I have seen in a long, long time.
The country has come to accept stereotypical gay men—sardonic fellows with fussy hair who live in over-decorated apartments with a striped sofa and a small weird dog and who worship campy performers and go in for flamboyance now and then themselves. If they want to be accepted as couples and daddies, however, the flamboyance may have to be brought under control.
Fortunately, Dan Savage arrives on the scene to rip him a new one where this is concerned so I don’t have to. I don’t know how many more of these airheaded editorials I can stomach before I get elevated blood pressure at the age of 16.
