Gigantic, orange, and gay

Best homosexuals on TV—a list of personal favorites:

1. Wayland Flowers and Madame

2. Rip Taylor

3. Everyone on Bewitched, except Elizabeth Montgomery and probably the kid who played Tabitha

4. Charles Nelson Reilly

5. Sandra Bernhard on Roseanne

6. Mr. Snuffalupagus and Big Bird, who were always way faggier than Bert and Ernie ever thought of being

7. Brian Posehn and Steve Agee

It's OK if you don't know the last two names. I assume the actors aren't gay. Who knows, really, but that's not the point. The point is that they play mutually disagreeable red-haired boyfriends on a new Comedy Central sitcom, The Sarah Silverman Program (premiering February 1 at 10:30 p.m. Eastern). And they're everything the gay characters on Queer as Folk and Will & Grace were too afraid and unimaginative and busy chasing their own boring tails to be: fat, bearded, nerdy, bickering, dude speaking, glasses wearing, karate chopping, video game playing, covertly masturbating, metal T-shirt–wearing malcontents. In other words, these are homosexuals I understand: My circle of friends finally represented fictionally on television. And I feel validated by a sitcom for the first time.

First, though, you need to know about Sarah Silverman. She's the insanely funny comedian whose standard operating procedure is to behave like a 9-year-old, blurting out the most offensive stuff she can think of. She starred in her own concert film, Jesus Is Magic, in which she talked about licking jam off of her boyfriend Jimmy Kimmel's penis and sang a lot of self-penned songs, including one that addressed the suddenly hot (thanks to Isaiah Washington) issue of "when faggots call each other faggot." On her new show Silverman introduces her neighbors with, "This is Brian and Steve. They're gigantic, orange, and gay." Then she sings a song, grinning happily, that contains the lyrics "If I find a stick / I'll put it in your mama's butt / And pull it out and stick the doody in your eye." By the end of the episode she's crashed two cars while drinking cough syrup, witnessed the gay neighbors battling (and fake vomiting) over one of them possibly being bisexual, hung out with a third gay man—an animated, limp-wristed Loch Ness monster who declares, "We're terrific together"—and finally delivered the moral of the show: "Whether you're gay or bisexual, it doesn't matter because at the end of the day they're both gross." In its almost-nothing-makes-sense way it's like Aqua Teen Hunger Force with human beings.

But back to the gays. They're sidekicks, but they are so unlike anything else ever seen on a half-hour sitcom that they could have their own show, standing alone on their own weird merits. Best of all, they aren't reactions to anything: They aren't self-consciously butching it up or created to combat all the "Just Jacks" of TV history; they just are what they are. They're written with no agenda and no axes to grind. They're just misanthropic slobs-freaks-jerks whose idea of sweet talk is dialogue like, "Dude, I'm totally gay for you." They live in an apartment that looks like a postcollegiate dorm room, and when danger lurks they can fly through the air and get all Shaolin fighting temple on knife-wielding maniacs trying to threaten their obnoxious female friend's life. For the record, that part isn't like my circle of friends at all because we're all big babies and none of us can do that, although I did play the boxing game on a friend's Wii recently, fighting under the name Joan Didion, and I beat the shit out of my opponent. Also, my apartment has excellent furniture. So basically they're better than any other sitcom gays ever. Go watch the show and tell me I'm wrong, and I'll put a stick up your mama's butt.