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.