Nobody wants to go to Elisabeth Hasselbeck's house to watch her favorite show, The Bachelor. Nobody on The View anyway. She asked her cohosts this week -- and even tried to make it sound like it would be 110% fun -- to hang out at her place watching a show about straight women battling it out to fall in fake-love with a handsome, frequently shirtless guy. There would be pajamas worn! There would be snacks!
Barbara, Joy, Whoopi and Sherri Shepherd declined. Shepherd even pulled a face.
But I would absolutely go. First of all, people like Hasselbeck need more non-shopping-pal, non-ass-kissy, non-bullshit-accepting gays in their life. She comes off like the kind of knucklehead who's first to talk about how "some of their best blah friends blah meow meow gay" and then turns around and worries aloud that gay marriage will destroy the planet and erase her religious freedom. And I have a cast-iron stomach, so I could easily deal with whatever healthy snacks she served. I might smuggle in my own strawberry frosted Pop Tarts.
The other reason I'd go to watch really important reality dating shows at her house is because everything else I've seen on TV this week is about how nasty the gays are and I need a little breather. Not that I'm delicate about that sort of thing. I can eat a tall stack of hate for breakfast. But dang. This week's slop-bucket of homo sludge has made Haggard on Oprah seem like a go-go-boy-festooned gay pride parade.
Things you can learn about yourself as a homosexual from watching everything except World's Heaviest Man Gets Married on the Learning Channel (except I watched that too):
1. You don't have a job. You never did.
Seriously. This toothless sociologist/political consultant said so on this week's HBO documentary from Alexandra Pelosi called Right America: Feeling Wronged. When asked if there were two different Americas now, dude goes, "There's gays and there's working people." So I guess getting up every day and going to work is just a hallucination and I've been crazy high inside for my entire adult life. I'm glad when people come around to give me reality checks like that.
2. You think you're grown-up and well-adjusted, but you're really a weak, predatory troll.
The Tyra Banks Show is a real godsend for people who can't get with the thoughtful discourse presented on Oprah. Why bother with controversial Republican power-broker closet-case evangelicals when there are random 19-year-olds wandering around who hate the fact that they're gay and are dying to be interviewed about it by MISS TYRA?
Because you have no attention span, there are like five young guys on her show, each of whom gets about eight minutes of couch time to call their own intelligence into question and all of whom have some sort of problem with the fact that they're gay.
There's the one who's going the "ex-gay" route and lying to women he dates, the one who's really not all that freaked out about his same-sex orientation as much as he is about creepy gay bars (understandable, really), the one who just happened to find himself married to a woman and fathering a child with her and in need of semiregular threegies with his Mrs. and another guy (and really, if she's down for it, then why not?).
But the best one is this kid -- who, by the way, is gayer than a Costco-size case of poppers -- with one of those annoying voices where every sentence out of his mouth rises at the end and sounds like a question he's too bored and cool to ask. And because it's gay to care about answers, he doesn't seem to be listening to Tyra as she reminds him, to her credit, about how normal it is to be gay (the least she could do, really, after having these dumbheads on in the first place). He wants a "real family" by the time he's 30 and, in order to make that a reality, after that age he's going to "force [himself] to be with a woman."
Because that's going to be a real treat for the woman.
After going on to explain that gay men are "weak" and "effeminate" (cut to a gay guy in the audience making an "ooh girl" face) and that gay men over 30 are creepy and stalking kids online just to get "some younger butt," he explains that he hates penises that don't resemble his own.
When Tyra asks him if female anatomy is more appealing, he balks, calls it "a cave," and worries that it will swallow him.
"Have you ever been intimate with a cave before?" asks Tyra.
"About twice," says the kid. "I wasn't really a fan of it?"
So, in summary, this teenager has little life experience besides what was given him in his childhood home, a strict conservative Christian environment in which Pokemon was considered Satanic; he has a tractor-trailer full of unexamined and irrational prejudices, infused with simply wrongheaded ideas about his own sexuality. He could use a counselor. But what he gets is The Tyra Banks Show, where there are no older, reasonable gays with happy lives on display, just Tyra standing up and wiggling her ass a little bit to test her guest's response. Message: Not into Banks-Butt? Then you're seriously a fag.
3. You are oppressing the conservative Christian majority and want to steal their children.
You probably didn't watch Speechless ... Silencing The Christians, but I can't get enough of this kind of show. I found it on the Inspirational Channel (thanks for that one, Time Warner Cable). The whole thing was about a lesbian divorce and child custody hearing complicated further by one of the lesbians becoming a born-again Christian. The non-Christian lesbian refused to participate in the show, which gave the creators plenty of time to assassinate her character and explain that she only wanted custody of the couple's daughter to use her as a political trophy. Not explained: exactly where one goes to get a child gold-plated and mounted onto a sturdy base.
Even better? There's an hour-long "second part" happening next week. It's going to be less specific, I think, more about how gays in general are bringing about the destruction of civilization. So that's awesome. It's already in my TiVo. I'm hoping for some last-minute reshoots so they can include that Senator Buttars guy. You thought Jesse Helms was dead, didn't you? Psych!
4. Jerry Springer is more concerned about gay rights than Tyra.
He's also more concerned about gay fistfights. Did you even know he was still on the air? Shock, right? But he is. And he had these two gay siblings on the show. One's an ex-con "ex-gay" (it's been a big week for them) and raging bulls all 400 pounds of himself onto the stage and beats his gay little brother on the head with the Bible, a move you know he ripped off after watching that Mandy Moore movie where she did just that. Then the gay little brother's drag queen boyfriend comes on and fights the big brother, ripping off the guy's shirt so that stupendously huge moobs are flopping everywhere. Then the big brother rips off the drag queen's wig. I watched this whole segment twice. A recent upgrade to Springer is the use of wacky sound effects as commentary on guests. When people talk about their recent incarceration, a police siren sounds. When a fight breaks out, a boxing ring bell clangs. And when the "ex-gay" shouts at Jerry, "I'M STRAIGHT NOW!" a wrong-answer buzzer jolts the studio. Brilliant.
5. Bungee jumping is your favorite new high-risk homosexual behavior.
Queer screenwriter Mike White ( School of Rock , Chuck and Buck ) did it on TheAmazing Race. Off a 700-foot-tall dam. He's on this season with his dad, the gay Christian activist Mel White. First gay dad-gay son duo on TV doing anything ever, I think. Then they carted 50-pound wheels of cheese around on their backs. Get that Tyra kid to do that. That'll show him who's weak.
