Say it ain’t so, GK!
Garrison Keillor has a few things to say… well that’s the usual for him but this time it’s his literary equivalent to Whitney Houston’s “The Greatest Love of All”. In his essay “Stating the obvious” over at Salon he starts out by poking at a $750k Dept of Education study that shows that going to art museums and looking at art is good for schoolchildren, saying that this kind of stuff should be obvious (it should).
It’s hard to tell with him how much is just his writing and how much is coming straight from the man himself, but for some reason he feels it necessary to weigh in on gay marriage. The first paragraph sounds like classic Keillor but then the second makes me think it’s time for him to crawl back inside whatever time capsule he escaped from.
And now gay marriage will produce a whole new string of hyphenated relatives. In addition to the ex-stepson and ex-in-laws and your wife’s first husband’s second wife, there now will be Bruce and Kevin’s in-laws and Bruce’s ex, Mark, and Mark’s current partner, and I suppose we’ll get used to it.
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. Parents are supposed to stand in back and not wear chartreuse pants and black polka-dot shirts. That’s for the kids. It’s their show.
In the article he also longs for the days of monogamy, when people had one mommy and one daddy, etc. It’s just an odd sentiment coming from a man married multiple times with children from each marriage.
Being a lover of modern and old-school science-fiction, I’m already used to loving the product even though the provider may well be a racist, misogynistic, homophobic, classist, etc. asshole (pick and mix as is appropriate) but this one’s pretty hard to take, GK.
[via Towleroad | more GK foolishness seen at The ChaliceBlog]
