I’ve been a longtime fan of Prairie Home Companion and its creator, Garrison Keillor, so naturally I was excited to read his latest piece on Salon.com, entitled Stating the Obvious, in which he illustrated his rather traditional family values (three words that send chills up my spine, incidentally) in his typical deadpan, Midwestern style. Unfortunately, it’s terribly difficult to wax eloquent about the good old days without appearing painfully self-righteous, particularly when your own lifestyle doesn’t seem to sync up with the lofty moral structure you describe. And heaven help you if, when speaking about gay marriage, you not only fail to speak of it in the most glowing of terms, but also throw in some handy queer stereotypes while you’re at it. Six, to be exact.

Here’s the part that seemed to have raised the most eyebrows:

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.

Now, a word on this sardonic fellow: my living space is in a perpetual state of disrepair, I’d sooner own a rat than a small dog, and I favor solid colors as opposed to stripes. Furthermore, I buy my clothes at Target, and while I may dye my hair quite a lot, I doubt even the most cynical description of my approach to it could be described as “fussy.” Now, had Sean Hannity been the purveyor of these comments, I probably would never have noticed them for all of the other insane drivel he regularly puts out. But this time it’s friendly fire, and it hurts — particularly from a man who has been so candid in his hatred of the war and for the administration that presides over it. Basically, we’ve trusted this guy. Curious to see what kind of a response this article was receiving, I searched around.

Not surprisingly, the claws were out — few more than Dan Savage’s eloquently titled retort, “Fuck Garrison Keillor.” Despite my own outrage, I have to say I was a little puzzled over the level of vitriol in each response, and more than slightly disheartened to read comment after barbed comment from those who jettisoned their regard for his work simply on the basis of a single stupid article. Particularly when a quick browse through Keillor’s Wikipedia entry — the details of which Savage goes into considerable detail — reveals the following:

Keillor has been married three times:

To Mary Guntzel, from 1965 to 1976. The couple has one son, Jason, born in 1969.

To Ulla Skaerved (a former exchange student from Denmark whom he famously re-encountered at a high school reunion), from 1985 to 1990. Keillor is mildly notorious for having dumped his long-time lover and PHC producer Margaret Moos to marry Skaerved. The marriage failed when Keillor had an affair with his Danish language teacher.

His current wife, violinist Jenny Lind Nilsson (b. 1958), from his hometown of Anoka, whom he married in 1995. They have one daughter, Maia, born in 1998.

And all that from a man who dared to write the following:

Under the old monogamous system, we didn’t have the problem of apportioning Thanksgiving and Christmas among your mother and stepdad, your dad and his third wife, your mother-in-law and her boyfriend Hal, and your father-in-law and his boyfriend Chuck. Today, serial monogamy has stretched the extended family to the breaking point.

So basically, the entire article is an act of the purest hypocrisy and the author should just stick to homegrown, soporific radio monologues. Case closed. Of course, you can be sure that in response to the uproar he was prepared with the requisite “non-apology apology” that public figures have become so skilled at crafting (which Savage also skewers — it’s worth a read). In it, he states that he was speaking merely tongue-in-cheek, that his comments arose from “a small world — the world of entertainment, musicians, writers — in which gayness is as common as having brown eyes.” I can’t say this explanation gained him much ground, as it seems the larger gay community missed out on the satirical edge of the article entirely, the way a person sensitive about her weight would miss the humor of a fat joke. Nevertheless, I’m waiting patiently for words of support from within the Hollywood community this article was apparently geared toward.

The fact is, had Keillor devoted just one sentence to the fact that he has been married three times, committed adultery, and lives primarily in Manhattan’s Upper West Side, the whole article would have been put in the proper context and the ensuing vitriolic responses could potentially have been avoided altogether. But he didn’t, and thus succeeded only in making himself look at best ignorant and at worst a self-righteous hypocrite. I’m not saying his words weren’t bigoted, and I’m certainly not saying they weren’t careless. What I am saying is I think the GLBTQ community needs to save its righteous indignation for true examples of hatred and disregard the rest as mindless stumbling blocks. Somehow I just don’t see the author of Lake Wobegon Days becoming the gay community’s most vicious detractor.

Ultimately, I wish others would stop trying to homogenize all of our beliefs and values into one handy travel-sized carrying case. Face it: simply because someone identifies himself as a liberal or, in Keillor’s case, a “Homegrown Democrat,” does not mean that we will all see eye to eye on every issue. Educated people know that gay marriage poses no threat to the family, morality, or society; the opinions of those who do not agree are akin to those who contended that interracial marriage posed those very same threats. But they are still entitled to them. Even Ann Coulter. Seriously — without her, would we appreciate Helen Thomas, Maureen Dowd, Jon Stewart, and Stephen Colbert as much as we do? Let them speak, and above all, let them reap the consequences of their words, whatever they may be.

This is why I believe all citizens should speak freely — even the stupid ones. Especially the stupid ones. I believe that if you are a person of ignorance, hatred, or both, you should proudly exercise your First Amendment rights and speak as loudly and clearly as possible, so that we may know exactly where you are and identify you.

But Garrison Keillor isn’t one of them, in my opinion.

Filed by Trevor at 1:15 am under Social Issues, Gay Agenda