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Ok, the latest
Ellen flap. The Kiss. Which may or may not have involved the use of tongue.
Which may or may not have been enjoyed by all. The Born Agains are in an
uproar, ABC and Disney are in an uproar, Baptists won't watch "Sleeping
Beauty", Ellen is threatening to quit if ABC doesn't take down the "adult
content" *warning* for God's sake at the beginning of the show. Sigh. All
this over one kiss. Which we all knew would happen. Hello? She's a lesbian.
We have established that already. Lesbians, along with large numbers and
varieties of other sorts of adult humans, kiss.
The Discovery Channel (known in my household as the Bug Porn Station) makes
a living out of showing, nightly, how every other earthly creature above and
including flatworms do the big fazoolie, in all its combinations and
permutations of gender, in full view with minute explanatory voiceover,
often including measurements of genitalia and duration of coitus. If any.
Flatworms can do it alone, apparently.
But Ellen kisses another woman on the small screen (on the lips, actually,
not on her small screen) and all over Christendom there is an outbreak of
cardiac infarcts. Plus, the kiss was in jest. The other woman in the story
line is straight. It was a *joke*. This show is a *comedy*. Doncha just hate
when you have to point out the obvious? Explain a joke? Men kiss one another
on the mouth--I know I've seen this for years on television--in jest when
for the sake of the plot, they want to make people laugh. Remember Milton
Berle? Or show real affection or show the opposite: that they're straight
and the kiss is an affront. And I never saw a warning.
Whatever. What this current uproar is about is that nobody can any longer
pretend to pretend that gays and lesbians don't exist, or that we don't do
all the normal things that the rest of humankind does. Because Ellen has
already said she's a real, live lesbian. Not just her character. There has
already been sometime last year a wonderful, full on the mouth, spit kiss on
"Deep Space Nine" on Fox, and it didn't bring the bigots out of the
woodwork, nor did too many families in America crumble as a direct result.
That I know of. But then the two women involved in that episode weren't
really lesbians, or said they weren't, so the threatened majority could
pretend that these particular women hadn't really defected. They were just
playing make believe. What all the Ellen uproar is about is that the usual
gang of bigots is insisting yet again that we hide. Ellen can *have* a gay
show (maybe), and she can even *be* gay (maybe). But why does she have to
flaunt it? :::covering up little Janie's eyes::::
All the usual people are quaking in their jackboots over the threat to the
American Family. (Who ARE those people, anyway? Don't you have a family? I
certainly do. All Americans, every one.) All the issues which The Ellen Kiss
brings up have been discussed ad infinitum since the 60's, chief among them
being that kissing isn't as threatening to *anybody's* family as is learned
violence. I don't want to take the time to count the number of murders and
other violent acts depicted daily, real and imagined, on television, or the
acts of heterosexual foreplay, duringplay and afterplay, but come on here.
Gimme a break. ONE kiss??
If the entire weight of Western civilization, all of its institutions and
power, is threatened by Ellen, if their insistence on heterosexual culture,
conveyed over the centuries by millions of pulpits, hundreds of
legislatures, nearly all of the publishing industry, fiction and nonfiction,
films and television, music videos, music itself, advertising in all its
variety all day long in all media--if all this can not withstand a single
kiss on national television, then I would say there might possibly be some
beansie thing wrong with their basic premise. If Ellen kissing a woman can
bring down the American Family when it has at its disposal all of Western
civilization for a crutch and a prop and a flying buttress, we either have
one kickass powerful actress available for our amusement or the American
family as an institution is in dire need of new architecture and just a
teensie bit of re-evaluation.
Carole
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