Eww, kissing boys, yucky!

Today was supposed to be "A Day Without Gay" - some activists pushed for gay people to stay home from work, and not buy anything for 24 hours. Alas, I'm not on board with that initiative - it seems ill-timed, and well, just a little odd as a response to Prop 8; I'd be much more up for "Paint a Swastika on a Mormon Temple" or "Break a Stained Glass Window at the Pedophile Club" day. But I will post a little snippet from the David Letterman Show that bugged me when I saw it. I don't think of Letterman as particularly homophobic, but really, what is with this long harangue about how icky it is to kiss a guy? James Franco (plugging his latest, Milk, which I'll write about soon) handles his host's stupidity well, and the exchange ends on a cute note, but the whole sequence reminded me yet again of what a friend of mine calls "post-homophobic homophobia," i.e., the restatement of bigotry in an ironic disguise. Why does this go on? Why is it just about every other skit on Saturday Night Live, for instance, features some weird gay character in leather, or guys kissing guys? Why must every TV show still bow before the anxieties of Midwest male twenty-somethings? (Somehow, for instance, I doubt Letterman was as horrified by Britney kissing Madonna.) Sigh. I'm just saying.