Yet another reason to hate Garrison Keillor

Like many northern midwesterners I know, I’ve always been annoyed by the fact that Garrison Keillor has built a career out of idealizing the down-home homogeneity of 1950s Minnesota, even as he lives in an Upper West Side apartment. So I wasn’t surprised to read him blathering about his Leave It to Beaver upbringing — which he laments has become a lifestyle of the past.

Back in the day, that was the standard arrangement. Everyone had a yard, a garage, a female mom, a male dad, and a refrigerator with leftover boiled potatoes in plastic dishes with snap-on lids. This was before caller ID, before credit cards, before pizza, for crying out loud. You could put me in a glass case at the history center and schoolchildren could press a button and ask me questions.

Oh, if only he were locked away in a museum somewhere. I can sum up his piece (and his career) thusly: Wasn’t life grand before no-fault divorce, before there was easy access to contraception, and before women went to work outside the kitchen? Ah, the good old days. Back when gay people knew to stay in the closet:

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.

Nothing like those bigoted midwest values. As Scanner retorted, “Advice on not hogging the spotlight from a man who made his living writing memoirs?” Indeed. (Twisty, Cameron and Dan Savage are pissed, too.)