The Green Door #15

February 1999

Tinky Winky and "The Englishman's Disease "

I've been giddy for the last week and I don't think it's from my new thyroid medicine. Jerry Falwell has discovered the Teletubbies and shares my need to overanalyze them. I think Jerry Falwell may have been placed on Earth just to amuse me. If more potentially dangerous villains, like David Duke or Al Sharpton or Kenneth Starr, were lovable buffoons like Jerry or Dan Quayle, this would be a merrier world indeed.

I have been mesmerized by the Teletubbies since they premiered in the US late last year. Various friends and I have been contemplating the Teletubbies for a while now.

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While it never occurred to us to contemplate the sexual orientation of each of the Teletubbies, we did feel the need to genderize them. Unlike Jerry and friends, I thought "sexing" the Teletubbies seemed scummy, "genderizing" sounded much more tasteful. In the interest of parity, we assumed an even ratio of male to female Teletubbies or 2:2; a theory that turned out to be true.

One original gender theory had to do with the shapes of the Teletubbies' antennae, or as Drew likes to refer to them as "their Phalluses". With the more pointy antennae assumed to belong to the males and the holier looking antennae attached to females. While the theory seemed somewhat vulgar it also seemed to work. Po, who was identified as female in an episode, seemed to bear this out with her circular antenna. With a triangular antennae and purse, Tinky Winky seemed a safe bet to be female, although a rather butch one.

Consulting the official and (really cool) BBC Teletubbies Website, revealed our theory to be false with Tinky Winky and Dipsy identified as males and Laa Laa and Po as females. While there, I downloaded various Teletubbies sound files and have integrated them into a somewhat frightening Windows sound scheme. (Shawn who edits The Green Door and who has first look at each issue wrote me: "I took a stroll through Teletubby Land and I have to say the sounds were VERY disturbing. I played some of them, thinking it would be funny to have the birds imitate some of the phrases. However, I've thought better of it because these are really annoying". Maybe one needs the visuals also to fully appreciate them).

In Jerry's National Liberty Review magazine, of which he is the listed editor, one of his writers outted Tinky Winky, the largest and purplest Teletubby. Apparently purple is the international gay color and the triangle is the international gay symbol. The purse was also considered to be a clue, although the BBC insists that it is a magic bag. Of all the gay men I've met, none has carried either a purse or a magic bag. Come to think of it, none of them have been purple either. Another so-called clue was that the Washington Post, in an "editorial", listed What's In and What's Out with Ellen Degeneres as Out and Tinky Winky as In. I guess you have to forgive Jerry's kids, they are Fundamentalists and used to taking the written word, even a newspaper fluff piece, literally. Jerry's kids missed an obvious clue; Tinky Winky is English!

If the only other male Teletubby, Dipsy, isn't gay, who is Tinky Winky pursuing his lifestyle with? Rumors indicate that Tinky Winky has been spotted with Barney, the PURPLE (Clue! Clue!), prancing dinosaur, who has always been proud and in your face about his love of show tunes. I have e-mailed Jerry and expressed to him my concerns about Barney. I expect Jerry to begin a complete investigation. Barney's song "You love me, I love men" might also be a clue.

Of course all of this would have been much more amusing if it was truer and not a case of the media running wild. I was actually accused of being a right wing apologist last week because I mentioned that Jerry Falwell was wronged (not just wrong) on this one. A check of the Web, even Jerry Falwell is on-line, produces both the original brief article and Jerry's response to the media. The article merely alerts parents to be aware of Tinky Winky's secret agenda. They don't call for burning or boycotting anything. From what I've seen it seems a news wire correspondent put 2 and 2 together and got 8.

The Green Door is a mostly monthly zine published by Scoats. E-mail: scoats at greylodge dot com. (c) Scoats 1999. All rights reserved. Most wrongs unintentional. Reproduction permitted as long as it accompanied by this entire paragraph.

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