We assume that the brouhaha Garrison Keillor’s homespun “Stating the Obvious” Salon.com piece caused in certain ‘hoods of the gay community can be found in this short passage:

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.

We’re no fan of Keillor; we think he’s strikingly unfunny, so five decades ago, and that it’s depressing Robert Altman’s last movie had to be A Prairie Home Companion. But we also think that a lot of the gay-watchdog groups that overzealously protect gay rights are like the animal activist groups currently campaigning to kill that baby polar bear for its own good. So now, Keillor’s weak apology for what he wrote is being attacked. Even – especially? – by Dan Savage, whom we all love, right? Randy Barbato thinks Savage got it right, but we think Barbato got it more right when he said, “I always thought Garrison Keillor was a humorless humorist, although I do find his pathetic attempt to apologize to gays kinda funny.”