When I was in college in the late 1970s and early 1980s, I spent most of my free time in a little bookstore off the Student Union lobby that looked and felt like an old-fashioned living room, with a writing-desk for a checkout counter, low mahogany-stained bookcases, two armchairs, and a green couch by the western window. It provided a bright belonging place for "head cases," boy who were majoring in English or philosophy or music, who wanted something greater and nobler from life than carrying briefcases into skyscrapers. We called ourselves the Bookstore Gang.
During any hour of the afternoon and early evening, half a dozen members of the Bookstore Gang could be found standing by the counter, or sitting on it, or browsing through the shelves, or reading in the armchairs or green couch that blazed with western sunlight. We discussed classes, comic books, movies, ghosts, and politics, but for some reason never girls. When the bookstore closed, we adjourned to the Rathskeller or to the TV Lounge, to argue and advise and review, discussing
The Wizard of Id or
Saturday Night Live, yelling "No one expects the Spanish Inquisition!"
while stuck-up Business Majors stared.
Everything we watched or listened to or read was hip, anarchic, iconoclastic, but my favorite was
The Muppet Show (1976-81), with Kermit the Frog from
Sesame Street hosting a comedy-variety show, juxtaposing parodies of medical dramas or
Star Trek ("Pigs....in space") with musical numbers, while the elderly gay couple Statler and Waldorf heckled everything (except for the famous guest stars, of course).
Other hip, anarchic, iconoclastic tv programs and movies --
Monte Python, Mary Hartman, Saturday Night Live, WKRP in Cincinnati, Blazing Saddles, The Cheap Detective, Silent Movie -- were loaded down with fag jokes and hetero-horniness, but
The Muppet Show had neither.
Only Miss Piggy regularly displayed heterosexual interest -- at Kermit and various male guest stars -- and she was always rejected. And instead of constantly ridiculing gender transgressions, same-sex contact, and "fags,"
The Muppet Show offered a pleasant nonchalance about diversity in size, shape, affect, and affection (who knew what Gonzo the Great was into?).
Muppet creator Jim Henson was a gay ally, as is his daughter Lisa, now CEO of Jim Henson Enterprises. In 2012, the company severed ties with Chick-Fil-A due to its homophobic bias, and donated existing proceeds to GLAAD.
