A gay misstep on "How I Met Your Mother"?

I'm a day late on this, but was anyone else vaguely annoyed by the minor "gay" sub-plot on Monday's episode of How I Met Your Mother? Desperate for money, Marshall (Jason Segel) and Lily (Alyson Hannigan) decide to try to sell Lily's paintings. They have the usual sitcom-y back luck ... until Lily manages, to her delight, to sell a painting to the arbiters of truly good taste, a "GAYCWK" — a Gay Couple Without Kids.

But Marshall loves the painting and wants it back, so he goes to visit the gay couple's apartment. After Marshall inquires about the painting — "the one in the nice frame" — one of the gay guys says (in a queeny, lascivious voice):

"Talk about a nice frame! You are a big one, aren't you? My, my. And you're married to that little bit of a thing. How does that work? I'd like to find out."

The show pretends that Marshall, an obviously married, heterosexual man, would flattered by this creepy, totally inappropriate sexual attention, rather than having him give the correct response, which would be to tell the gay guy to go f*#& himself.

I confess: I hate gay-guy-hitting-on-straight-guy humor. I hate it when frat-boy comedies cement the rock-solid heterosexuality of their main characters by having them get hit on by, and then rejecting, some queeny stereotype of a gay guy.

(For the record, I also hate it when drag queens get cheap laughs by making double entendres to the hapless straight guy in the audience. Passive aggressive much?)

Anyway, you can tell who has the real power in Hollywood by looking atwho the sexual predators tend to be in movies and one television: women and gay men. Um, yeah, cause that's the way it is in real life.

This whole thing was beneath How I Met Your Mother, which, after the brilliant new Robin Sparkles video "Sandcastles in the Sand" a few weeks ago, had been on something of a winning streak.

I mean, the gay couple wasn't just creepy-lascivious, they were literally limp-wristed!

I refuse to blame Neil Patrick Harris for this — hey, he's just another actor on the show. But did the whole thing strike anyone else as a series of gags straight out of the 1980s?