From Twinkies to Gerbils: The History of the Gay Urban Legend

The furor over these characters probably reached its ridiculous zenith in 1994, when North Carolina minister Joseph Chambers sought to get the two Muppets banned, ranting on his radio show, “Bert and Ernie are two grown men sharing a house and a bedroom. They share clothes, eat and cook together, and have blatantly effeminate characteristics.”

This is also the man who would later write a sermon booklet called Barney: The Purple Messiah, insinuating that the lovable dinosaur was an instrument of Satan and homosexuals.

The idea that children were being “indoctrinated” into the “gay lifestyle” by colorful TV characters surfaced again with both Tinky Winky and SpongeBob SquarePants. In Tinky’s case, one of the main instigators was televangelist Jerry Falwell, who warned parents that the flamboyant Teletubbie could be a coded homosexual, because "he is purple, the gay pride color, and his antenna is shaped like a triangle, the gay pride symbol."

The uproar over SpongeBob grew so loud that his creator, Stephen Hillenburg, finally had to reassure concerned parents that the characters in the show were never meant to be portrayed as gay, and that he saw them as “asexual.”

In all these cases, the message is quite clear: homosexuals have an agenda, and your children are at the top of the list!

The case of the sodomized sleeper

Parents’ paranoia about the influence of gays on their children doesn’t stop in adolescence, of course. It follows right through to when kids are leaving the nest, which leads to the next urban legend. Apparently (and I heard this from a friend, whose cousin’s friend went through this), the story goes something like this:

A student goes to see the campus doctor because of sluggishness and a feeling of soreness in his rectum. It’s discovered that his gay roommate had been secretly anesthetizing and sodomizing him every night.

At first glance, you might ask, “Who would believe something so ridiculous?” But when you consider this news story from a couple of years ago, it’s entirely plausible that someone would take it at face value.

When parents are using sites like Facebook to screen potential roommates for their children, and weeding out those they feel are undesirable because of "psychological and sanitary concerns,” it’s easy to see where this kind of legend can get started, and why it has endured. The message that the legend fortifies is all too familiar: Gays are out there, and they’re after your kids.

“Welcome to the world of AIDS”

Ever since the advent of AIDS, there have been urban legends surrounding the disease, and often gay men are at the center. One day it's Rock Hudson putting Linda Evans' life in danger by kissing her in a scene from Dynasty, and the next gay dentists everywhere are infecting their patients.

The latter obviously comes from the famous case of Kimberly Bergalis, who claimed to have been infected by her HIV-positive, gay dentist, Dr. David Acer. Her case was championed by conservatives and the religious right, who held her up as a "blameless victim, ” a virgin who didn't use drugs that was given a death sentence by an "admitted homosexual."

It wasn't until after her death in 1991 that it was revealed that she was not a virgin, and had actually contracted genital warts from one of her sexual partners. To this day, it is unclear whether she was, in fact, infected by her dentist, but the story of the innocent heterosexual victim infected by the "tooth fairy" is still treated as fact.

AIDS urban legends have taken many forms, from the fear of HIV-infected needles lurking in pay phone coin return slots and soda cans to gay men stabbing people in movie theaters and branding them with a "You now have AIDS" sticker. Then there's the classic myth of the drunken one-night stand (which exists in both straight and gay varieties). A night of anonymous condom-free passion turns to horror when the person wakes up alone to find the message "WELCOME TO THE WORLD OF AIDS" scrawled on the mirror. The specter of the "AIDS BOOGEYMAN" has been around for over two decades now, and unfortunately doesn't look like it's going away.

The “Twinkie Defense”

Most gay-themed urban legends cast gays as the villains, but sometimes, we in the gay community are willing to embrace a myth if it feeds into our own fears. Everyone has heard of the infamous “Twinkie Defense, ” that miscarriage of justice that resulted when the lawyers for Dan White convinced a jury that junk food caused him to murder San Francisco Mayor George Moscone and openly gay Supervisor Harvey Milk back in 1978.

I remember the outrage that I felt when I was a teen and read about this defense, and thinking “Of course, he got off with a lesser sentence: he killed a gay man. ” The fact is, the Twinkie Defense is, for the most part, an urban legend.