Gloria's Riddle Gets a New, Surprisingly Gay Answer

Nearly forty years ago on a famous episode of All in the Family called "Gloria and the Riddle," Gloria posed a riddle to Archie, Edith and Meathead.

The setup: A father and his son are in a car accident. The father dies immediately, but the son gets taken to the hospital for surgery. Once in the operating room, the surgeon takes one look at the boy and says: "I can't operate on him. He's my son."

The riddle: Who is the surgeon?

The answer might be obvious to us now, but on All in the Family (and later in a 1988 episode of The Cosby Show) most of the characters – particularly the men – had trouble figuring out that the surgeon was actually the boy's mother.

This conundrum was a clever way to illustrate the insidious nature of gender stereotyping: the idea of a female surgeon simply never entered into people's heads.

Recently, ABC's Good Morning America wanted to see how younger generations would fare with this riddle, so they asked a bunch of schoolchildren. 

As you would expect, most kids had no trouble figuring out the correct answer. What was a bit unexpected (even the reporter seemed surprised) was a new - and perfectly valid - alternate answer. The way some children solved this puzzle would literally have blown Archie Bunker's mind and says a lot about where gay rights issues are headed. (h/t AE reader RN.)

Check it out....

Note: The 1972 "Gloria and the Riddle" episode of All in the Family will re-air on the TVLAND Network this Thursday at 6:30pm EST.