Beren deMotier * writer * artist * human
Buster Baxter Goes to Vermont
copyright Feb. 15, 2005 Beren deMotier
I always thought that Sesame Street would have the first gay people on it, of any television for children. I grew up with Sesame Street. I watched the first episodes on avocado green shag carpeting in my parents’ sunken Los Angeles living room, fell in love with that pre-Tom Hanks “Everyman” Kermit the Frog, and still own the fuzzy and blue Grover puppet I got for Christmas in 1971. I do a mean Grover impression, which comes in handy more than you’d imagine when you have three kids. Sesame Street was the first show to have inner city kids, black kids, Hispanic kids, and a puppet with HIV. It seemed inevitable that one day a lesbian couple would move onto the street, or some nice gay men would buy Mr. Hooper’s store and start serving mochaccinos (as well as over-sized cookies) to Cookie Monster on his daily visit.
But it was Buster Baxter, the happy-go-lucky, child-of-divorced-parents rabbit co-star of the popular “Arthur” cartoon show, and now star of his own “Postcards from Buster”, who introduced lesbians to children’s television. Except that sadly, very few children got to see it, since before the episode about Buster visiting Vermont (where civil unions are legal and couples with two moms not uncommon) could air, under pressure from new Education Secretary Margaret Spellings, PBS pulled the show from national distribution.
Some stations ran it anyway, though often at preposterous hours like four-thirty in the morning, with the notion that parents could tape it and preview it before exposing their children to it. Good grief Charlie Brown. We’re talking Buster Baxter. I have a two year old, so I know, he is as benign as you can get. He travels around with his dad on the show, visiting with kids all over the nation, with all kinds of family structures and beliefs. But then again, he probably treated the lesbian family like any other family, and that message is scaring the Cultural Conservatives.
Especially after the Sponge Bob brouhaha.
I’m not a big Sponge Bob fan. I’ve seen a little of him when visiting the Grandparents (who have cable), and he appears to be inane, ridiculous and not terribly literate. But I do appreciate that he took part, as well as Barney, Big Bird and some other kid favorites, in a tolerance video urging children to accept people different from themselves, including gays and lesbians. This got the vocal Focus on the Family group up in arms, fearing the “forced normalization” of homosexuality, since it is their goal to keep us bad, mad, and dangerous to know. Isn’t it strange that we can live in a society that struggles with violence, with hate crimes, with racial intolerance, and is currently involved in a war to promote freedom, democracy and diversity in a foreign land, and it is considered outrageous to urge kids to accept the obvious- that all people are not the same, and it doesn’t make you better than them, and no, you can’t hurt them because they’re different?
Of course, the Cultural Conservatives, Bush administration, or whoever is making a fuss about Tinky Winky now, has good reason to worry if intolerance is their goal. Young people do accept difference more easily, they don’t automatically consider it bad to be dissimilar, and their automatic response to two people of the same gender falling in love isn’t to beat them up or make sure they can’t get married. Children are much more likely to want to pet the couple’s golden retriever or ask if they have any kids who can come over and play.
Until they’re socialized differently that is. While gay bashing among teens sadly continues, there is a growing trend toward live and let live throughout the country. It is hard to demonize us when we live next door and shop at Target. We can’t be going to hell in a hand basket too fast if we’re President of the PTA or Principal of the school, and young people, and increasingly their parents, know it.
So Sponge Bob, Big Bird and Barney telling kids to tolerate gay people is part of the gay and liberal agenda, sure, since we know we’re fine just the way we are. Buster Baxter visited Vermont lesbians and he doesn’t seem to have jumped any fences or questioned his sexuality, just as watching Vin Diesel or Bruce Willis punch out the bad guy on DVD won’t make me go straight anytime soon. Though it might make me go to the store for ice cream.
Interestingly, no one seems to have a cow when Melissa Etheridge or Nathan Lane, out and proud as you can be, do a cameo on Sesame Street to sing the ABC’s, as long as they don’t bring a loved one along. They will someday. But what I’m really hoping is that before I’m old and gray, someone will finally tell me how to get, how to get to Sesame Street.