Transcript for Episode 7: Homer Simpson Is a Homophobe

This is the transcript for the installment of the show in which we discuss the Simpsons episode “Homer’s Phobia.” If you’d rather listen to Glen and Drew than read what they say, click here. The transcript was provided by Sarah Neal, whose skills we recommend wholeheartedly.

Roscoe:  Hey. Listen up. I want all of yous to say hello to the Simpsons. 

Workers:  Hellloooo!

Homer:  [gasps] Has the whole world gone insane?

Worker 1:  Stand still! There's a spark in your hair!

Worker 2:  Get it, get it, get it!

Homer:  [groans]

Shirtless Worker:  Hot stuff coming through!

Homer:  [screams]

Bart:  Dad, why did you bring me to a gay steel mentally ill? 

Homer:  [distressed] I don't know. This is a nightmare! You're all sick! 

Worker 3:  Oh, be nice.

[The Simpsons theme song plays]

Drew:  You are listening to Gayest Episode Ever, the podcast that looks at LGBT-themed episodes of classic sitcoms, which is to say very special episodes that also happen to be very gay episodes. I'm Drew Mackie. 

Glen:  I'm Glen Lakin. 

Drew:  And in case that intro didn't tip you off, today we are talking about The Simpsons. I'm so excited to talk about The Simpsons on a podcast. There's maybe no other entity I know more about or have invested more time in—

Glen:  That includes his family. 

Drew:  Absolutely true. I have definitely spent more time with The Simpsons than my actual physical family. Before we get into it, I'm going to introduce our guest, Dr. Bryan Wuest. 

Bryan:  Hi there. My name is Bryan Wuest. I just finished my PhD at UCLA in cinema and media studies, and my expertise is queer media. 

Drew:  Which is why you're here right now because this is the first and gayest and best episode of The Simpsons. 

Bryan:  Is this the first one with any gay content? 

Drew:  Arguably.

Glen:  Mine is the Smithers wink, wink, nudge, nudge. 

Drew:  This is the first explicitly gay episode of The Simpsons. Yeah. So Bryan, tell us a little bit about your field of study. 

Bryan:  Yeah. So I look at queer media pretty generally, but my dissertation specifically was about LGBT-niche distribution companies. So if you go on Netflix and look at the gay and lesbian—I guess it's LGBT now—LGBT category, a lot of the content there will have been put out by these distributors, and they were part of helping LGBT become a category of media the same way we think of genres like horror and sci-fi and whatever else. 

Drew:  That's crazy to think about. Tell us a little bit about what it's like to specialize in the queer branch of a cultural field of study. How new is that specialization? 

Bryan:  So queer studies has been part of the academy since the early '90s. There was stuff before. It was called gay and lesbian studies, and then queer became a theoretical idea in the '90s, partly coming off of Queer Nation and the AIDS era. So it's kind of a mix of queer theory and media studies. It's kind of been cobbled together out of both of those and how they speak to each other. It's kind of new, I guess. I guess since the '90s there's been a lot of gay film studies. If you ever read The Celluloid Closet or seen the documentary, that was the '80s and that was one of the first big, important texts that Vito Russo wrote that is very much like an angry screed against the way that gays had been represented in Hollywood. 

Glen:  What is the class break-up like? Do you find that most of your students are out gay students? 

Bryan:  Yeah. So I teach other classes that aren't specifically queer, but when I teach queer ones, generally speaking I find that the men tend to be gay, and the women it's more of an even split. 

Drew:  I guess that makes sense. 

Bryan:  Yeah. And sometimes you can take these classes for—if you're social work major, you just take people studies classes—like you could take African American studies—and they take queer studies. So some people just are taking it as part of that. But then some people clearly have skin in the game, and so it's really interesting to see their work and the kind of questions that they ask. 

Drew:  Most recently you taught a few classes at UCLA, and you actually taught some sitcoms. Is that right? 

Bryan:  Yeah. So I was teaching an undergrad lecture class, Film and Social Change, which was mostly film. But the last week I was talking a little bit about TV, and I showed some Ellen and some Will & Grace and then some Fresh Off the Boat. 

Drew:  Oh. Was it the one where the neighbor girl comes out? 

Bryan:  No. So that one wasn't queer. It was the one where he goes on a morning show and he's trying to figure out, as an Asian American man, should he be funny, should he be serious, and it's kind of about the burden of representation. It's a really good episode. 

Drew:  Right. Yeah. There's actually a gay storyline in the most recent season that we might do as a bonus episode on here, maybe over the summer. It was a really well-handled coming out story for a teenage female character. It's probably not classic enough, but they did such a good job with it that I want to talk about it, so I'll have to make Glen watch it. I want to make more people watch it. 

Glen:  I'll watch it. 

Drew:  All right. So we are talking today about The Simpsons. The episode is "Homer's Phobia," which originally aired February 16th, 1997. Where were you guys in February of 1997? And also, what was your relationship to The Simpsons at this point in your life? 

Bryan:  So in 1997, I was 12. 

Glen:  Go fuck yourself [laughter]. 

Bryan:  And we were not allowed to watch The Simpsons in our household because Bart was not respectful to his parents. 

Drew:  He's not. It's true. Accurate. 

Bryan:  In our household, Full House even was a little questionable because the parents were sometimes sort of wrong at the end, and the kids would teach them lessons. 

Drew:  Huh. 

Bryan:  Yeah. So we weren't watching The Simpsons. I think at that—no, Buffy was a little bit later. I would sneak Buffy in my room once I got a TV in my own room because that wasn't explicitly allowed. It seemed like that one would be tenuous if I watched it out in the living room. But, yeah. So I didn't get into The Simpsons until later, kind of late high school, early college. So to me, it was just a bad object about disrespectful children. 

Drew:  That makes sense. Okay. 

Glen:  I was in it from the ground floor. My brother and I would watch Tracy Ullman Show on Sunday nights, and I love The Simpsons. I was so ready for that Christmas special, and I watched pretty much every episode live when it aired until I went to college. 

Drew:  They actually don't do very many animated shows live. It's very hard on the animators' wrists [laughter].

Glen:  Well, I mean—the broadcast was live. I'm not talking about rock live. But yeah, I was a diehard Simpsons fan, and—I don't know if my life was changed by it. I still say, "In theory, communism works," all the time. 

Drew:  "In theory." 

Glen:  "In theory. So, yeah. I'm maybe not as avid of a fan as you, but up until a point I considered myself—I don't know. What would you call a Simpsons fanatic? You know, Barry Manilow has fanilows. What are Simpsons fans? 

Drew:  I don't know if there's a word for the—I'm sure if there was a popular term I would have heard it by now, but I don't think there actually is one. Just Simpsons nerd who's constantly quoting The Simpsons, and speaks in Simpsons, basically. 

Glen:  I think that's called a white, gay man—or a white man of a certain age. 

Drew:  That's true. I did not watch Tracy Ullman, but I was there from the Christmas special—that's the pilot. I've seen every episode of The Simpsons, which means I never stopped watching The Simpsons. Even though they are not as good as they used to be, I still find it very comforting, and occasionally they are good. But of all the things in my life that I've ever been obsessive and nerdy about, this is the one I've known the most about and spent the most time with and love so much. And before we go any further, I should just say I need to give a shoutout to Talking Simpsons, which is a podcast about The Simpsons where they're going through every episode chronologically. I started listening maybe a year ago and burned through all of their content, all of their backlog, and look forward to these episodes on a weekly basis. They do research and they talk about the cultural context and they talk about the jokes and explain jokes and stuff, and it's so up my alley that I did my own TV-talking show, and I think we're approaching it from a slightly different angle, but this podcast owes a great debt to Talking Simpsons, and we wouldn't be talking about it now if they hadn't put the bug in my ear to talk about TV that's meaningful to me. So yeah, everyone, listen to Talking Simpsons. They do a great job, and it's one of my favorite podcasts. All that said, here's what we are going to say about The Simpsons—also, we're talking about this episode before they get to "Homer's Phobia," which I kind of feel like I'm snaking them on but in a very small way. 

Glen:  Well, then maybe they should be faster. 

Drew:  They're going week to week. They don't miss a week. They started with episode one. They just haven't got there yet. They're almost there. So this episode is the episode that has John Waters as a guest star, and he plays John, who is essentially a Simpsons version of John Waters, and is the first episode that deals with anything explicitly gay. However, The Simpsons has a history of using gay content as a running joke, basically. And I just wanted to quickly go through—yes, Smithers was the first one, and they thought it'd be funny to make Smithers gay, and there's all these running jokes about Smithers being gay. The also did it with Patty. Both of them eventually did come out and are now out gay characters on the show, which is kind of cool. But they still do it. They do Millhouse. Millhouse is gay sometimes; sometimes he's in love with Lisa. Whenever it's convenient for a joke, they do use it. They do it with Martin. Martin, he's a little gay boy—he's going to grow up to be a gay man, and they treat it like a gentle punchline. Grampa, sometimes. Grampa has some running gay jokes. He talked about how he wore a dress for a period in the '40s, and he's the president of the Gay and Lesbian Association for some reason as he's pulling cards out of his wallet. Lenny and Carl. Lenny and Carl, they always make jokes about how they're secretly in a relationship. Duffman. Duffman, later on in the series, has a runner about being secretly gay and crushed by his sexual secret. And then Bart. This episode is all about Homer being concerned that Bart is secretly gay. They actually have done this before on the show. You guys remember? There was a pageant episode where Lisa enters an underage beauty pageant. Bart coaches her, and he's really good at walking in heels, and he gives her beauty tips that he just knows out of nowhere. It's kind of outside what we normally think of Bart being like, but it's not wholly out of nowhere that there's this gay element to Bart, I guess.  

Glen:  I think that happens anytime you make a young boy clever—he reads as gay. If he's aware of history and culture and sort of reads as older than his years, everyone's going to be like, "Oh. He's gay." 

Bryan:  Yeah. And the episode sort of treats it this way, that being gay is tantamount to just a lot of deep pop-culture knowledge, and so when Bart is like that it can code as gay, I think. 

Drew:  Like, "How else would you know about that? Why do you know about his? Where did you get that wig, Bart?" Where did he get that wig? 

Glen:  Why is he familiar with the works of Pablo Neruda? 

Drew:  [laughs] That is—yeah. He shouldn't know Pablo Neruda. This episode aired February 16th, 1997. It did not do so well in the ratings. It was 47th for the week, which is actually pretty low considering that Simpsons overall in that year was the 30th most-watched show, tied with Everybody Loves Raymond, which was in its first season, which is weird to think about. 

Bryan:  Was the show promoted as a gay episode? Do you know the commercials beforehand, like Ellen was like, "Here's the gay episode"?

Drew:  Usually I do remember what the commercials were like. I don't remember this one. There was some promotion. I remember, because I was that weird teenager who had a subscription to Entertainment Weekly back in the day, and during their new fall season preview, they did talk about how they were going to do a gay episode that John Waters was going to be on. I'm not sure if I knew who John Waters was at the time, but—

Glen:  The commercials for the episode definitely did mention John Waters. 

Drew:  Did it seem gay? Do you remember? 

Glen:  In that John Waters seems gay. 

Drew:  Right. 

Bryan:  How much of a draw is John Waters to a mainstream audience? What movie was he on then? 

Drew:  Serial Mom is the one that came out closest to this, and that was actually a pretty big hit. But it's also not the gayest John Waters movie ever in some ways, although I think almost every gay man I've ever met has seen that movie. But yeah, didn't do well. But fuck them, because we're talking about it all these years later, and it won a ton of awards. It won the Emmy for Best Animated Program, which is kind of awesome because that means this is the one they picked as "This is the best thing we did this year. This is the one we think is going to get an Emmy," and it worked. It also won a GLAAD Award for depicting gay people properly. And the director Mike Anderson won an Annie Award for doing this. Mike Anderson, by the way, directed a ton of Simpsons episodes. He did "Lisa the Iconoclast," "You Only Move Twice," and most recently "Halloween of Horror," which was that non-"Treehouse of Terror" Halloween episode they did two years ago, maybe, where everyone was like, "Oh. This is really good." It is really good. If you ever are bored and you want to watch a good episode of The Simpsons that aired recently, "Halloween of Horror" is a very well-written Lisa episode that just happens to take place on Halloween and isn't "Treehouse of Terror" style. It's a normal Halloween story, and they did a really, really good job of it. Most of the episodes we've done so far we talk about what else was going on the few other gay episodes that aired around the time of this. There's a ton of stuff going on in this one. The ones that aired most closely were the Ned and Stacey called "Saved by the Belvedere," which has—

Glen:  Oh, yes. I know it. 

Drew:  You remember this. So Mr. Belvedere guest stars, basically as himself, but he is basically just Mr. Belvedere. Do you remember Ned and Stacey? 

Bryan:  No. 

Glen:  What!

Drew:  It was Debra Messing and Thomas Haden Church—Debra Messing before Will & Grace, Thomas Haden Church after Wings. And it was—they were married? 

Glen:  They were fake married. See, the plot of Ned and Stacey is this: Ned needs a wife for work—he does advertising, and family men just apparently sell products better—and Stacey needed to get out of her parents' house. And so they got fake married so that she could have a place to live and he would have a wife for work events. And in this Mr. Belvedere episode, Mr. Belvedere is selling crackers or something like that. 

Drew:  And he advises a coworker of Ned's that "If you really love him, you should tell him. And then Ned, when he learns that a male coworker is in love with him, he decides to arm himself with a gun—which GLAAD actually chastised Fox for doing, and Fox apologized. And then it was canceled the next episode. That was the penultimate episode of the show. Debra Messing turned out fine, but it's a weird little footnote in her career that I feel like people don't remember. It was kind of funny. It was a dark, mean show but was actually kind of funny. 

Glen:  Yeah. I loved it. 

Drew:  Along similar lines, there was a Married with Children that aired very close to this where Amanda Bearse plays the lesbian cousin of her character on the show. She plays Marcy D'Arcy. This one episode she also plays Marcy's lesbian cousin. I kind of want to do that episode next season because I just want to talk about Married with Children in any sort of context. But there are so many gay episodes happening in this time period—most famously "The Puppy Episode," which would air in two months. "The Puppy Episode" is the episode of Ellen where she finally comes out. But, yeah. Is this what people talk about when they talk about the Gay '90s in terms of pop culture? 

Bryan:  Yeah. When people talk about the gay '90s, it's about on TV just this surge of tons and tons of gay content, and not even a show like Will & Grace, necessarily. But just like Roseanne and Seinfeld—they have episodes with gay characters, gay themes that kind of pop in and out, kind of coming from both a change in how advertisers were thinking about audiences and who they wanted to reach, and then also, I think, just a growing publicness of gayness in cultural life, probably because of the AIDS crisis which is sort of forcing people to address gayness in their everyday life. And then also what's happening in film, like queer new cinema and this rising awareness that there's an audience for queer-themed media. 

Drew:  It is weird to think about it being piped directly into people's homes on mainstream, really popular shows. 

Bryan:  Totally. Yeah, and that's why—I think  now there's more queer stuff on TV than there is in film, but back then it was much more film-centric, and probably because the way TV's always been regulated. This is a domestic site and it's coming into your home, and so it needs to be protected much more carefully as opposed to you choose to go to the theater and see whatever is there. 

Drew:  Right. Well, it's funny you mention that because the Fox censor, who originally took a pass on this episode, did not like it. They gave I think two solid pages of notes and said that—the censors stated that they "did not like the use of the word 'gay' or the discussion of homosexuality at all," and closed with a paragraph which stated that "the topic and substance of this episode are unacceptable for broadcast." And they were like, "What the fuck?" Eventually, there was a turnover at Fox. The president left, the censor got replaced, and when they resubmitted it to the new censor they were like, "Yeah. It's good." But it was the most notes they'd ever got back for anything, and it's kind of nuts to think about because there is very little to be offended by in this episode unless you hate gay people. 

Bryan:  Yeah. It's a pretty gentle gayness. 

Drew:  Yeah. 

Glen:  Well, this is coming off of the hate mail you got about the Archie Bunker episode that we did. 

Drew:  Yeah. We got a single piece of hate mail about the All in the Family episode. It's on SoundCloud. You can look at it there. 

Glen:  I think just a general note in approaching this episode, I think how they portray Homer in this episode is the best-case scenario of how people excuse Archie Bunker in All in the Family in that Homer's behavior is so clearly lampooned in this episode that no one's takeaway is going to be "I should be like this," and that this is an okay attitude to have. He dances that line between we can still laugh at him and kind of care about him, but no one in their right mind would say that's an okay way to talk. 

Drew:  Right. 

Bryan:  And homosexuality isn't the problem; it's heterosexual discomfort is the problem, and it throws up the way he reacts and that's what we're laughing at as opposed to laughing at John Waters. 

Drew:  Right. Yeah. We're not meant to laugh at him. He's urbane and an entertaining person. Yeah, Heterosexual discomfort is actually probably the biggest theme of this podcast because we're doing straight TV shows that have one-off gay episodes, and most of them are about heterosexual discomfort [laughter]. So this episode starts out with Bart being a troublemaking rapscallion. 

[Simpsons music plays while children chatter excitedly]

Bart:  All right. Everybody got their ticket? Then get ready for today's Super Bart-o Jackpot Drawing!

[dryer whirs]

Millhouse:  Come on, cantaloupe!

urbBart:  And round and round—uh-oh.

[dryer explodes while children scream and cry]

Bart:  No refunds! Force majeure. Read the back of your ticket. 

Drew:  Glen, do you have any thoughts on what happens? 

Glen:  Well, yeah. You mentioned to me earlier, like, "Oh, we can just skip past the dryer incident," and I was like, "What?" This is me reaching. I have a history of reaching. 

Drew:  Explain what he does first. 

Glen:  So Bart is running a lottery of sorts out of the dryer. There are a bunch of balls—

Drew:  And a cantaloupe. 

Glen:  —and a cantaloupe and, most importantly, one pink shoe. And the pink shoe gets lodged in the dryer, which then dislodges from the wall and flames shoot out of it. 

Drew:  Oh!

Glen:  So the stretched metaphor of it is: The one pink shoe causes the dryer to go flaming.

Drew:  All right. 

Glen:  So this is what Homer's fear with Bart is the entire episode—that one pink-slash-gay influence is going to make him flaming. 

Drew:  I'm okay with that. I'm okay with your read. That's a good read. I did not think about that, though. 

Glen:  What say you, Doctor?  

Bryan:  Interpretation is a complicated thing. 

Drew:  [laughs] So, they have to pay a giant gas bill, and they have no money. And in order to offset the debt, Marge decides she's going to sell her family's precious Civil War figurine inherited from her grandmother, and so they take it to—the mall? Because there's a knickknack, kitschy, curiosity shop in the mall. I never have seen anything like that in a mall. Is that a real thing? 

Bryan:  The Springfield Mall is just so functional. 

Drew:  I guess if the Leftorium can exist there, so can this knickknack shop. 

Glen:  It shouldn't go without saying that it's called Cockamamie's. 

Drew:  Cockamamie's. I didn't really think about that until right now, either. That is a great name for a gay kitsch shop. So she tries to sell the figurine, and she learns—they meet John, and John is John Waters's character. He looks just like John Waters with more hair, and he is kind of like a gay hipster. A lot of the things I associate with hipster culture now, I'm like, "Oh." The first time I ever saw them was this middle-aged-ish gay man. 

Glen:  Yeah. I wouldn't call him a hipster, though, because I think he was just a clever, kitschy gay man that younger generations of gay men adopted as hipster culture. 

Drew:  I guess that's true. Okay. 

Bryan:  Yeah. It's an old gay type of this obsession with these older pop-cultural artifacts.

Drew:  Keep in mind—I'll mention again, you're talking to someone whose house is decorated with stuff he inherited from his grandmother. 

Glen:  I agree. This is a special breed of gay man before they had to grow up and live without being out, necessarily, so a lot of their passion is poured into recapturing their childhood. So hipsters appropriate this culture because it's cool and not many people know about where John comes at it from an earnest passion. And so I feel like hipster is not the most accurate description of him. 

Drew:  Right. Okay. I will accept that I was wrong. I think he actually comes in—the line that gets him in was him showing—Marge is ooh-ing and ahh-ing at a TV Guide that was owned by Jackie O. 

Marge:  [gasps] Oh Homer, look! Look. A TV Guide owned by Jackie O.

John:  Oh, you should see the crossword puzzle. She thought that Mindy lived with Mark. 

Homer:  Give her a break. Her husband was killed. 

Glen:  Homer's line in this scene still makes me laugh. "Give her a break. Her husband was killed." [laughter]

Drew:  She couldn't invest herself in sitcoms, her husband was killed. Yeah. That makes sense. Also, John reveals that the Civil War figurine is actually a liquor bottle and is basically worthless. 

John:  Hmm. Well see, here's the thing on this. It's a Johnny Reb bottle, early 1970s. One of the J&R Whiskey Liquor Lads. Two books of green stamps, if I'm not mistaken.

Marge:  Oh, no. Oh, no. No, no, no, no. It's a very, very old figurine.

John:  No, it's a liquor bottle. See? [John pours whiskey] Ahh! That'll make your bull run.

Marge:  [grunts] Well I guess it'll always be a monument to Grandma's secret drinking problem.

Drew:  Homer is confounded by the shop and that anyone would find value in this mid-century garbage, as he sees it, and he gives a definition of "camp." 

Homer:  Okay. So maybe that thing's a hunk of junk, but look at what you're selling. Fifty bucks for a toy? No kid is worth that.

John:  Oh, but this is the Rex Mars Atomic Discombobulator. Don't you just love the graphics on this box? 

Homer:  No. How can you love a box or a toy or graphics? You're a grown man.

John:  It's camp! The tragically ludicrous? The ludicrously tragic? 

Homer:  Oh, yeah. Like when a clown dies.

John:  Well, sort of. But I mean more like inflatable furniture or Last Supper TV trays, or even this bowling shirt. Can you believe somebody gave this to Goodwill? 

Marge:  [chuckles nervously]

Drew:  In my mind it's actually kitsch, but I suppose there's an academic difference, and you might know. Brian, what are your thoughts on this? 

Bryan:  Yeah. Well, when people talk about camp and kitsch, a lot of times kitsch is the object, and then camp is what you as a reader or a viewer do with it. It's a mode of reception. And to me, this episode makes some connections between camp in sort of a queer approach to camp and then also just general nerd culture, because he loves Itchy & Scratchy, which Bart is excited about, which to me feels like less of a gay-specific thing. It's just sort of like a pop-culture nerd thing. But, yeah. In academia, camp has been thought about in different ways. One of the famous landmarks of thinking about camp is Susan Sontag in 1964 Notes on "Camp," and she really separates camp from queerness and sees it as an approach to pop culture that is about reveling in failure and high goals but missed—you don't hit the goal that you were going for—but passion, right, this earnest passion for something, and that if you are not fully committed to your project it can never be camp, right? And so for her, it's like if someone's trying to make something that's campy, it will never be proper camp because it has to have that full effort of passion behind it. 

Glen:  What I'm hearing is "camp" is Diane from Cheers. 

Bryan:  If Susan Sontag wrote her article later, that may have come up. 

Drew:  You get a chance to defend this when we talk about Cheers in three episodes. 

Bryan:  But since then, a lot of people, when they've written about camp, they sort of tried to take it back from Susan Sontag separating it from queerness and say that no, it's inherently queer. And an organization like Queer Nation, which was doing these really theatrical protests in the late '80s or, I guess, early '90s, where they are throwing up institutions like the government and medicine and the church in order to draw attention to their cause and raise awareness of the way in which people with AIDS were not being seen. And some of it, too, is that it was in order to flip a narrative that they were obviously—gay people were seen as these tragic figures and these victims that were being ravaged by this disease. And as the only thing that they could do, they just kind of flipped it into this weird, sometimes funny thing as a resistance method or way of coping, and partly as a way to just have some agency over the narrative themselves, and then also because if they're dying and they're not getting funding from the government to research AIDS, all they can do is make theater out of it. And camp has often been associated with, since John Waters, the movie Polyester, which is one that is very much like a family melodrama, but Divine is playing the mom. And a lot of times the way people thought about queer camp is it is meant to upend the normalness of heterosexuality. So if you take a show like Leave It to Beaver, in retrospect it seems very antiquated and sort of banal, and that—the queer camp approach, that would be to say, "Look at this. This paradigm of heterosexuality is so silly. This isn't the only way to live or a normal way to live," and so it's a way to shake up the dominance of heterosexuality as a norm—which I don't know that The Simpsons is using camp exactly in that way. It's more of a reception mode of like, "I have this weird appreciation for something that is earnest but ultimately lacking in taste, or middlebrow," or whatever else.

Glen:  I feel like how you just described camp would apply to how John approaches the Simpsons themselves in a later scene, when he goes to visit their home and talks about their 2.3 kids and the Hi-C and pearls on a little girl. That feels like a more apt use of camp. 

Bryan:  Yeah. You're exactly right. It's the idea of just seeing artifice in everything, and so seeing that that's not the way in which everyone has to live their life, but by doing it—the Simpsons having their life organized in this way—that he wants to point it out, like, "Look at all these ways in which you're aligning with this really standard model of the American family." Yeah. That's a good example. 

Drew:  Okay. So I have a question. When we were moving stuff out of my grandma's house, I found a bunch of packaged toys, and I was like, "Oh. These are awesome." They're all stuff that my mom or my uncle played with when they were little kids. I have them in a box in the spare bedroom right now. I like the graphic of them. 

Glen:  How much are they worth?

Drew:  No. I guess I'm trying to understand the intersection of nerdiness and queer culture because I often can't separate the two. Actually, when I did Sewers of Paris two weeks ago, I was aware that I don't know where one ends and one begins because it's an obsession with detail and aesthetics, and they're almost the same thing for me. I can't really explain—I certainly can't explain to my parents why I, a gay man, am attracted to aesthetics, and I don't know if it's a camp appeal. I really—can you tell me what that is? Why am I drawn to this vestige of American life that I was not even ever alive for? 

Bryan:  Yeah. When people write about camp, they talk about the '60s as a point in which camp as a queer thing kind of entered into popular culture, stuff like Andy Warhol and just this irony. And the way that Susan Sontag thinks about camp is very much just in this attention to pop culture, this irony, this love for the middlebrow and bad objects, and I think that that's very—because I'm not interested in policing anyone's approach to camp. I'm just relating how it's been talked about, and that infused just the way we thought about pop culture in the '60s. And Susan Sontag talks about that, that Jewish people and gay people specifically, she sees as the vanguard of a change or aesthetics in American society and that yeah, this thing that was a queer object turned into something that just underlay all of society. And so I think the appreciation for pop culture and this old stuff that you have no clear connection to, but you still feel this attachment to is that more general pop culture appreciation that I think is underlapped with a camp idea but has moved a little bit away from when it was a specifically queer object. 

Drew:  I can be okay with that. 

Glen:  Is the intersection just that for a long time, queer communities were robbed of the normality? Like, we weren't going to have the families with 2.3 kids, or we at least weren't going to love having them. And so is [it] the longing for these objects that sort of represent a normal life?

Drew:  Oh. I kind of like that. 

Bryan:  Yeah. And I think that some of this association between camp and queerness is because so much of reading media or society as a gay person was not having things that were explicitly gay and explicitly for you, and so you kind of had to learn how to make sense of and how to make use of things that weren't exactly meant for you. And so that's always been a part. In film studies, it's like reading against the grain—it's that you find value in a movie like Wizard of Oz or All About Eve where you find something there that works for you and are reading what you are looking for out of it, and you make use of it, which is something that I think gay people have just had to learn to do traditionally with a dearth of stuff that gay people didn't have to extrapolate from. 

Drew:  And that seems like exactly what John's doing with his whole life. It's different than me, because he probably lived through that era because he's older than—he's older than I am now, I would assume. 

Bryan:  For me, John seems like someone who saw his mom and his grandma with this kind of stuff, and it imprinted on him, and it's part of just what he values in the world. This is reading a lot into John's character, creating a backstory for him, but that's how I read him. 

Drew:  That's what we're here for. 

Glen:  Also, he lives in fucking Springfield. This is his shield against the people, like his neighbors. 

Drew:  Right. He seems too good to live in Springfield. He finds charm in the small things. And we're ready to move on to the scene where he actually goes to their house. He immediately goes in the house and is in love with everything about the way their house looks. Here's an interesting point though. The Simpsons were born during the Tracy Ullman shorts and solidified in 1989 when the series started properly. Those writers were all children of the '60s and '70s, and the Simpsons's interior aesthetic has never really changed. But a lot of things about the Simpsons's interior life is very '60s, like Marge is always making gelatin molds, which is something they shied away from as the thing went on. But a lot of things were presented with—when the show was first kicking off in the early '90s—were stuff those late 20s and early 30s writers would have remembered from their own childhoods, and it basically locked, and it's like a weird time capsule of kitsch, basically. 

Glen:  Mm-hmm. 

Bryan:  And that snack that Marge makes—the Happy Cracker Snack Platter or whatever—makes me think of—have you ever seen those ads? I think they're coming off of the Depression era when you made a salad that was mostly Jell-O and that kind of stuff. It looked like those disgusting foods you see in those advertisements, right? 

Drew:  Made to be smiling. 

Bryan:  Yeah, which to me is something that—yeah, it's a camp object for me that people ate this way, and in retrospect you can be like, "Isn't it outrageous that they used to do this?" 

Glen:  Isn't it a plot point in The Shape of Water? The gay character in that paints those ads, like the ad for the Jell-O mold. 

Drew:  He does do that. I walked out of The Shape of Water, but I saw enough to see that. 

Bryan:  I haven't seen it, but I've listened to the soundtrack, and that part is lovely. 

Drew:  I've heard the soundtrack on NPR. It's lovely. I say we keep listening to the soundtrack, but I'm the extreme minority on this one. 

Glen:  Tune in to our Shape of Water podcast [laughter]. 

Drew:  But, yeah. So their house is full of corn on kitchen curtains and rabbit ears and stuff. 

John:  Oh, man. You weren't kidding about this place. Well, I just love it. 

Homer:  Do I know you? 

John:  Oh, the color scheme and the rabbit ears, and the 2.3 children. I mean, where's the Hi-C? 

Lisa:  Hi-C and Fluffernutters.

John:  Oh! And pearls on a little girl. It's a fairy tale.

Lisa:  [flattered, nervous laughter]

John:  Oh, I've got the exact same curtains, only in my bathroom. Didn't you just die when you found these? 

Marge:  Not really. They just had corn on them. Kitchen, corn.

John:  Oh!

Marge:  [laughs flirtatiously]

Drew:  On the DVD commentary, John Waters actually mentions that he thinks the Simpsons's bedroom is the gayest thing on TV chromatically speaking. I'm like, "Oh, yeah." It's really bright colors. It's really garish. That's not something—maybe a mid-century couple would do, but a modern family would not actually have paint that looks like that. If you would realize that in real life, it would be a lot to take in. Oh. Weirdly, the director of this and John Waters liked working with each other, and they tried to get a sitcom starting John Waters. It was called either The Patent Leather Dreamhouse or Uncle John, and they pitched it to a bunch of networks. No one picked up on it. No one wanted that. 

Glen:  I would have watched it. 

Bryan:  That is a travesty. 

Drew:  It's a travesty that John Waters does not have more to do. At the very least, they should put him back on the fucking Simpsons. But he has not directed a feature film since A Dirty Shame, which I think was 2008.

Glen:  Did you see it in theaters? 

Drew:  No. I heard it wasn't very good. 

Glen:  Well, then you're part of the problem. 

Drew:  I watched it on DVD. I actually didn't love it that much. But it's been forever since he directed a movie. Please, someone give this man something to do. We need him more than ever [laughs]. I think he would be a very nice influence to have in mainstream American culture. 

Bryan:  He came to UCLA and did a public show when I was there. 

Drew:  Really? 

Bryan:  Because wasn't he hitchhiking around the country? 

Drew:  He was. 

Bryan:  He kind of talked about that, and he gave out a bottle of poppers to someone in the audience. 

Glen:  A new bottle of poppers?

Bryan:  Oh. It was uncracked.

Drew:  Okay. Good. So he loves everything in their house, and post-dinner, he puts on Alicia Bridges's "I Love the Nightlife," which is a record the Simpsons just randomly have. And Homer and John are dancing and enjoying it. 

Homer:  So do those records have camp value? 

John:  Everything here does. You yourself are worth a bundle, Homer. Why, I could wrap a bow around you and slap on a price tag.

Homer:  [laughs]

["I Love the Nightlife" plays]

John:  Come on, Homer. Join the party. 

Drew:  Oh. There's the line where Bart and Lisa are really excited about—you said, "He likes Itchy & Scratchy, and he collects toy robots," and I was like, "Wait. Are all the gay men I know now basically John from this episode of The Simpsons? 

Glen:  Yes [laughter].

Drew:  The whole arrested development thing and investing yourself in stuff that's supposed to be for kids and finding value in it is another thing most any of the gay men I'm friends with do. 

Glen:  Don't go into my bedroom. 

Drew:  It's full of robots. 

Glen:  No. No, I don't have any robots. Oh. I have some Lego robots. I think what this scene does is what—and you can speak to this, what the queer '90s in TV was like. But I feel like a lot of these gay characters were brought in to make the normal cast happier. Like, straight people are just so happy when a gay man is around, as is Homer until he finds out he's gay. 

Drew:  Until very shortly. Yeah. 

Glen:  But I don't know. It's so often that gay characters come in and take the wives dancing or teach the kids about this beautiful art thing. We're expected to make these boring lives better. 

Drew:  To some degree, yeah. 

Bryan:  Yeah, and they bring this wealth of pop-culture knowledge and a sparkling wit, and they—yeah. They kind of function as this little wizard that comes into your life and just improves it, like gay magic. 

Drew:  Magical homosexual. 

Bryan:  Yes. 

Drew:  Yeah. Is that a stock character? Is that a problematic stock character? I feel like it should be. 

Bryan:  I'm trying to think, because there's the magical negro as a stock character. I'm trying to think if there's a—there must be some named equivalent. 

Drew:  The closest I can think of is Endora from Bewitched, but she doesn't help anyone [laughter]. 

Glen:  Well, we'd have to be sorcerers because that's a charisma-based class. 

Drew:  Mm-hmm. That's a Dungeons & Dragons reference. I'm outnumbered by people who know more about—

Bryan:  Yeah. That was for me. 

Drew:  —know more about Dungeons & Dragons than I do. Yeah. The next morning, Homer's like, "John's great. We should invite him and his wife over for drinks," which I don't think the Simpsons ever had anyone over for drinks, but—

Glen:  That's not true. 

Drew:  Just for drinks? 

Glen:  I don't know. 

Drew:  They have dinner parties that always go poorly. But Marge knows what's up, though, and without John ever explicitly telling her that we saw, she's like, "Didn't he seem a little festive to you?" 

Glen:  Yeah. Her euphemism game is on point [laughter]. 

Drew:  I think it's cool that Marge knows because there's a previous episode—it might be after this, actually. It's around here. There's a point where she doesn't seem to know about gay people. Lisa talks about how she's going to have a boring summer without friends, and she's like, "Grown-up nerds, like Gore Vidal, and even he's kissed more boys than I ever have," and Marge's response is "Girls, Lisa. Boys kiss girls," which I assume she does not know that Gore Vidal is gay. In this one instance, she has put it together. 

Homer:  That John is the greatest guy in the world. We got to have him and his wife over for drinks sometime.

Marge:  [groans] I don't think he's married, Homer.

Homer:  Oh, a swinging bachelor, eh? Well, there's lots of foxy ladies out there.

Marge:  Homer, didn't John seem a little festive to you?

Homer:  Couldn't agree more. Happy as a clam.

Marge:  He prefers the company of men.

Homer:  Who doesn't? 

Marge:  Homer, listen carefully. John is a ho-mo—

Homer:  Right.

Marge:  —sexual.

[dramatic music plays]

Homer:  [screams]

Glen:  He's okay with the first two parts [laughter]. Ho-mo—

Drew:  It could have been sapiens. But, yeah. Like you said, this is Homer at his most Archie Bunker-esque. And it's clear he's an idiot. His reaction is stupid. I like the line about "Now we can't say that we've only had straight people in the house," which is not true because they've had Smithers and Patty in the house, and that has already gone out the window. 

Homer:  Oh, my god. Oh, my god. Oh, my god. Oh my god, I danced with a gay. Marge, Lisa, promise me you won't tell anyone. Promise me!

Marge:  You're being ridiculous.

Homer:  Am I, Marge? Am I? Think of the property values. Now we can never say only straight people have been in this house.

Drew:  It's a little out of character for Homer to be as homophobic as he is, to be just horrified that a gay was in his house. But maybe I'm saying this as a gay person, and a straight person in 1997 might have acted this way? I don't know. What do you guys think? 

Bryan:  He danced with him. 

Drew:  He danced. They bumped butts. 

Bryan:  Which I think is what really introduces that threat. 

Drew:  Right. 

Bryan:  Bart hasn't started imitating him quite yet. 

Drew:  No. 

Bryan:  But soon after, Bart is imitating him, which then I think that danger creeps up that Bart is going to—

Drew:  Turn gay. 

Bryan:  But yeah, that Bart is imitating this gay fellow. 

Drew:  Oh. I forgot to say, the two working titles for this episode were "Bart the Homo" and "Bart Goes to Camp."

Glen: [gasps]

Drew:  Which no one got. But I'm like, "Oh, that's such a better title." But yeah, "Homer's Phobia" is actually not a bad title. We've talked about this before. I can't remember what episode. You talked about the sneaky homosexual who doesn't announce himself. He actually calls him out as a sneak. He said, "He should at least have the good taste to mince around and let everyone know he's that way." 

Glen:  Which leads to the famous line, which you will edit in—

Marge:  What on earth are you talking about? 

Homer:  You know me, Marge. I like my beer cold, my TV loud, and my homosexuals flaaaaming. 

[John honks horn which plays "Somewhere Over the Rainbow"]

Glen:  I would also like to point out—if John doesn't count as flaming, what Homer would think constitutes an out gay man?

Drew:  Any of us would be like, "Oh. That guy's gay." Yeah. 

Bryan:  But that's actually an interesting point because I think the coding of him is gay, and what we read is the kitsch and camp love, and it's not that he's—he's not flipping his wrists around. It's so easy for us to read as gay, I think, but that's a particular kind of subcultural knowledge, maybe? 

Drew:  Right. There were specific animator directions that said, "Do not give him limp wrists. Do not give him really fluid hand motions." I don't know exactly what their intent was, but they did tell them not to do that. 

Glen:  Which is crazy because in Homer's earlier scenes with him, Homer's hand animation is more fluid. 

Drew:  He does it, and when he does "flaming," it's like this. 

Glen:  It's a podcast. Just imagine what Drew's doing [laughter]. 

Bryan:  It's beautiful. 

Drew:  I'm making gay hands. 

Glen:  And also, Homer's argument is then interrupted by John showing up, and his car horn is "Somewhere Over the Rainbow." 

Drew:  Which is pretty flaming. But I say this—there's a Judy Garland record right there. It's technically Dan's. 

Bryan:  No one is arguing that you're not flaming. Oh. It's right above the Doris Day Christmas Album I'm also seeing. 

Drew:  That I inherited from my grandma. 

Bryan:  [laughs] It's all coming together. 

Drew:  Yep!

Glen:  Oh, I wish I had left my Steven Universe record in here. 

Drew:  You did, didn't you? 

Glen:  No. I took it outside. 

Drew:  Oh. Why? You can't play it outside. 

Glen:  I can show people. 

Drew:  Frame it. That'll be a good use of a record. 

Glen:  I have my Care Bears Christmas album framed and hung. 

Drew:  I saw that. It's nice. I like it. So John takes everyone but Homer on the town for a drive, and he's doing a very gay insider, queer knowledge thing where he's like, "That's where—" He says, "Kent Brockman got caught cheating in the Springfield Marathon." I think that's a reference to an actual woman named Rosie Ruiz who in 1980 cheated in the Boston Marathon. And I'm not sure how she did it exactly, but I think she might have taken public transportation to get to there, and this woman just out of nowhere who didn't seem like she was in good shape beat everyone else. They were like, "Oh. That was weird." I think that's Rosie Ruiz. Fall in a Wikipedia hole with her. It's a real entertaining read. 

Bryan:  That just sounds resourceful. 

Drew:  I mean, it worked for a brief window of time. Good for her. And then Lupe Vélez is the other one. The story is that she was an actress who got sad and committed suicide and staged this elaborate suicide. Isn't that—

Glen:  Frasier mentions it. 

Drew:  Is it the pilot of Frasier? 

Glen:  Maybe. 

Drew:  Okay. It's early-early in Frasier. I think Roz tells the story? 

Glen:  Yeah. She does. 

Drew:  So she sets up this beautiful death scene where she's going to commit suicide, and she's wearing a beautiful dress, and she has candles lit, but she had enchiladas for dinner, and the pills she overdosed don't agree with the enchiladas, and she dies—she throws up into the toilet and drowns in her toilet. And that is a story that has stuck. I think Kenneth Anger is the reason that story was popularized. It is not true. That's not—she did die, but she didn't die in that embarrassing fashion. 

Glen:  That's too bad, because the moral of the story is that even if things don't work out how you thought they would, you might still succeed in the end—because you remember her death. 

Bryan:  What's the Kenneth Anger connection? 

Drew:  He wrote Hollywood Babylon. 

Bryan:  Oh. 

Drew:  The weird thing about Kenneth Anger is he has his films, and he also did this story of urban legends and half-truths and things he heard at a party somewhere and wrote a book. And one of them, I believe, is Lupe Vélez, and that is why we all think that story is true. She did commit suicide. She did not embarrass herself. However, we all remember the story anyway, and the Simpsons writer did. But according to John, Lupe Vélez bought her toilet in Springfield [laughs]. 

Bryan:  Oh. Thank you for that rabbit trail because I needed it for that deep cut. 

Drew:  Yeah. Sorry. Yeah. Maybe we'll cut this. They also run into Smithers, and I love—first of all, this is the idea that there's some sort of past between him and John is maybe the first indication that Smithers is actually gay and not just a sad man who's in love with Mr. Burns. Also, John is like, "Waylon. These are the Simpsons." He's like, "I know the Simpsons," because everything in his life for the last few years has revolved around them as far as we know [laughter]. 

Glen:  They come back. 

Drew:  They come back, and Bart puts on a Hawaiian shirt. 

Homer: [makes chewing sounds]

Marge:  Homie, I can hear you chewing on your pillow. What's wrong? 

Homer:  [spits] Marge, the boy was wearing a Hawaiian shirt! 

Marge:  So? 

Homer:  There's only two kinds of guys who wear those shirts—gay guys and big fat party animals. And Bart doesn't look like a big fat party animal to me.

Marge:  So if you wore a Hawaiian shirt, it wouldn't be gay?

Homer:  Right. Thank you.

Bryan:  That was something I wrote in my nerds—in my notes. I wrote "Hawaiian shirt equals gay?" 

Drew:  Did you say "nerds"? [laughs]

Glen:  Well, because yeah, I feel like anything that is—and we could talk about him mirroring John.

Bryan:  Who here owned Hawaiian shirts at any point in your life? 

Drew:  I inherited my grandpa's Hawaiian shirt. 

Glen:  We're raising our hands. 

Drew:  Yeah. And I have one now. 

Glen:  The pineapple one? 

Drew:  Oh, I have two [laughs]. I have a pink one that has pineapples on it. But in the '90s, was that a gay thing? 

Bryan:  It was flamboyant removed from being gay. It's just it's a loud style thing. 

Glen:  Yeah. Wearing color. 

Bryan:  But, yeah. I don't—it seems to me that that would be a non-gay thing. It seems like it would be in bad taste? I don't know. 

Drew:  Yeah. Yeah, they would be too tacky. I wear mine to a tiki event, so that's why I feel it's okay. Fat party guys can wear Hawaiian shirts, and probably do. 

Glen:  That's why he's—yeah. 

Bryan:  That's a Sunny in Philadelphia joke later. When Mac gets really big, he starts wearing Hawaiian shirts, and it totally makes sense for him. 

Drew:  So Marge says, "You don't even know what you're worried about anymore," and says, "If there's a problem, it's because you're not spending enough time with Bart," which is one of a few times in this episode where someone says the right thing for the wrong reasons. Like, Homer not spending time with Bart isn't going to turn him gay, but Homer should be spending more time. He's a shitty father. He's not invested in his child at all. And Bart is latching on to John because he's using him as a surrogate father because he's an older man who has common interests with him and likes to tell him stuff, and Bart will take that. 

Bryan:  Yeah. That really seems to appeal to a certain idea about what turns kids gay, like this boy spends too much time with his mother or doesn't have a strong role model. And so I think you're right. Yeah. It's the right thing for the wrong reason. 

Glen:  Yeah. It's the only problematic part of the episode for me is Marge's correct advice but wrongheaded view. 

Drew:  Right. The next scene is Bart dancing in the wig. So Homer walks in on Bart, and he's wearing basically a Tracy Turnblad wig from Hairspray, which I'm like, "Where'd he get the wig? Who allowed him to buy this wig?" 

Glen:  I feel like John brought it. He's over for coffee or whatever. 

Drew:  Oh. He's over for coffee. That's right. So he's in the kitchen with Marge, and Marge doesn't really have friends. She has Ruth Powers for three episodes who is Sara Gilbert's mom, and she's friends with her but they don't do anything with her. And none of the other women in Springfield treat her nicely. They all kind of treat her very poorly. And for a few moments, she gets to be coffee friends with John. I'm very happy for her because Marge deserves more than she's getting. But John is ditching gossip.

John:  And Helen Lovejoy—sure, she looks blonde, but I've heard cuffs and collar don't match, if you get my drift.

Marge:  I don't, but I loved hearing it.

Bryan:  That was a line that also really stuck out to me because I think it really does establish the appeal of homosexuality for people. It's like, "I don't get what you're all about, but this is very shiny and cool to me." 

Drew:  Right. She's dazzled. 

Glen:  Also, maybe because we're so outside of, one, her social circle, but also societal norms. Like, we've already broken a big taboo, so we're allowed to be catty and bitchy and talk behind people's back, and somehow it's okay. 

Bryan:  We'll talk about the pastor wife's pubic hair. That's not a big deal. 

Drew:  So that's the thing. I didn't really understand that line, but I was watching the DVD commentary and they mention how that was them sneaking in a dirty line—a dirty joke. And I did not understand that cuffs and collars—I understand "the carpet doesn't match the drapes." That one makes sense. But I was like, "Wait. Do cuffs and collars—is that a pubic hair joke?" It is. They're talking about Helen Lovejoy's pubic hair, but I don't understand. The collar, obviously, is the head, but the cuff is—why is the cuff—the cuff is here, right? Why is the cuff near your crotch? 

Glen:  I don't know. Maybe she fists herself. 

Drew:  Ugh. 

Bryan:  It's not a great analogy.

Drew:  Yeah. But I asked Spencer [and] I asked Katherine. They were both like, "Yeah. That's what it is." I'm like, "Oh. Okay." Also, Helen Lovejoy's not blonde. Helen Lovejoy has gray hair, which is weird that in the Simpsons universe we're supposed to think she's blonde.

Glen:  Yeah. It's just weird coloring. Like, does Marge actually have blue hair? 

Drew:  Right. 

Bryan:  Which John wanted to buy when she came in his store, right? 

Drew:  Right. Right. It's also weird thinking that Marge's hair is more outlandish than anything you see in the movie Hairspray [laughter]. So Homer is incensed that Bart has been given a wig and let dance to "It's In His Kiss," and he comes in and just kind of unloads on John, and it's a beautiful rant about how—

Homer:  You seem like a perfectly nice guy and all, just stay the hell away from my family. 

John:  Well, now you don't get any candy. No, that's cruel. Take a teensy piece.

Homer:  No.

John:  Homer, what have you got against gays? 

Homer:  You know! It's not usual. If there was a law, it would be against it.

Marge:  Oh, Homer, please. You're embarrassing yourself.

Homer:  No, I'm not, Marge. They're embarrassing me. They're embarrassing America. They turned the Navy into a floating joke. They ruined all our best names, like Bruce and Lance and Julian. Those were the toughest names we had. Now they're just—ugh.

John:  Queer?

Homer:  Yeah. And that's another thing. I resent you people using that word. That's our word for making fun of you! We need it! Well, I'm taking back our word, and I'm taking back my son.

Drew:  I did find in doing a little bit of research, the one note John Waters gave—you read that, too? 

Bryan:  Yeah. 

Drew:  So it's one of two places where they use "queer" where in the original script it was "fag," and John Waters was like, "Maybe change it to 'queer.'" So it's either this queer, or at the end of the episode, Homer's like, "You like to be called 'queer,' right?" and he's like, "Or just John." One of those is "fag," and John Waters advised them against it, which I think is fine. But, yeah. Can you figure out which one? Is it this one? 

Bryan:  I think we probably read the same thing, but from what I read I assumed it was the first one just because it—because I don't think at that time, maybe, gay men had reclaimed "fag" as much as they had "queer," so I just assumed it was "queer." 

Drew:  Right. That was an actual cultural thing. 

Glen:  For me as a writer, it's weird that they would be different in the script because I feel like the power of Homer's last line in this episode—and we'll get to it—is that he did actually listen to—well, it was his own rant. But he was taking into account a conversation he had had with an actual gay man and trying to—in his own ham-fisted way—play by his terms or address his concerns. And so the fact that in the original script Homer doesn't do that callback is weird to me. 

Drew:  Right. So, yeah. He thinks Bart's gay, and he's very concerned about Bart turning gay. So lesson number one in not being gay is to park Bart in front of a cigarette billboard for—hours? 

Glen:  Two hours. 

Bryan:  Two hours. 

Drew:  And then it only makes Bart want a cigarette. 

Bryan:  A slim. 

Drew:  A slim—"Anything slim." The cigarette ad billboard has sexy ladies on it. But it's for Slim Cigarettes, so the ad clearly worked. 

Bryan:  Is it before that when they have the interaction with hugging and whatever in the car? 

Drew:  Oh, right. 

Bryan:  Because that is a point that I wrote down in my notes, that it made me think of that Vincente Minnelli film Tea and Sympathy, if you've seen that, where it's kind of coded—it's about this boy—is he gay? And his friend is trying to teach him how to—it's clear in the play that he's gay. In the movie, he's just kind of effeminate. And his friend is trying to teach him how to be more masculine and how to walk, and it's this really, really excellent scene where the more effeminate guy is asking his friend, "Okay. Show me how a man walks." And then once his more masculine friend has to do it to show off, he stops being able to do it and gets very caught up in the artifice of it. And to me, Homer was doing some of that. Once he's thinking about queerness and masculinity, every handshake, every hug, every hand on the shoulder becomes really suspect for him, and "I love you"—

Drew:  He's like, "Oh, not too long." 

Bryan:  Yeah. It puts normal—quote—normal masculinity and heterosexuality up on display and be like, "If you really look at this, how normal is it?" 

Drew:  Right. Yeah. You'll break your head thinking about it, which is why most straight men are angry.

Glen:  Yeah. It must be so miserable [laughter].

Drew:  "How do I do it right, guys?" "I don't know. No one told me." And then he takes Bart to the steel mill, which I think is probably one of the more famous sequences in the entire run of the show. 

Bryan:  Oh, yeah. 

Drew:  It's just such an amazing sequence. You probably know what it is, but—yeah. He takes them to the steel mill to learn how real men behave, and he meets Roscoe who has a great gruff voice—

Bryan:  Roscoe. 

Drew:  And then—[laughs]. They pull the break whistle. 

Homer:  Oh! My son doesn't stand a chance. The whole world's gone gay! 

[whistle blows]

Homer:  Oh, my god—what's happening now? 

Worker: We work hard; we play hard.

["Gonna' Make You Sweat (Everybody Dance Now)" by C+C Music Factory plays]

Homer:  [groans]

Drew:  Turns out that it's actually The Anvil [laughter]. 

Glen:  Which is so unsafe. 

Drew:  Oh, yeah. It's a terrible idea. It's interesting that they all look very masculine. And Roscoe at least starts out talking masculine, but when Roscoe introduces Bart and Homer to everyone, they all respond with a big, effeminate "Helllooo," and I can't even do it right. 

Bryan:  Hellooo. 

Drew:  That's better. Thank you. 

Bryan:  And wiggly-finger waves. 

Drew:  Yeah. 

Glen:  They're all very inviting and nice. 

Drew:  They're the nicest people, and then they play hard and they dance hard. 

Bryan:  And even very nice when he's mean to them. 

Drew:  Right. 

Bryan:  They're just like, "Oh, be nice." 

Drew:  [laughs]

Bryan:  One of my favorite parts of that scene is that Bart just asks him, "Why did you bring me to a gay steel mill," as though that's a recognizable genre of steel mill. 

Drew:  Right [laughs]. He's like, "I don't know. I don't know." In the original script, it was supposed to be longshoremen. 

Bryan:  Oh yeah, but it was too complicated to animate or something. 

Drew:  Yeah, which is something that only comes up when you talk about animated shows where the animators are like, "That's hard. Can we make it something else? What if it's a steel mill?" The joke actually works better because I think of longshoremen being on boats together for long periods of time, and they would have sex. It's less likely that there'd be an all-gay steel mill. 

Bryan:  Yeah. 

Drew:  The Anvil, by the way, was a real gay bar in New York. It closed at the height of the AIDS crisis. It was a leather bar that was famous for having really raunchy sexual acts. It's a great name for a gay bar. 

Glen:  Because of the pounding. 

Drew:  Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's why, right? 

Bryan:  Hard steel. 

Drew:  Yeah. Yeah, it's perfect. 

Glen:  Backbone of American industry [laughter]. 

Drew:  Backbone is another great name for a  gay bar [laughter]. Someone should have—so someone did their research or someone knew something when they called it that, I guess.

Glen:  I'm sure The Simpons had gay writers.  

Drew:  I looked. None of the people that are responsible for this episode seem to be gay. The person who actually wrote the steel mill scene—different writer. He until recently was an executive producer on the TV show my boyfriend works on. Has done a ton of stuff. I don't think any of them are gay, as near as I can tell. I like whenever an episode of a TV show offers more than one type of gay person. So we have Smithers for a second; we have John, and he's our gay person; and then you get, like, "Look. There's more than one type of gay person. There's a wide variety of gay people." That is something a lot of TV shows don't actually do, and especially older stuff. You'd be forgiven for thinking that there's just one type of gay person. 

Glen:  Well at this point, I'm also going to point out that this is the first animated show we've talked about, and the limitations on animation are different than the limitations on a sitcom.  And so in animation we can have a wide variety of scenes that last five seconds whereas sitcoms you're going to need to have longer scenes, and you can't go to as many locations because you are limited to what sets you build where Simpsons can go to a gay steel mill that turns into a gay bar. 

Drew:  Right. That would be a very expensive set to build. Yes. I think this was the first time I ever saw sexy gay men dancing with each other in any visual medium, ever. So I would have been freshman year of high school when I saw this. I still had not figured things out. But I'm trying to think of another time when I would have seen this many—they are drawn to be very sexy by Simpsons standards, and they're dancing with each other. And that is—that might have been the first time I ever saw that in my life. 

Glen:  I mean, "Hot stuff coming through," still triggers my body dysmorphia. 

Drew:  I think that's going to be the cover art for this episode. 

Glen:  Great. 

Drew:  You're not going to listen to it anyway. 

Glen:  True. 

Bryan:  Speaking of unsafe steel conditions, I like that he just has oven mitts and is holding a vat of molten lead, I guess. 

Drew:  He's that tough. He's that comfortable with his sexuality. 

Glen:  Yeah. He has that many calluses from lifting.

Bryan:  [laughs] I would just love to go to a gay bar that actually has raised platforms like that [we can 00:57:32] dance on. 

Glen:  But what if you have to go to the bathroom? What if you have to go to the bathroom? How do you get off that platform? Do you have to wait for it to lower? 

Drew:  You just climb down. You just jump down. 

Glen:  Those are high!

Bryan:  They're strong men. 

Glen:  Someone catch me!

Drew:  Yeah [laughter]. That'll work. Homer is dejected, and Homer goes to Moe's to complain about things. And what Moe says is something that would not—I'm sure I've heard the 2018 version of that. He's seeing it as a—

Barney:  Yeah, I always thought Bart would grow up to be just like us. What happened?

Moe:  Oh, it ain't no mystery. Whole modern world's got a swishifying effect on kids today, and their MTVs and their diet sodas ain't going to set them straight neither.

Drew:  I'm like, "Yeah. That's what people still think." That's what old people still think. They're terrified that the conveniences of modern life are just going to turn an entire generation into a bunch of queers. 

Glen:  Like today, I saw a meme where it was like, "In my day, searching for crawdads was fun. We didn't need any screens." And it's like—what does that even mean? 

Drew:  Wait. What does that mean? 

Glen:  It just means that their generation was better because they were entertained by walking around a puddle, looking for fish—or I guess mollusks. I don't know what a crawdad—

Drew:  They're crustaceans. They're like lobsters. There was a place where you could get crawdads when I was a kid. Yeah. 

Glen:  I guess your childhood was better than mine. 

Drew:  It was very outdoors. We had nice weather where I lived. Moe also says, "There's not even any wars no more, thank you very much, Warren Christopher." Then someone points out that shooting a deer is a lot like shooting a beautiful man, so they decide to take Bart hunting, which is a terrible idea. Sitting in the forest and just drinking beers all night actually sounds great, but they seem like they're sad that they're not killing anything the entire time they're there because they want to make Bart not gay. But Bart has already by this point pointed out that a bunch of guys just going out to the woods with each other seems kind of gay and makes them all very uncomfortable with the idea. 

Bryan:  I think that's one of the ways that when you think about heterosexual panic and discomfort or whatever, especially with gayness, it's this fear that all these homo-social activities like the Army or hunting or camping—that those become under threat, that those could be queer or could be gay. 

Drew:  "You turned the Navy into a floating joke." Yeah. 

Bryan:  Yeah. So I think that's how it's being talked about a little bit in the '90s. There's this historian who did this history of gayness in New York from 1890 to 1940 or something. He was writing about how there used to be—there was this older idea that it wasn't just you were gay or you were not. It's like you might have sex with men, but you were either trade, or you were a fairy. And if you were a trade, you were the masculine partner—sometimes you were paid for it. And the idea was that you were not gay no matter how much sex you had with men, and he talked about how gayness became medicalized in the '50s and the '60s, and then it was an identity thing as opposed to a performance thing. And he was saying that people he interviewed talked about how much they hated that because you just couldn't get trade anymore because you couldn't suck a straight guy's dick because he was worried he was going to be gay, unlike in the '40s—you could just do it whenever. 

Drew:  What a world to live in. 

Bryan:  What a world. 

Glen:  Time machine, please. 

Drew:  So Homer's even more depressed. Moe asks if him and Marge are cousins or something—

Bryan:  [laughs] Oh, yeah. Because Lisa's a vegetarian. 

Drew:  Lisa's a vegetarian. Both his kids turned out wrong. And then they get the idea that they're going to go to Santa's Village and shoot one of the reindeer, which is a terrible idea. They all turn their backs. They give the gun to Bart. They tell him to shoot a deer. Again, that is a bad idea embedded in a bad idea, and Bart fires off one shot. Doesn't kill any of them. The deers stampede. 

Bryan:  I think he doesn't shoot. I think it's just that they butt each other. 

Glen:  Yeah. They think it's a gunshot, but it's actually antlers hitting. 

Drew:  Oh. That's what it is. Okay. You're right. The reindeer are stampeding. At this point, John and Marge and Lisa figure out the only place they could be because they've AstroTurfed the national park, so all the deer have left and the only place to find deer is Santa's Village, so they come to the rescue. And something they drop right at the beginning, before we even meet John, is that he loves robots, and he has this Japanese robot Santa—Annual Gift Man—in the backseat of his car, and he turns it on the deer, and it subdues the deer because it has a horrible noise and it shoots sparks, and he figures that they would fear their cruel taskmaster. 

Bryan:  Something that happens right before he gets there with the robot that was really interesting to me the second time I watched it is that Homer—because Moe and Barney flip a water thing and a trough and hide under that, and it's just Bart and Homer. And Homer picks up Bart and holds him above his head and gets battered by the deer a little bit, which to me doesn't have to necessarily be in there. And to me—and maybe I'm going to do a stretch like he did—it's showing Homer protecting Bart. And to me, it was almost a way that Homer is redeemed a little bit in that even though it's really—his central impulse is to protect Bart, and he thinks he needs to protect him from homosexuality, and that's why he's doing all this ridiculous stuff, and he's about to have a turning point about that. But that, at its core, he's a father who protects his kid. And so we sort of see that impulse in a positive light, I think, right there, that he's taking all these antler hits just to keep Bart safe. 

Drew:  Oh, totally. 

Bryan:  Yeah. So to me, that seemed like a softening moment for Homer, a little bit. 

Glen:  I would even say the acting in this episode does a good job, I think, of always putting the emotion into Homer's panic. It's always, from that midpoint on, him being very worried about Bart. And when they're in the steel mill and he just doesn't even know anymore, he's at his wits' end, like—

Drew:  Like, "I don't know." 

Glen:  —what could he possibly do to protect his son? And that's why he goes wrong with this terrible, terrible plan. 

Drew:  Well, there is the argument that a parent's dread about their child being gay is a bad version of protecting the child because they might just hate gay people, but also, they might be thinking of how your life is going to be harder if you're gay, which is true. And his desire to divert Bart away from this is a wrongheaded method of protecting Bart, and probably lots of people's parents have similar thought processes until they come to their senses, I guess. 

Glen:  Yeah. That was the standard line in the '90s, I think, is "I'm not upset because you're gay. I'm upset because your life is going to be harder," and that's how parents would try and excuse away the fact that they look miserable when you come out to them. 

Bryan:  And I think Homer's approach—you did the Roseanne episode a couple episodes ago. I think it was a common strategy, too, with TV at the time. You have a protagonist who's the audience surrogate who has some discomfort with homosexuality and then comes around to it at the end, and it gives, I think, people who aren't quite sure where they stand with it—it gives them an entry point. Like, Roseanne actually isn't as cool as she thinks, and Homer has a problem with it, and it kind of gives them a roadmap towards acceptance. Because if you just shove, like, "Okay. Homer's cool with it," then you don't have that emotional journey with him, and so you don't have somewhere to start if you're not totally comfortable with being gay. 

Drew:  And the majority of people watching this episode were straight people anyway. We would be exceptions to the rule. Yeah. Homer does come around. He has some hesitation about what the right word is to call John. 

Barney:  Aw, Moe. We were saved by a sissy.

Moe:  Yeah. Yeah. We'll never live it down. Oh, boy. It looks like it's suicide again for me.

Homer:  Hey, we owe this guy, and I don't want you calling him a sissy. This guy's a fruit, and a—no. Wait, wait, wait—queer. Queer. Queer! That's what you like to be called, right? 

John:  Well, that or John.

Drew:  Moe and Barney kind of come around, too. 

Barney:  Is it okay to come out now, Mr. Gay Man, sir? 

Moe:  I'll do anything you say. Anything!

Drew:  Which is a nice line. 

Glen:  Yeah. "Is it okay to come out now?" Wink, wink.  

Drew:  Yeah. John drives everyone back to safety, and Homer has a nice thing. He's like, "However you turn out, I'm fine with it." 

Glen:  Yeah. Well, I think it's an important to point out what John says before that: "I've won your respect, and all I had to do was save your life." 

Drew:  Right. 

Glen:  Like, the benchmark for gay people to just get bare-minimum respect that everyone else just assumes—

Bryan:  Well, and then he goes on to say—something to the point of every gay man needs to save Homer's life at some point [laughs], and just the limited effects of individual interactions between hetero and homo people and how much change is that going to effect. 

Glen:  But I guess the reverse is what people say now is that what has changed, I guess, the national dialogue is the fact that so many people now personally know a gay person. The reason why gay marriage isn't a contested thing these days as much as it was, and how surprised everyone is how quickly we sort of—quote/unquote—won that fight is because it's now very, very hard to find anyone who doesn't have a personal relationship with a person. 

Drew:  Thanks in part to TV shows, I would say, because these got piped into everyone's houses for free, and you're like, "Oh. I'm going to watch this gay thing now, I guess." And episodes like the ones we watched were many people's introduction to gay anything, and they normalized it, and they made it seem human [laughs]—imagine.

Bryan:  And Joe Biden, specifically, referenced Will & Grace as having this, as he saw, important influence on gay marriage. And GLAAD really trumpeted Modern Family as part—because that was right around when the Supreme Court decision actually happened, and they were pushing for that marriage episode. And so these are both kind of big institutions—if you think of Biden as an institution—that are in a public sphere talking about the importance of media representation in a comedy show, a sitcom, to having these real effects, these real political policy changes. 

Glen:  Watching Obama award Ellen that Medal of Honor, that ceremony and the things he said to her and watching her cry—I can't watch that without breaking down and realizing yeah, we can thank TV for a lot of the strides we've made. 

Drew:  Yeah, which is why I wanted to do this podcast. Also, I just like talking about TV. But the episode ends with Homer giving that speech. 

Homer:  You know, Bart, maybe it's just the concussion talking, but any way you choose to live your life is okay with me.

Bart:  Huh? 

Lisa:  He thinks you're gay.

Bart:  He thinks I'm gay? 

["Gonna' Make You Sweat (Everybody Dance Now)" plays]

Drew:  And then the end credit is "Dedicated to the steel workers of America. Keep reaching for that rainbow." [laughter] I would love to think that there's a steel worker out there who just hates The Simpsons because people bring it up to him, like, "Oh, have you ever seen that one episode of The Simpsons?" He's like, "Yes. I have. It's not what it's like. It's hot, and it's a lot of work. 

Glen:  I don't care about the opinions of steel workers or coal miners anymore. 

Drew:  We know. We're aware. 

Bryan:  Hot take. 

Drew:  Yeah. I really like this episode. I think this is good representation. We don't really ever see John again. We see him in the background in a few episodes, but he never speaks again. There are other gay episodes of the show. I don't think any of the characters—Scott Thompson does one. It's called "Three Gays of the Condo" where Homer moves out of the house and moves in with a gay couple, and Scott Thompson falls in love with him, which is like—eh. I don't think any gay man is going to fall in love with Homer, necessarily. 

Bryan:  He likes sloppy bears. 

Drew:  Yeah. I guess if Marge can love him, then maybe a gay man can, too. But John seems like a well-drawn character. That's not an animation joke. He just feels like he's more than a one-off character, and I'm glad lots of people got to see that episode and meet the kind of nerdy gay that I would eventually kind of grow up to be. Thank you for that, Simpsons. Maybe I imprinted too hard on that. 

Glen:  I don't know. I think—in that they present John as the positive qualities of John and don't really focus on being gay as a negative, so it's great representation. But as for him being a well-drawn character, I would have liked to have seen some hint of a flaw or human quality to him before I would say, "Yes, let's make him a recurring character." I mean, I guess he doesn't have the best dating etiquette given Waylon's reaction to him canceling their date. 

Drew:  At least he got that brief look at a romantic life, so he wasn't completely neutered for an episode. I bring up representation at the end of this episode because The Simpsons just fell on its ass representation-wise. They had the episode where they dealt with the Apu situation. Did you guys watch the documentary The Problem with Apu? 

Bryan:  Uh-uh. I read about it. 

Drew:  Its good. It's on demand—on my cable, at least—40 minutes long. It's just this guy going through all the reasons that Apu is a problematic character because he's voiced by Hank Azaria, tries to talk to Hank Azaria about it. And in the most recent episode as of this recording, the plot is about a book that Marge liked when she was younger that now seems outdated and kind of backwards in some of its values. And Marge and Lisa have a conversation about "Well, if something you liked back in the day and now it's politically incorrect—" and they use the word "politically incorrect," which is not something Lisa would ever say. That's not something—only conservatives ever say "politically incorrect." But what do you do? Can you not like it anymore? And then the camera pans to a shot of a framed photo of Apu where it's written "Don't have a cow" on it. And it seems to be the show has a big representation problem where they essentially have an actor who is in a form of blackface and has been for almost 30 seasons, and they don't care about that. But the people who wrote this episode, I refuse to believe that they would have handled that as badly. The people who wrote this episode were straight people who wrote a very thoughtful gay character, and I feel like that spirit maybe is not present on the show if that is how they handled the Apu situation. I don't know. 

Glen:  Again, it's almost been on 30 seasons. I don't know if they feel bulletproof or if they just don't have the same burden that they once had to be able to tell—they're no longer a unique voice in telling these sorts of stories. Like I said, it was an animated show, had a lot of freedoms to it. And even though I guess it was—what—30th in the rankings or whatever, it still felt current, and I think it saw that it had a role to play whereas I don't know if they view themselves as having that same role anymore. 

Drew:  Maybe they don't. 

Bryan:  The filmmaker, he talks a little bit about a complex reaction to it, that he did value that. When I teach queer media classes, that's something we talk a lot about, these bad—I'm making quotes, listeners—those bad representation of killer queers and these pansies and whatever, and how much I value those characters still, and the idea that you can see a problem with these characters and value the historical location but also be thinking in more complex ways about them now. And I think that that's something Lisa would be thinking about, and I think they just gave Lisa this quick little—yeah, to use the term "political correct" doesn't seem like a Lisa term. And they don't actually get at those questions. She just kind of shuts it down, and it seems like it's not engaging with the documentary filmmaker's issue and having a dialogue with that or whatever. 

Glen:  Yeah. Lisa could have made—I don't know if it would have been valid point—but in character made the point that it is a complex, lengthy dialogue to be had, and that maybe a 22-minute animated sitcom is not going to be a satisfying venue for that discussion, even though—what we just talked about—it can be. They could have found a story reason to work it out in some way. 

Drew:  Well, in some ways, I think of this episode that we just talked about as being the show performing some degree of contrition for Waylon Smithers being an underdeveloped running gag where it's like, "He's gay. Isn't that funny?" And it is funny. We all laughed at it. I laughed at it. And sometimes it still is funny to watch those old episodes where it's treated like a punchline. But this was them—maybe not consciously, but being like, "Okay. What if we told a real character and had a more fleshed-out gay character who's out and who's comfortable with them self and who's not pathetic like Smithers is?" And maybe they just need to write that episode about Apu. Actually, they kind of tried to, but it didn't really work. But, yeah [sighs]. We are not talking about Apu being problematic. We are talking about this gay episode being actually pretty fucking good. Do you guys have any closing thoughts on it? 

Bryan:  Yeah. I like this episode, and I also—yeah. I remember when I saw it when I was younger. I really valued the camp stuff, and I idolized the character of John for having this wealth of pop-culture knowledge and this ability to move throughout the world. And I feel like as a gay man in L.A., I still crave that, just this endless well of pop-cultural knowledge because I feel like it's so much capital and you really want to have access to it [laughs]. 

Drew:  You can never have enough. 

Bryan:  No. 

Drew:  Always something you don't know. 

Glen:  I mean, John wearing the Pin Pals bowling shirt is one of my favorite Simpsons callbacks. 

Drew:  We didn't talk about—and they don't even bring it up!

Glen:  I just talked about it!

Drew:  But they don't even mention it on the—no one is like, "Oh, that's my husband's shirt." Marge clearly has given away the shirt. But, yeah. That was a nice touch. And also, that was the thing in the '90s, where people wore bowling shirts ironically. Yeah. Doesn't happen anymore. Bryan, this is the point in the episode where I say: Where can we find you online? Where can we find you online, Bryan? 

Bryan:  I have just a website—BryanWuest.com—B-R-Y-A-N W-U-E-S-T—that right now is a gif from a French film from the 1930s and my CV, which has links to some of my writing. So if you're into gay softcore porn from the '60s, I just published on that. 

Glen:  I am. 

Drew:  That's great. Oh, I like that. 

Glen:  Also, sometimes you play Dungeons & Dragons. 

Bryan:  I do. Yeah. I've been on a couple streaming videocasts, I guess, of playing Dungeons & Dragons. 

Drew:  Is there one coming up? Is another one happening? 

Bryan:  I don't think so. We had one a couple weeks ago with Carlos Maza and Anthony Oliveira, who are both lovely to play with. Bryan Safi has played with us before in that group, but he was ill, so his character was turned into a cat and written out. 

Drew:  Bryan Safi from Throwing Shade? 

Bryan:  Yes. 

Drew:  Oh. That's awesome. That's really cool. 

Bryan:  Yeah. When he played with us, it was the first time he'd ever played, and then he was just—he loved it and was like, "When can we play again?"

Drew:  That's a lot of pressure to do on video if you've never played before. 

Bryan:  Yeah. It's also a lot of pressure to play with all these internet comedians and personalities [laughs]. 

Drew:  Yeah.  

Bryan:  I was brought in mostly as a—I know the rules in a Wikipedia type way, and I was brought in, I think, just to keep the game moving along. 

Drew:  Okay. That makes sense. If people want to see those videos, where can they find them? Do you know?

Bryan:  Matt Baume's YouTube. 

Drew:  Matt Baume—B-A-U-M-E.

Bryan:  Yeah. If you don't already know him, you should. He just does a lot of internet video stuff. I believe you were just on his podcast. 

Drew:  Gay stuff. Yeah. 

Bryan:  He has a really lovely podcast Sewers of Paris, where he talks about—I'm sorry I'm just plugging this on your podcast, but I'm plugging your episode. 

Drew:  And you're going to be on an episode yourself. 

Bryan:  Yeah. Yeah, in a couple weeks, I think. Yeah. He talks about gay men and their connection to pop culture. 

Drew:  Yeah. Yeah, it's a great show. 

Bryan:  What did you talk about? 

Drew:  Super Mario Bros. 2, and that wasn't—I was worried whether I could sustain that for an entire episode. Yeah. I had enough. Yeah. 

Glen:  I think you were the only one who was worried about that. 

Drew:  Yeah. Yeah. Glen, where can people find you online? 

Glen:  I'm @IWriteWrongs on Twitter—that is "write" with a W. And on Instagram, @BrosQuartz.

Drew:  B-R-O-S Q—

Glen:  I don't like spelling out loud. 

Drew:  Okay. You're worried you're going to spell it wrong? 

Glen:  Mm-hmm. 

Drew:  We can do another take if you spell it wrong. 

Glen:  [mumbles] B—no. It's from speech therapy for years. 

Drew:  B-R-O-S, quartz, like the stone. I'm on Twitter @DrewGMackie—M-A-C-K-I-E. I have another podcast I've never mentioned on this podcast. It's called Singing Mountain. It's literally me talking about videogame music. It's a real deep nerd dive, but if you're down with my brand of nerdy and you like videogames, try Singing Mountain out. It's on SoundCloud.com/SingingMountain, or just search "singing mountain" on iTunes or Google Play or anything. It's all about videogame music, and this is what I'm doing with my life, apparently. 

Glen:  I highly recommend the Earthbound episodes and the episode about the sax. 

Drew:  Oh, the best saxophones in videogames? 

Glen:  Yeah. 

Drew:  Yeah. That's a pretty good episode. Please subscribe to us on any of the places you'd find podcasts. Please give us a rate and review if you have a spare moment. If you write something funny, we'll read it in a future episode. Also, we made a Twitter and a Facebook, so just search for Gayest Episode Ever on Facebook or Gayest Episode Ever on Twitter. And if you need another place to get podcast updates, those exist now. But enjoy. I think that's it. 

Glen:  Bye forever. 

Drew:  Bye. 

Bryan:  Thanks for having me. 

Drew:  Yeah. Thank you for coming. Podcast over! End. 

["I Love the Nightlife" plays]

Homer:  I like my beer cold, my TV loud, and my homosexuals flaaaaming.

[John honks horn which plays "Somewhere Over the Rainbow"]