... then why hasn't he pulled his head out of his ass? There's only one obvious way out of there.

Why did kids love Mary Poppins? Because she was flamboyant, becuase she had personality, because she was eccentric and fun. Gay men in chartreuse pants have the potential to be quite possibly the most awesome parents ever.

This guy is painfully, painfully square. I know he has this whatever radio show, but you know what? I never listened to it. You know why? 'Cause it's boring. I sure wouldn't want this herb to be my dad, and that's the last thing I'm saying about it.

No wonder the right wing thinks the left are a bunch of immoral Darwinists eager to sacrifice the concept of the good to a soulless, reductionist view of life! Garrison Keillor has given us the ultimate in such idiotic reductionisms.

While betraying every principle of accurate history and human decency in the process.

Jackass.

Yours truly,

A straight guy with weird hair and a weird little dog and funky sofas who loves Freddie Mercury.

I grew up in a much simpler place at a much simpler time -- boston in the 1960s. white people who wanted a culture marked by homogeneity and a narrow sense of the normal did not claim they were good liberals. They celebrated their racialized whitebreadness by villifying black and brown people, pansies, and hippie freaks. They had lots of children and kept things simple and proper -- fathers hit and molested their wives and kids beyond closed doors (rarely on the chemically treated green lawn of the backyard); good folks tormented, or condoned the torment of, sissy boys and butch girls; they reacted violently to efforts to bring those black kids raised in innapropriately matriarchal black culture into their schools.

Now I find myself in a much more complicated place at a much more complicated time -- Minnesota in the early 21st century. White people say they're good democrats, recycle, and drive hybrids but keep as far away from people of color as possible. They don't own televisions (well maybe an old set for PBS/TCPT) and they think hiphop is materialistic and misogynistic. But they sure love this old white guy who tells twee stories and sings twee songs and who waxes nostalgic for the days before people of color and fags and dykes made their presence known and who, from the well appointed rooms of his St. Paul mansion, laments that all these people with their complicated lives interrupt his smug little dreams about a fictional town set in a fictional past . And now he's using "nature" to legitimate and empower these dreams ..........

As a teacher with 29 years' experience, my response is focused on your primary classroom visit, perhaps I should say performance, which occurred near your childhood home. You say you strolled into a class of 7 year olds and shared a tale of significance to your region's historical routes. I have no doubt it was entertaining to all. One main motif in your article seems to be that children are of value and their voices/ideas should be heard. All I hear is that you performed to an audience unknown to you. If, in fact, you genuinely place an importance upon children, as your piece implies, why did you not include your reflections about your interactions with them in your article? Why did you simply paint such diverse children with the same brush and label them lovely? I would venture to guess that is because you, as Author (your capitalization, not mine) held your own experiences as more significant than theirs. I hope this is not so. Tell me that you spent a few minutes talking to a few of them and learning a bit about their history and their dreams

How could anyone possibly read homophobia into someone describing gay men as "sardonic fellows with fussy hair who live in over-decorated apartments" and warning they needed to tone it down to be accepted as parents? That's just folsky wisdom. By the way, if African-Americans want to be accepted as parents, they are going to have to lay off the fried chicken and watermelon. What? You think that was a racist comment? Must be something wrong with your reading comprehension.

I don't think I will be listening to Garrison Keillor anymore. Has he forgotten his own marital problems?

Everyone got all excited about the talented, witty gays but then that sterotype is now the only reference point for straight "satirists" writing about raising children the old fashioned way back in the good ol' days.

Does Keillor even realize the struggles that gay couples went through while he was doing the twist and ordering burgers and malt shakes for his kids? Does he know of the legal rights that gay parents are still being denied?

I agree that ideal parents shouldn't be self-centered; Keillor doesn't need to write a column asking for $500 compensation to tell me that. But why single out self-centered members of the gay community when there are plenty of self-centered straight people, black people, Republicans, Democrats, satirists with the initial GK, etc.?

And only one paragraph with no follow up? The gay get slapped then abandoned--the classic actions of a bad parent, come to think of it.

No book helped me appreciate my childhood as much as Lake Wobegone Days. I too grew up on a farm in an ethnic rural community, though I was a kid in the seventies instead of the fifties, my people were Czech instead of Norwegian, we lived in Texas instead of Minnesota, and we only had snow once every five years. But so many of the elements in Garrison's novel paralleled my own life, especially the huge role of the church. I too belonged to a small ethnic Protestant denomination (is our Moravian-derived Unity of the Brethren any relation to the Brethren that Garrison writes about, I've always wondered). The big events on the local social calendar were high school football games, weekend dances at the fraternal lodge, and the annual ag and livestock show in which I entered my latest 4-H projects. It was, I thought at the time, the dullest existence possible, and likewise the people around me were the dullest on the planet. I constantly longed to live in the city--it didn't matter which one, any city would do. A couple of years after I graduated from college and moved to New York, I was looking for something to read in my parents' house during a trip home and picked up my dad's copy of Lake Wobegone Days. I expected it to be dull--it was my dad's book, after all--but it wasn't. Most all of the fiction I'd read up to that point was set in environments very different from my Texas hometown, but Lake Wobegone felt like a place just up the road. And by creating such rich characters, Garrison helped me to see that the people I'd grown up with were equally complex, with hopes and fears just as interesting and important as anyone in Manhattan. It was one of the most powerful instances in which a piece of art helped me understand my own life. Still, some two decades after reading Lake Wobegone Days, I remain in New York, though I visit Texas several times a year. Moving back home is out of the question, and it's not because I don't think that my family and friends would accept the fact that I'm gay--many of them already have. It's because I know that I wouldn't be able to lead the full life that, yes, I feel I'm entitled to as a gay man--a life that would include marrying the person I loved in the church where I was raised, perhaps even raising kids on the farm where I spent my own youth. Garrison once showed me that other perceptions I had of my hometown were false, but this one, unfortunately, he has only confirmed.