Isabel and everyone else: Garrison is having a

wonderful time with rib nudging, winking,

and yukking it up for us.

IT'S ALL A SEND-UP, A JOKE, a poke in the eye

about being grown-up and looking back on

our childhoods.

Relax everyone and take a breath!

Reading this article was kind of like being at a cocktail party, chatting with a charming, amusing acquaitance who always leaves you delighted with his charming anecdotes - only this time, in the middle of such a yarn, he begins to lose control of his bodily functions, urinating and defecating in his perfectly fitted suit, but he just continues going on and on, and you and everyone else is just looking on in horror and embarrassment and nervously glancing at the door now and then.

Garrison ... honestly, what on earth were you thinking when you wrote this?

Or, at least, I hope. I find this bit

If they want to be accepted as couples and daddies, however, the flamboyance may have to be brought under control. Parents are supposed to stand in back and not wear chartreuse pants and black polka-dot shirts. That's for the kids. It's their show.

truly offensive. Maybe Keillor should write for Parade or one of those other mindless Sunday supplements?

I've listened to Prairie Home Companion for years, but after reading this I'm not sure I'll be able to enjoy it anymore.

Garrison, if this was meant to be satire I think you needed to tweak it a little more, because it sure doesn't come across that way.

This heterosexual woman is taking her weird little dog and going home.

What an awful article. I grew up with Prairie Home Companion in Brooklyn, NY and loved when my parents put it on in the car or at home. Haven't listened in a while but not for lack of love. However, this article makes me not want to listen to Prairie Home Companion again. Keillor's disrespect towards lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people in his article "Stating the Obvious" is completely at odds with the amazing, warm vibe I always got from listening to his radio show and reading his subsequent editorial work in print from time to time.

My boyfriend loves your radio program. Now that I know you're homophobic, I have a solid reason to insist that our hosehold boycott your show.

Ignorant actors, pro athletes, military chiefs and right-wing hacks are expected, but et tu GK?

...but I will forgive GK and the editorial staff here for working under the assumption that the Salon audience was actually capable of reading something written above the high school level, where the Irony isn't necessarily noted by the shooting off of flares and the sounding of air raid sirens.

To put it bluntly, if you think the piece is homophobic, or nostalgic, or self-indulgent, you should go ask for your money back from wherever that BA on your wall is from.

PS--Prarie Home Companion is and has always been magnificently ambivalent about its putative genre. There's warmth there, sure, but also pettiness, insularity, and plain ol' human dimness, all touched on in turn.

Keillor, I can't tell exactly what this piece was supposed to be about, but if it is some sort of plug for the benefits to children of traditional two-parent, mom-and-dad marriage, then I assume your next piece is going to be about the bad thing you have done by having a child with your third wife so late in life. Each of your three marriages has been shorter than the standard span of childhood, and yet you have written, bragged even, about having a young child, even though you have given her an old hypocrite with a bad ticker for a father. Maybe that's why you included in this piece that paragraph about homosexual couples and toning down the queer eye for the sake of the kids--you can say, it's true, that at least you're not some kind of flamer. What you are, Keillor, is an old fart who is starting to sound like the William Bennett of the left.

Garrison, you're starting to sound about as relevant as ol Cammie over there. Hang it up already. You've become a tedious bore!

Mr. Keilor,

For someone who deals in yesterdays, you can be surprisingly progressive. Your work usually does a respectable job of celebrating nostalgia while simultaneously making light of it. But forgive me, for once, if I'm confused about which era you're actually living in.

My partner and I have an amazingly old-fashioned life. If you didn't see us together so often, you'd assume we'd fit right in with your Rockwell monolgues. We've been together for six years- I'm only 27, he's only 30- and are easily more stable than your average heterosexual couple. If we decided to raise a child, we'd have a lot to offer it, as we're well grounded, well educated, compassionate, sometimes boring people. By no means are we flamboyant.

Your description of "stereotypical" gay men struck a terribly dissonent chord. Maybe you're not describing people like us, but your article doesn't even suggest a world beyond flamboyance. There's no room for us in the picture you just painted. It's an old-fashioned image, but not in a positive way.

I'm a bit disappointed. You're so much more sophisticated than that. Perhaps I'm reading you wrong.

Maybe it was all a joke.

you know, those grumpy-old-man style pants you're wearing? the ones that fasten around the neck? wearing them too tight is obviously cutting off the oxygyen to the brain, better loosen 'em up a bit! better yet, tighten 'em a bit more . . .

I've been reading and listening to Garrison Keillor for over twenty years now, and I'm not yet 40. I've joked that I'm a senior citizen in training because I get so much enjoyment out of his quaint old-fashioned show.

Keillor's latest column just baffled me. What uncomplicated "once upon a time" era is he dreaming about here? And why does he only single out gay marriage for scorn - what about divorce, remarriage, hyphenated last names? What about straight men who fuss over their hair (John Edwards, Patrick Dempsey) or live in over-decorated apartments or who worship campy performers (everyone who watched Will and Grace or watches Inside the Actors' Studio)?

What about the bizarre married couples that we can see every night on the entertainment shows - Brad and Angelina, Brit and K-Fed, Oprah and Stedman (oops, they're not married), Donald and Melania Trump, and the rest of the fool's parade of married couples. Are they more wholesome because they're "traditional" couples? Are they more dignified because they have the luxury of procreating? Come on.

It seems appropriate that he closes his column by explaining how he lied to an audience of children and then declaring that they were better for the experience. His column is predicated on a myth. The old unsophisticated past he seems to be mourning never existed. Families were always complicated.

My mother died when I was ten. My wife's parents divorced before she was in high school. My grandfather died when my mother was eight years old, leaving my grandmother a single mother of four children in the 1950s. Things have always been complicated. The burden is not on gay couples to render themselves palatable to naysayers like Keillor. The onus is on people like him to accept gay couples as human, as couples, as being as real as any ridiculous, mortifying, stupid-looking, vaguely preposterous straight couple.