Oh Garrison, I'm really trying to give you the benefit of the doubt here, that maybe (hopefully) this was meant to be tongue in cheek and that it was not what it appears.

I'm really hoping this is the case, because what it appears to be is a homophobic rant complete with glaring sterotypes, nostalgically rewritten history, and the same sort of no-factual evidence shock attacks the right wing has been throwing at gays for years.

Have you really switched sides? Are you now one of 'them'? As a divorced woman who has to play the holiday shuffle and deal with ex-families and relations I can tell you it's no easier dealing with the remnants of that marriage than it is dealing with people who hate, judge, and ridicule my new life as an openly gay woman raising two children in a country where people I have never met voice opinions about my family in horrid displays of bad taste such as this.

I truly hope you will rethink the words you have put forth here and then sit down to think about who's prejudices you are voicing here, your own or those of your 'mixed-gender' parents.

Anything I could say in reaction to this piece pales beside Dan Savage's post at: http://www.thestranger.com/blog/2007/03/fuck_garrison_keillor

This dyke - who actually does like power tools, is so profoundly disappointed in the thrice divorced Mr. Keillor, that she doubts she will ever hear his voice again without thinking - "as bad as Ann Coulter - but without the balls to call f'gots, f'gots."

Although this dyke admitts her days of listening to Prairie Home Companion just ended.

Under the guise of writing about the needs of children, Keillor takes the opportunity to come out of the closet as a homophobe and it's not pretty. His cluelessly crude stereotyping of gay people as hairstyle-obsessed, "weird dog" owning, camp performer-worshipping, flamboyant design freaks not only reveals him to be completely out of touch with reality (how many parents do you know who have time to fuss with their hair? They're too busy keeping up with the kids. How many gay people match the inane portrait he paints?), but also a boring old bigot.

How nice that, in service of his lousy article, Keillor has refused to see that (a) gay families are real, (b) they look pretty much like straight families and (c), as such, they face the same struggles and triumphs of straight families but (d) not only don't get the same legal support and protection their families need but also (e) are trivialized and mocked by the thrice-divorced likes of him.

What on earth can he have been thinking? Is this the real Keillor coming through? Does he expect that he can maintain readership of intelligent and decent people with this kind of junk?

Shame on him and shame on Salon for publishing this kind of offensive drivel. On second thought, perhaps Salon has done us a favor by showing its readership the true face of Keillor.

...even when the satirist has an off day. A corrollary of that other one about "even if you don't get it." All the upset over this made me go read it again. The piece may read better 5 or 10 years from now, looking back. I'm not a huge Keillor fan but these days it's important to tell the difference between enemies and friends, and he's not the enemy. Stupidity, above all, is the enemy and especially those who deal in it. Garrison deals in inflated stereotypes, especially in outdated ones, as humor and as commentary on current topics. Even the nostalgic stuff is with a wink, as if to say "don't trust anything I tell you."

Also, yes he's been a jerk and topped many others when he fled to Denmark and from his own show over publicity of his behavior. But he came back, has occasionally made jokes at his own expense about it, on a nationally broadcast show even. He's a hypocrite like the rest of us. So what?

I'd like to offer a heartfelt thanks to all of you knee jerk, put-upon, one dimensional dullards who have written these letters of disgust for ushering me even further along the path to self realization.

Wow. There is simply nothing like perusing the letters section on Salon to sober oneself from the notion that just because you might lean left on the political spectrum, you actually have anything else in common with others that might claim the same inclination. Like a sense of humor for example.

Good grief.

As long as Keillor is waxing on the good old days, I am offering him my version of a grade-school teacher's assessment: F.

This is one of the most poorly executed essays that Salon has ever published. I understand that Keillor's reputation is such that the editors at Salon probably let him publish damn near anything he wants, with little or no editorial oversight. But this essay is either a very poorly executed satire or a deeply offensive diatribe. Which is entirely impossible to know, because Keillor has united his construction with little more than a font and a bit of syntax. His ideas are drunkenly incoherent and biliously spewed across the "page."

Keillor should clear up this mess and resubmit it. If not, this will be the last of his essays I bother to read.

I didn't get it. I'm not one to say that since I didn't get it, there is nothing to get, but I don't get it. I live in a small town that has not changed in 30 years. People in their 50s still do things the way their parents did them, with not an original idea of their own. To me this way of life is soul-crushing and depressing and I am leaving this small town.

At my house, there are some 50-year-old Childcraft books that I look at every now and then because they are charming and cute, and they show a way of life that's quaint and kind of over. It's nice to look but it's good to have the options of looking at other books, newer or older, adult books. Options are good.

As for GK's rant about gay people, I have a charming story about a gay woman. My aunt told me this story that starts in the late 1940s. My aunt had a lady cousin who liked to wear khaki pants and plaid shirts. She also was from the midwest but soon took a trip to California where she met a very pretty lady and brought her home with her. The two women liked to play the piano and sing, and take drives together. For some reason this angered her family and they sent the new friend back to California. About 30 years later, after my aunt had moved away from this cousin, she returned to visit her. She had married a man and had a few children. She was being treated for clinical depression with electroshock therapy. She's dead now. Those were the days, I guess, according to GK.