It was one of those days when a good house cleaning involved rearranging my living room and reconfiguring the placement of my art space. In the process of moving a bookshelf I came across a small, purple, plastic statuette of Tinky Winky.

For those wwo remember back over 20 years and for those too young to know how demonic the Teletubbies to which they may have been innocently exposed by naïve parents actually were, let me recount the situation.

Among all his claims about “the Gays” were such gems as his saying, “Remember homosexuals do not reproduce. They recruit,” Jimmy Carter employed “practicing homosexuals” in the White House, and when her sitcom character came out of the closet in 1997, Jerry Falwell, the founder of the Moral Majority that got its voice when it decided the best way to get adherents was to use a safe minority, the Gays, as a threat from which good people needed protection, called Ellen Degeneris “Ellen Degenerate.”

“The Gays” was a safe choice as Blacks were out because of the recent Civil Rights activities and Jews had been through the Holocaust and the Evangelicals needed to be united with Israel to bring about the end times.

People’s lack of knowledge about Gay people made it possible for Falwell to say whatever he wanted in a voice of God related authority, and his every lie took on the veneer of truth.

He saw Homosexuals lurking in the shadows spreading the “Homosexual Agenda” and forcing their “lifestyle” on the unsuspecting and were the bringers of natural disasters and the end of society as we know it.

Teletubbies was a British television show for preschoolers airing on public television between 1998 and 2008. Although it had some creepy aspects, the weird baby-faced sun, the narrator who had to translate their gibberish, and the Teletubbies themselves, those four rotund creatures, each a different color, who lived in a simple, cartoonish English countryside spending their days rolling around on the grass, eating toast and custard, babbling in that high-pitched baby talk that required the narrator, and had television screens embedded in their bellies, it was colorful, uncomplicated, cute, and, although attention seizing for toddlers, really annoying for adults.

Jerry Falwell, always looking for some farfetched monster to justify his equally farfetched need to protect the country from his imagination, claimed in a 1999 article, “Parents Alert: Tinky Winky Comes Out of the Closet”, that he published in his own magazine, that one of the Teletubbies was Gay.

He had arrived at that conclusion because one Teletubby, Tinky Winky, was

 “purple—the gay pride color, and his antenna is shaped like a triangle—the gay pride symbol.”

Tinky Winky also had a toddler boy’s voice, if one can discern the gender of a two year old solely on the voice, and often carried a red purse, making him a stealth Gay, one of those Gays who are there but not seen, promoting the Gay Agenda and the end of society subliminally and non-stop.

He repeated this on a subsequent Today Show appearance telling the host that to have

“little boys running around with purses and acting effeminate and leaving the idea that the masculine male, the feminine female is out, and gay is OK” is something “Christians do not agree with.”

The Teletubbies were obviously unclothed, so anyone who ever owned a pet would be hard pressed to see any real sexual characteristics that would make them anything but gender non-binary.

I was teaching in the Buckle of the Bible Belt when this happened and, finding a five inch Tinky Winky statuette on one those impulse buy shelves by the cash register at a local dollar store, bought it, and put it on my desk at school as just one more little, easy to overlook Gay thing that I had on my desk as, being an openly Gay teacher in a closet preferring environment, it could signal GLBT students that there was an ally if they got the hint, and to show everyone that I was as ashamed of who I was as they obviously were of who they were judging by all their Jesus clothes and jewelry, Ethnic and Racially related clothing often with some slogan of pride cialis cost canada Along these lines don’t take this medicine 1 hour before making love with your partner. http://robertrobb.com/?iid=8708 buy levitra online At that situation it can take some more hours to be maintained during the consumption period of time. cialis 100mg In order to have a good sexual stimulant. They become easy prey for addiction to drugs, alcohol, pornography, and deviant sexual female viagra canada behaviors. in their group, or some other entity of which they were proud regardless of the opinions of others.

There were on my desk a small plastic stand with three flags on it, the U.S. flag, the state flag, and a pride flag, taking up four inches in length and six in height, a small wrist chain with 6 links in the Pride flag colors long enough to go around my wrist before the clasp broke, as obvious as a piece of yarn about 6 inches long that just laid there on my desk, the Tinky Winky statuette, with some positive Gay youth books on a small shelf behind my desk that was not too obvious, but was discoverable by any curious student. And it was.

In addition to the small things on my desk, for Gay History month I had posted a list of GLBT people who had made contributions to civilization on one of my classroom bulletin board, the one in the back, and did so with no mention, allowing the students to discover it on their own which they did, and carefully read for familiar names.

There had been no issue with any of this as I was already known to my students and the whole district as a Gay man, until one student complained that these in your face Homosexual things offended her religious sensibilities, and, being the Buckle of the Bible Belt, this one religious based complaint was enough to set panic in motion.

On the evening after the student’s father had gotten on the news complaining about the provably not huge, ostentatious, Gay display, a non-existent class on Homosexuality, and the usual victim-assuming claim that while Gay stuff was allowed all over the campus, his daughter was not allowed to bring a Bible to school, with his daughter expressing offense at this affront to her religion, the Keystone Kops of an administration went into panic mode.

Accompanied by his Vice-Principal and the Dean of Instruction, the principal had gone to my room that evening to remove anything Gay related, but found he had to contact the union president to see if he could get me to go to the classroom and help remove things. By the time the union president was able to contact me the principal’s main concern was his inability to find the huge, industrial sized chain with rainbow colors on it that the student had included in those things that bothered her. The chain could not be found, and the principal feared that if the parent saw it in the morning there would be a scene.

The fact that he was in the room and unable to see the chain should have been an indication of the extent to which the student had exaggerated her discomfort with those things in my room. I refused to report to the school on the grounds that I would not be party to the removal of the “Gay things” and my expressed fear that to enter the school so far after hours could set me up for a charge of trespassing.

I was advised by Central Administration to take the next day off to defuse the situation, and was contacted by the local news media who slunk off after seeing the situation for what it was and not some story with lewdness and depraved sexuality. There was none of the anticipated pictures of men ranging from two men kissing to full on in flagrante delicto activities, just a list of the names of famous people.

After an odd whirl-wind two nights, one day circus, I returned to my class to see that anything the three stooges saw as Gay related, and their understanding of Gay related was obviously frighteningly very broad, had been removed, but left behind, and this I found telling, were the books behind my desk which they, and the student, hadn’t bothered to check out, and, standing alone on the desk abandoned by just about everything else including generic pens, was Tinky Winky, the one thing that, according to Jerry Falwell was the height of Gay flaunting and recruitment.

When I moved back to my home state I donated the books to a local GLBT youth group, threw out the chain, it was broken and easy to lose anyway, rolled up the poster of names I continued to post every year I was at that high school for sentimental reasons, and, apparently threw Tinky Winky in a box o’ things, from which it found its way to the back of a book shelf when I settled into my present digs.

Interestingly, 10 years before this Jerry Falwell connected event, as a teacher in Los Angeles who did cartoons for the Los Angeles teachers Union newspaper, my job was threatened by the school board whose members did not like my cartoons about them and their failures, a threat that lost its power with the ruling of the Supreme Court in Falwell’s case against Hustler magazine’s Larry Flint.

Another moment in my Gay History of which I still have a piece.