I Hope Daryl Hall And John Oates Are Gay

The other night on The Daily Show with John Stewart he had on Hall & Oates. As I looked at them (and thought about all the times in my life that I had listen to their music having received at least part of my “Adult Education” from them) I couldn’t help but think to myself, I hope Daryl Hall and John Oates are gay – Don’t Get Me Started!

Now for some of you, you may be picturing me with my Duran Duran hair and oversized blazer with the enormous Joan Collins shoulder pads as an impressionable teenager sitting in my room, holding the album cover and singing along with “Private Eyes” and you would be right. Did I love Hall & Oates because of their music, their hair, their fashion, well I loved them because all of it. And while some may think that there is some sort of homoerotic reason that I want Hall & Oates to be gay, I’m here to tell you that this is not the case. I don’t want to picture them making the “monkey love” at all. It just seems to me that both of them seem really nice and since they have been together as a group for all these many years there’s a fantasy I have about gay couples that includes them being committed to one another for years and years and just living their lives loving one another. Maybe it’s because I myself reached the twenty year mark this year in my own relationship. I don’t know but wouldn’t it be nice to think of them together all these years, making music together, loving one another? No big flashy coming out like Lance Bass or some of the others that are shoved out of the closet these days by hysterical gays on the Internet but just a nice couple of guys who happen to be a couple and in love.

There’s a large part of me that thinks if there were some “normal” or what I tend to call, “garden variety gay” couples who were like, “Yeah, we’re gay…and???” That perhaps things like being accepted and being able to marry might come easier to us.

There are other male couples outside of the music industry (get your minds off Wham! As we all know that Andrew what’s-his-face is not gay and George Michael plays three shows a day on his knees in apparently any public restroom) no, I’m thinking more wholesome (like Hall & Oates) like say, Bert and Ernie? Wouldn’t it be great if Bert and Ernie finally admitted that they shared more than an apartment and a rubber duckie? I remember when Sesame Street first came on. My mother got a call from the neighbor, “Lois, turn on PBS. You are not going to believe this. There is a show where there are colored people and white people living on the same street! You watch it but I’m not letting my kids look at programs like this and you shouldn’t either.” My mother didn’t see what the big deal was about the blacks and whites living on the same street, she was more worried about the fact that I wanted to wear a cape everywhere, the bottom part of one of those plastic things toys used to come in from gum ball machines as a monocle, counting everything and then very loudly proclaiming, “Ha, ha, ha!” (This would be the closest I would ever come to being interested in or being good at math.) My point is that no one gives the fact that blacks, whites, birds and monsters are all living on the same street anymore. In fact it did us as a society good and made us more accepting. So me thinks that along with breaking ground like letting Buffy Saint Marie breast feed on the Street de Sesame that perhaps a gay couple might be a good idea too.

Now before all of the people who write about “indoctrinating” children in the gay culture start sending me additional hate mail, let me assure you that first of all I don’t care what you have to say and second of all, I don’t want to indoctrinate anyone (in fact, I’d like to give a few gays back – if you know what I mean). I just don’t want anyone to be afraid of us gays and truth be told we have more to be afraid of you than you do of us.

Maybe that’s the whole crux of this issue, fear. Maybe everyone’s just afraid of the unknown. Remember how afraid you were the first day of school? The first day of high school? The first day of your job? The first time you “you-know-what?” Maybe we just need someone to take the straightees by the hand and let them know there’s nothing to fear but fear itself as JFK once said. Or maybe we just need some established pairing of two men to simply state they’re gay and it’s okay. Ernie? Bert? I’ll bet even though they’re puppets that they have the same thought as me. I hope Daryl Hall and John Oates are gay – Don’t Get Me Started!