Goin’ Down to South Park

Dammit, geeky ones. How long does a girl have to wait for the next season of South Park?

Yes, I know it’s just a matter of months, but that’s like a decade in fangirl time. And right now I’m doing what all newly-minted fangirls do: burning through the DVDs of seasons one through 11 with a fury that only rabid Star Trek fans can match when you give them a Next Generation box set and a DVD player at a convention. I mean, I think I watched all of Season 4 on one lazy Saturday prompting my girlfriend to remark, “Dude! Slow down or you won’t have any left!” How helpful.
At this rate I may do the unthinkable. I may actually attempt, in 2008, to watch a television show as episodes air instead of waiting for the DVDs. I can’t stand that kind of behavior, you guys. But I really can’t help myself. South Park is brilliant: well-written, drop-dead hilarious, incredibly poignant and most of the time politically and culturally spot-on.
It’s also the most gay-positive show I’ve ever seen, and the gayest. The fact that South Park addresses queer issues frequently and (for the most part) sensitively while being written and produced by two straight men makes it requisite viewing for gay geeks who can handle the scatology, violence and mature humor (which often deals with the taboos of racism, sexism and just about every other –ism out there). Don’t let copious use of words like “faggot” and “gaywad” (mostly from the potty mouths of children who use every curse word in existence) fool you. Creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone are on the side of the angels.
The guys have been making a case for gay rights since South Park’s first season, with the famous episode “Big Gay Al’s Big Gay Boat Ride.” Big Gay Al first appeared on Comedy Central way back in 1997. You remember: just two years after the East High Gay-Straight Alliance debacle when sodomy was still illegal, gay marriage wasn’t a hot-button issue, and you had a lot more to risk being out (particularly in Salt Lake) than you do now. By today’s South Park standards, its premise is quite tame. Third grader and recurring character Stan Marsh discovers that his dog Sparky is gay, incurring much mockery from his friends Kyle, Cartman and Kenny. Eventually, Sparky runs away to Big Gay Al’s Big Gay Animal Shelter. When Stan finds him, the shelter’s owner treats him to a boat cruise on the virtues of same-sex love (complete with a delicious parody of “It’s a Small World After All”). At the episode’s end, Stan announces to a bewildered crowd that “Being gay is OK!” The episode rightly scored the duo a GLAAD Media Award nomination.
In just about every season since, the guys have stressed that being gay isn’t a big deal. Season three brought us “Two Guys Naked in a Hot Tub” which used a sexual hot tub incident between Stan and Kyle’s dads to skewer straight male homophobia; in season five, anti-gay scout leaders toss Al out of Boy Scouts and replace him with a heterosexual child molester in “Cripple Fight”; and season nine’s “Follow That Egg” was a much better take on gay marriage than The Simpsons’ cowardly and rather offensive “There’s Something about Marrying.” Season 11 also brought us my favorite episode of all time, “Cartman Sucks,” which treated the phenomenon of Christian ex-gay camps an the damage they do to children with more thoughtfulness and panache than most news reports. Oh yeah. And implied pretty clearly that Cartman might be gay or at least bi-curious.
In every season, Parker and Stone have been progressive voices for gay rights by, ultimately, treating gays and lesbians as people and not Issues. There are noble gay people in South Park and gay people (like school teacher Mr. Garrison) who are stupid and revolting. My brilliant girlfriend put it better than I could have, which happens with epic regularity: “Their message is that when you say being gay is OK, it isn’t followed up by this idea that gay people are any way special or different, really.” And really, isn’t that how most of us want to be treated?
Now if only the guys could get a clue about transgender issues. The only South Park episode I’ve truly hated was “Mr. Garrison’s Fancy New Vagina,” which features Mr. Garrison randomly deciding to get a sex-change operation. Of course, Garrison is an idiot and not a real transperson (do you know any transwomen who think sex-change surgery will give them the ability to get pregnant?). But the show’s message, that sex and gender are fixed and surgical alterations don’t make you a man or a woman, really galled me. I mean, come on, dudes! You’re way too smart for that bullshit cisgenderist thinking. Because I always give people the benefit of the doubt, I’m hoping they didn’t mean it, that they were trying to comment on the stupidity of thinking that a drastic change such as sex reassignment surgery will make someone’s life perfect. Or, at the very least, just trying to make a funny episode and failing miserably. Sadly, I guess that even the smartest and most talented of writers sometimes royally, hideously and embarrassingly screw up.
My frustration at their one transgender episode aside, I think South Park is a truly brilliant show that all queer people should watch. To be clear, it’s not just about children swearing and making politically incorrect jokes. Parker and Stone use that shock humor to skewer human stupidity. Think Jonathan Swift in “A Modest Proposal,” wherein the Gulliver’s Travels author proposed the eating of Irish babies to satirize the 18th century’s litany of easy solutions to problems like world poverty. Satirically speaking, Parker and Stone are Swift’s great-great-great grandchildren. They use the absurd and grandiose too because much of human behavior is absurd and grandiose in its stupidity. And I gotta love them for that … even if I think someone needs to send them a DVD of Transamerica, STAT.