Nicholas von Hoffman

Paar Made Gays Look Good

WASHINGTON

The other night three members of the Gay Activist Alliance wiped up the floor with Jack Paar. The three, two males ard a female, were put on the air as rebuttal against Paar, who has been telling wretched anti-gay jokes on the air.

"Ballet is the fairies' baseball" is an example of the un-funnies Paar has been attempting to entertain his audience with. But what was unfortunate wasn't Paar's one-liners, but that he was allowed to debate the Gay Activists about a serious question in our national social life.

VON HOFFMAN

This is no topic to be discussed on national television by an uninformed, unprepared comedian, especially one who was so obviously disturbed that he would be sandbagged into such inanities as, "It's quite true, I wouldn't want my daughter to marry a woman. Do you find that offensive?"

To which one of the gays replied. "Offensive, and I wouldn't be surprised that she may well do it. I trust that presently she'll decide that for herself. Right?"

INSTEAD OF CUTTING OFF this absurd ad hominem argument, the helpless Paar pushed on into a short monologue which bordered on the incoherent: "But I cannot understand how you, you, you'd find that offensive. I'm not, I'm quite certain that no parent, that it, listen, I want you to, I want you to lead a happy life. Of course, what joy would there be in having any human being not leading a happy and productive life . . . The world didn't begin with Adam and Adam you know.``

True, when the gays told the audience that 20% of the population is homosexual, Paar tried to challenge them. But they came back by citing the Kinsey studies as their source, and the comedian didn't know enough to point out that Kinsey's methodology was conclusively shot down years ago.

So, effectively, TV viewers across the nation were left with the uncontroverted assertion that one out of every five Americans is gay, when in fact nobody knows how many people are gay. Another proposition that went by uncontested is that gays are an oppressed minority group in exactly the same sense that blacks have been.

Rather than explore this idea, the inept Paar was saying such astonishing things as, I strongly suspect the New York Times in the last month of strong homosexual propaganda. Well, I do." While the comic was thinking accusations not even Agnew has made, nobody remarked that people are born black. but, so far as we know, homosexual activity is voluntary. A person chooses the gay life, as one of the three admitted when he said, "I was a heterosexual for many years" before taking up the gay life.

THIS IS NO IDLE QUIBBLE because the militant gays have not only come out of the closet, they've burst into the living room and are stomping the streets with a righter-on than thou attitude which far exceeds a demand that their civil liberties be protected.

That's what some of the noisy ones are doing, and as lot of ninnies are buying it. Not only has gay become this year's fashion, with queenish rock groups and the cloying camp of the Bette Midler admirers, but a moral ascendancy is being attributed to it. Disregard the typhoid fever in the migratory labor camps; this year you can work out your tender feelings of guilt by joining our newest and most mellow minority group.

All sorts of people, whom one suspects of never having had a homosexual impulse in their lives, are rushing into the closet so they can rush out of it and join the movement." Well, the Constitution gives a person an absolute right to make a fool out of himself, but that's no reason the rest of us should be intimidated into making social policy on other people's folly.

C Washington Post-King Features Syndicate