How Many Roles Call for a Coat Hanger in Your Head Anyway?

Tinky Winky, one of four characters on the children’s TV program “Teletubbies,” is gay and therefore a moral menace to American youth, the former Moral Majority leader Jerry Falwell has warned.

“He is purple--the gay-pride color; and his antenna is shaped like a triangle--the gay-pride symbol,” Falwell wrote.

--Agence France-Presse

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In the dressing room after taping the latest episode of “Teletubbies,” Tinky Winky slumped back in a chair and lit up a cigarette commercial on the television in his stomach. “I don’t think my sexuality is anybody’s business,” Winky said. “I’m an actor, and I want to be judged by my work. It’s damn hard enough for somebody with a television for a stomach and a coat hanger growing out of his head to get acting jobs without also being labeled a ‘gay actor with a television for a stomach and a coat hanger growing out of his head.’ ”

On the stomach monitor, a man in a beret snuffed out his Gauloise, and Winky said, “I had to start smoking these French cigarette commercials, because of the U.S. ban. I quit for 25 years, then this whole Falwell thing made me too nervous and I started again. I get them at a foreign video store in Greenwich Village.”

Anticipating the next question, Winky said, “Hey, you don’t have to be gay to live in the Village.” Then he paused and smiled, unable to resist the obvious punch line, “But it helps.”

That comic timing has been Winky’s stock in trade for nearly four decades, since he was discovered in the bar at Brown Derby in 1959. He was showing the Patterson-Johansson fight and attracted the attention of Jackie Gleason. “He liked what he saw and plugged me in to my first part, in the living room on ‘I Love Lucy.’ Back then, nobody asked about your sexuality. It was ‘Don’t ask, don’t television.’ ”

But Winky is clearly on edge these days, since Falwell’s story broke. Rumors had been swirling around Hollywood for months: that Winky was the cause of the breakup between Bert and Ernie, that Ellen DeGeneres had invited him to appear on her coming-out show, that he was spotted at a bar screening gay porn on his tummy TV. But he is determined not to dignify the rumors with a response.

“Barney is purple, too. Does that make him gay?” Winky asked. “ ‘My Favorite Martian’ had an antenna. Did that mean he was gay?

“Look, I’ve been discriminated against for all kinds of reasons,” he continued. “Back in the ‘50s, when I broke in, you never saw a black-and-white actor except in minor roles. Then in the ‘60s, I had the surgery to go color, just so I could get work. I’ve dragged around a cable and worn satellite dishes. I’ve done it all. Now, with the FCC mandates for high-definition TV coming up, well, this old body just doesn’t have much definition left in it, if you know what I mean. And I don’t want rumors about my sexuality to hurt the rest of my career.”

It may already be too late for that. Production on a planned revival of an old sitcom starring Winky, to be called “Sanyo and Son,” has just been postponed.

“Believe me, this kind of talk doesn’t help my cathode,” he said. With that he screened an Alka-Seltzer ad on his tummy tube. “ ‘My Mother the Car’ was a diesel. ‘Mr. Ed’ was a gelding. What does it matter? They were great actors.”