Gay or straight, sex is just funny

WHAT DID I expect when I joined the crowd at Broadway’s revival of “The Odd Couple”? The remake of the 1965 hit has aged in dog years. Its tired, pre-Stonewall premise feels 200 years old, and not because of the rotary phones and the early Eisenhower decor.

Back then, the unspoken possibility of men living together in stereotypical sex roles -- only without the sex -- was funny. It wouldn’t have worked if there’d been the slightest suggestion of something more.

We now have the real thing to laugh at in shows such as “Will & Grace.” Laughter in the case of any sex is the best medicine because sex, if you think too much about it, often is laughable. What’s limited the full acceptance of gays is that it forces us to think about someone else’s sexual activity.

The mother of a lesbian said that what disturbed her most was the thought of her daughter having sex with another woman. But what parent wants to imagine a child of whatever inclination having sex? Or a parent? When we do, it’s often for laughs.

This discrimination in what we’re comfortable imagining has real costs. In a case in Kansas, a statute punished underage sex -- but with vastly greater severity if the sex was homosexual. After having consensual sex with a nearly 15-year-old boy, Matthew Limon, age 18, was sentenced to 17 years in prison. Had the partner been a girl, the maximum penalty would have been a little more than one year.

In the appeal, the state attorney general argued that if the court ruled in Limon’s favor, we would see “a toppling of dominoes which is likely to end in the Kansas marriage law on the scrap heap ... allowing such combinations as three-party marriages, incestuous marriages, child brides and other less-than-desirable couplings.”

Ah, the slippery slope. The most fallacious argument against gay marriage is that it’s somehow going to jeopardize the straight kind. Last month, the Kansas Supreme Court saw through such arguments and released Limon, who had already served four years and five months longer than he should have -- simply for being gay.

In the course of my research, I’ve spent a lot of time with lesbian couples and their children, exposure that made me face my own assumptions, prejudices and fears about sex that differs from what I know as a straight mother in a 36-year marriage. I have seen the utter normality of two-mom families.

The wave is in the direction of equal opportunity ridicule for all sex. In a segment on Comedy Central, Ed Helms “reported” that “gay sex among men has doubled in 10 years.... At that rate, in 50 years, 150% of Americans will be gay ... that’s three out of every two people.”

That’s funnier than Felix washing a glass the minute it’s put down. The rap on the current “The Odd Couple” is that it’s not as good as the original because the leads are miscast. I think it’s that, back then, we were too squeamish to go beyond Felix fulminating that new life forms had arisen in the dust balls under the bed. No one could take a joke about what might happen in the bed. Now we know gay sex is just as funny and tragic as the other kind. Let’s have a play about that. It will be better than “Cats.”