the elevator pitch

Have you noticed openly gay men are the only ones who can fluster Stephen Colbert? Anthony Romero of the ACLU got the host of the Colbert Report to clam up recently. And you do remember how Dan Savage turned Colbert red-faced a few months ago with the mere mention of oily gay sex.

Nine out of 10 of Colbert’s guests fall easily into the role of his foil. That one out of 10, though, man do they seem to get Colbert’s back up. This observation brings us to this week’s Have You Heard: Have you heard Stephen Colbert is not a straight man.

And, yes, there is something wrong with that.

Colbert’s job is to always be funnier than the other guy. But whenever a fellow with a certain amount of, shall we say, panache enters the room, the hero of late-night hipster viewers crumbles like Heath Ledger holding Jake Gyllenhaal’s shirt.

Could it be that Colbert is living a lie? He’s supposedly a family man from the south playing the role of a conservative family man from the south with dim wits.

Could it be a façade? Could Colbert really be just another intellectual heterosexual man who wants to be liberal-minded but reverts to redneckiness when propositioned by a horny member of the same sex? Do gay men carry the rock that contains the Kryptonite to Colbert’s humor?

Lately, Colbert has shown he is trying to come to terms with these insecurities. In the first two weeks of 2009, he’s gayed it up like a drag queen at Key West, or that Clay guy from American Idol.

He fawned over Benicio Del Toro, clearly making a pass at him twice in a span of a 4-minute interview. “You are a very handsome man,” Colbert said to the star of Che. (Del Toro said, I ain’t into that freaky shit, man.) Colbert also admitted he carries all manner of objects up his rectum, including microfiche and micro-fish, mini-trouts, in his words. And if the Tek Jansen cartoon blips aren’t cries of “Help me, I’m not a straight man,” we don’t know what their reason for existence is.

The next time you watch the Colbert Report, pronounce the host’s name as if he were a Frenchman, the way he likes it, and count the homoerotic tendencies on display. Then you’ll think the Elevator Pitch is onto something as we continue our crusade to be Put on Notice (or politely told to go away).

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