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Fresh from fretting about the Gay Channel (see last Crank Watch), Andrew Sullivan now bitches out the Los Angeles Times report on the yearly College Freshman Survey for saying that support of gay marriage is a "liberal" position. No, no, cries the noted traitor-baiter and right-handed batter for the Pink Team, "Growing numbers of conservatives" support gay rights.

Of course these "numbers" are growing, we cannot help but observe: They could scarcely go down. Despite the presence of Sullivan and a few other LAGGAWUs (Look, A Gay Guy Agrees With Us), and a general campaign to make the Right look more "libertarian" (which, according to Edroso's Political Dictionary, is what conservatives call themselves when they want to get laid), gay marriage--indeed, gayness itself--remains a bone in the throat of most Sons of Reagan (his figurative sons, anyway).

Whenever Sullivan says something like this, I play a little game. I pick a conservative site at random, and check out whatever gay-themed material they might have handy for evidence of growing tolerance among the Righties. Then I enjoy a chuckle at the apposition of Sullivan's Pollyanna dreams to his colleagues' Anita Bryant realities.

Paydirt is never more than four clicks away. This time I got it on two.

In the most recent National Review Online "weekend" section--where NRO's staff of aesthetic illiterates regularly subject artists to criticism on political grounds, and none dare call it PC--one Kathryn Jean Lopez takes on the HBO series "Queer As Folk." As NRO is not Free Republic (a "gimme" in this game), there are no egregious remarks about ass pirates. Lopez even bestows some compliments: She calls the show "amazing"--because it "portrays the realities of homosexual 'dating'--namely promiscuity...the dangerous, unseemly world of gay baths and nightclubs."

Lopez describes some scenes from the series with obvious disinterest, then gets to her real agenda: In the last half of her review, she recycles the Jesse Dirkhising story. Dirkhising was a 13-year-old boy raped and murdered by two gay men. That his case drew less press coverage than Matthew Shepard's is frequently used by the homophobe Right to imply that, in press critic William McGowan's words (quoted by Lopez) "the Dirkhising story was too hot to handle because it raised the explosive issue of gay pedophilia and because it threatened the sanctity of the gays-as-victims script..."

Of course, this only makes sense if gay men are raping and murdering little boys at a rate comparable to the incidence of gay-bashing in the United States--that is, if a grotesque but anomalous murder story has the same "legs" as the violent apotheosis of traditional American homophobia. But never mind: an NRO hack reviews a gay TV show, and half the column is about "gay pedophilia."