The sex of children and adolescents has become, since the eighteenth century, an important area of contention around which innumerable institutional devices and discursive strategies have been deployed...discourses that were interlocking, hierarchized, and all highly articulated around a cluster of power relations. (1510)
Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol I
No one wants to talk about children’s sexuality. That’s how the story goes, anyway. For a society that is uncomfortable with this topic, we sure do seem to talk about it a lot. Mass anxiety over toddler beauty pageants as over-sexualizing children, the teen “sexting” craze, and the seemingly inexhaustible search for sexual inneuendo and symbolism in children’s media strike me as a few recent examples. (For an especially entertaining example, consider the National Report’s recent hoax headline: “Sesame Street’s Big Bird Comes Out as Transgender.” Just don’t read the comments.)
As Foucault and others have written, the extensive discourse on children’s sexuality seems to be an attempt at gaining control over something uncontrollable- human sexuality. Increased infrastructure since the eighteenth century in education, medicine, the law, religion, while sometimes successfully oppressive of sexuality, more often simply rearticulate the anxiety.
Joshua Conkel explores this set of concerns beautifully in his 2009 comedy MilkMilkLemonade. Equal parts coming of age story and PBSKids spoof, for whatever reason, it all takes place on a dwindling chicken farm.
Conkel appears at first to skirt the taboo of writing about childhood sexuality, and queer sexuality at that, by making the children in his play into adults. Emory and Elliott the two eleven-year-olds in the play speak like adults. Despite their distinctly juvenile brand of cruelty and heightened emotion, they have a mature self-possession that exceeds that of the only adult character, Nanna.They seem to understand things about themselves that elude most people, of any age. (Take for example Emory’s finely developed sense of self-worth when he admits “I like acting like a girl...I really like being me” (37). Or Elliott’s tender admission that he must continue bullying Emory because otherwise people might suspect that he cares for him (38). This calm recognition of his own internalized homophobia would frankly be inconceivable to many adults.)
These are emotionally sophisticated roles that call for adult actors. This casting requirement has the added benefit of making the play funny. It’s funny to hear (an adult playing) a child say something like “I’m not afraid of your Nanna. If she tries anything I’ll punch her in her front butt” (19). For example.
Despite the adult actors, the subtext of childhood sexual socialization remains perfectly clear. Take the set, for instance. Stage directions indicate that the set “should look as if it were designed and built by second graders for their school play: slightly retarded looking, but charming just the same…[with] a lemon yellow sun that passes from sun up to sun down over the course of the play” (4). While the sun is necessary to mark the passing time, it also feels like a Teletubbies reference if ever there was one. I can practically hear the smiling sun baby giggling over the proceedings at the chicken farm:
I suspect that Conkel’s invocation of the Teletubbies is no accident. In the late 1990s, the show became a representative example of our nation’s anxiety over childhood sexuality and gender roles. In 1999, Jerry Falwell, former spokesman for the Moral Majority, denounced the show, claiming that the purple Teletubbie, Tinky Winky, was gay. His evidence, according to a 1999 BBC article: "He is purple - the gay-pride colour; and his antenna is shaped like a triangle - the gay-pride symbol." Right. Tinky Winky also carried a purse. Three strikes I guess. He went on to state, "As a Christian I feel that role modelling the gay lifestyle is damaging to the moral lives of children."
Nanna seems to be something of a stand-in for Falwell in the play. Early in the text she explains, “I think it was Jesus or God who said, ‘Thou shalt not lie with another man as with a woman. It is an abomination.’ Now, that’s in Leviticus. And that’s why fags are nasty” (9). Her comic inconsistency and faulty reasoning echo Falwell’s outrageous claim. Leviticus says “fags are nasty” in the same way that Tinky Winky, a pre-verbal plush creature models the “gay lifestyle.”
(The BBC’s response to the whole thing was pretty wonderful: "As far as we are concerned Tinky Winky is simply a sweet, technological baby with a magic bag." Indeed.)
The Lady in a Leotard, the show’s narrator and foley artist also contributes to the rhetoric of children’s television. She begins the play with an “awkward” rendition of the children’s song, “Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes.” She concludes the number, and launches into stilted child-speak: “Hooray. That was fun. That was a song about your body. This is my body here. Can you point to your body? Good work” (7). I can’t help but connect this moment to the crude children’s rhyme from which the show gets its name, “Milk Milk, Lemonade.” Urban Dictionary explains the song this way: “Milk Milk Lemonade: 1. The preamble and unofficial title to a joyous childhood rhyme. It goes: Milk, Milk, Lemonade, Push the Button, Fudge is Made. While saying this lovely poem, children point to the right side of their chest and then the left for the Milk part. For lemonade, they point to their genitals. "Push the button" calls for pushing ones belly button and then finishing it off by pointing to ones arse.”
I always thought it was “round the corner fudge is made,” but you get the point.
The disconnect between the two songs, both ways of teaching children to label and identify body parts, is striking. We tell kids not to talk about their bodies, their genitals in particular, and yet as Emory so astutely points out, “Everybody’s so obsessed with them” (38). Both Nanna and Elliott are constantly monitoring his body and the way he talks about his body, while simultaneously scolding him not to talk about it, to just keep his feelings to himself. Jerry Falwell’s obsession with markers of gayness reads in a similar way. He purports to silence or disrupt queer discourse, when in fact he is starting the conversation, inciting further discourse. Everybody's obsessed. Some approach this obsession with fear, others with chicken jokes. You choose.
Works Cited
Foucault, Michel. “The History of Sexuality, Vol 1: An Introduction.”The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Ed. Vincent B. Leitch. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2010. 1502-1520. Print.
“Gay Tinky Winky Bad for Children.” BBC News 15 February 1999. Web.
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