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Tinky Winky Kinky

The Teletubbies is a British program aimed at the extremely young, children 18 months and older, featuring four barely verbal alienish characters named Tinky Winky, Laa-Laa, Dipsy, and Po. Many people are deeply suspicious of a television program deliberately aimed at children so very young, so the show has already attracted one noteworthy accusation in its first two years on the air in the US. The accusation is that the character Tinky Winky is gay and is promoting a gay lifestyle. Tinky Winky is male, carries a handbag, and in a stretch showing the deft imagination of the American right wing, his triangle antenna is interpreted to represent the triangle symbol of the gay pride movement. Apparently the "gay lifestyle" also includes living in a half-buried spaceship-like dome house and exclaiming one's name when eagerly receiving television broadcasts on one's stomach-mounted CRT.

Debunked: Tinky Winky, the large blue Teletubby, is gay.

Ragdoll Productions, the BBC, and PBS all deny Tinky Winky is gay, saying he is too young to adopt any sort of gender role, much less a sexual orientation. A related story, and one that should assuage the fears of the rumor-mongers, is that the original actor who played Tinky Winky, Dave Thompson, was fired in 1997 for allegedly playing Tinky Winky in such a way as to overly attract a gay audience. See this Newsweek article for details on this story.

References:

• Newsweek article