Satellite dish. (don't get me started).

Leapin' Botox! We're going to have our own gay channel! All over town Fantasy Gay TV Programmer is the new party game. Everybody's playing! Naturally, I want my own late-night show, Satellite Dish. I'd love to be in Six Feet Under the Vagina Monologues, but I really want to direct.

Before we get into a GLBT Studies discussion of the ins and outs of such a thing, let's do take a minute to revel. Before Ellen, Will & Grace, or Queer as Folk, all gay viewers could do was wait for Paul Lynde to be the round peg in his Hollywood Square, decode and deconstruct a Lily Tomlin special ("Look! She's wearing purple. Discuss!"), or decrypt PBS's Where's Waldo?-like programming to find In the Life.

Of course, if you watched with my girlfriend, you would be convinced that everyone on TV is already gay. Her constant commentary is "He is so gay" or, less often, "She's such a lesbian." Every weatherman. Most quarterbacks. (When John Madden squeals, "Look at him scramble out of the pocket!" I get the nudge.) Antiques Roadshow? The Christopher Lowell Show? Gay men telling us what to do with our stuff.

In our household, with the exception of that whining second-rate Canadian skating pair, the Salt Lake Olympics might as well have been called the Gay Winter Olympics. The breakup of the women's couple in the still-called "two-man bobsled" team? Dyke drama. The luge? "A very gay event," my viewing companion pronounced. Watching what looks to me like high-speed sperm rattling down a crooked, slick chute, I ask "How do you know that?" at the exact moment the announcer with the Vaseline over his mike intones, "She's controlling the whole thing with her inner thighs." Nudge.

Her "Name It and Claim It" viewing habit stems, of course, from her incorrigible ability to think the best of people. As persuasive as she sometimes is, I'm not buying it. TV is straighter and scarier than ever. Because of an unsettled economy and decreased ad revenues, TV is forced to produce more shows on the cheap, except of course for the Friends who get a million each per episode. Hey, they are so worth it.

Survivor, Temptation Island, and others of the so-called reality genre are really what interest straight people about themselves. One critic said The Chair and The Chamber--the second genre-ation shows, with their soupcon of S/M--tap into and defuse an undercurrent of anger in the country. So show them on Al Jazeera. In The Chamber, mercifully "on hiatus" (in other words, canceled), a contestant is strapped in a chair, doused with hot and cold water, and asked questions. The Chair is hosted by John McEnroe, torture enough. In Guantanamo Bay Watch? Or a Thursday night down at the Big Cock? Welcome to Gay Jeopardy!

It's no wonder gay people want their own channel. Some say it would invisibilize our hard-won visibility on mainstream programming. But it could in fact be a safe haven away from really bad TV--a lab for development of investigative journalism, fearless questioning, open debate, hour-long dramas. I'll give it a will and grace period, but I ain't holding my lesbian breath. I think we should start channeling from within.

Besides doing Gay per View, we should purchase the crawl space on every TV bandwidth--that space at the bottom of the screen where the terror ticker tape has been running 24-7 since 9/11. That "down there" used to be just the province of financial networks. As Lou Dobbs jowled on about the wonders of Enron, you could read that your 401(k) was worth as much as your Levi 501s. Now any channel worth its shares is scrolling. We'd run ours all the way around the screen so you could read it while lying on your side. Like Mystery Science Theater 3000 without the silhouettes, our crawl would run dishy comments on whatever was on the screen. Dick Cheney making a rare appearance? "Father Knows Best." Greta Van's new eye job? "What was she thinking?" And it is a known scientific fact that when you are reading the crawl you cannot hear what is being said. Let's roll!