Teletubbies.

Children's television has a long and largely unspoken connection to gay sensibility. After all, it's our first exposure to popular culture, one without the inhibitions of the adult world. How many queer boys have fallen in love with Speed Racer? How many diminutive dykes first fixated on Josie and the Pussycats? Sesame Street's Bert and Ernie continue to school junior homos about domestic partnership, while Mister Rogers still clues preschool pansies 'in on the meaning of the phrase "sweater queen." And what invert growing up in the '80s wasn't seriously impacted by Pee-wee's Playhouse?

While cartoons in America have become increasingly controversial adult entertainment, the live-action show Teletubbies has created a stir in England as the first TV program designed for children as young as a year old. Starring four adorably fuzzy, amply padded creatures who frolic across a hilly English countryside amid bunnies and cooing flowers, Teletubbies--now making its U.S. debut via PBS--offers the strangest weekday merriment that broadcast television has to offer. Barney has nothing on these up-and-coming toddler totems.

It's a challenge to describe exactly what Teletubbies do. They romp around Teletubbyland occasionally speaking British baby talk (off-screen narrator voices have been dubbed into Americanese), frequently giving each other "big hugs," popping out of holes, playing with their vacuum cleaner pal Noo-noo, doing line dances, and receiving broadcasts on their TV bellies from a giant, magical windmill. A film featuring children at play fills our screens until the Teletubbies chant, "Again! Again!" Then they--and we--watch the same film over again.

Designed to engage baby-size attention spans, Teletubbies is startlingly repetitive, minimal in a Dr. Seuss-meets-director Robert Wilson kind of way. The Teletubbies fall over and laugh. They chase each other 'round their circular clubhouse and laugh. They wave at the camera when it's "time for Tubby-bye-bye" and laugh. The show is so cheerfully abstract that it's no wonder a nation full of Ecstasy-fueled clubbers regularly watch Teletubbies to come down from their drugs.

But what's more remarkable is how the largest of the `tubs, Tinky Winky, has become a gay icon. Each Teletubby has a prop: Lime-green Dipsy has a top hat, yellow Laa-Laa plays with a giant orange ball, and little red Po rides around on a squeaky scooter. Tinky Winky--who is a lovely shade of purple, is described on the PBS Web site as "the gentlest of the Teletubbies," has a trilateral antenna reminiscent of a pink triangle, and is clearly a boy--regularly carries a smart red handbag under his arm. The show offers no explanation why Tinky Winky is so good at accessorizing. He's simply born (or hatched) that way, it seems.

Apparently Tinky Winky's purse is meant to show kids that it's OK to take an interest in the accoutrements of the opposite gender--that identity is something we should claim for ourselves and not have thrust upon us. This is all well and good, but Tinky Winky still comes across as a big, fabulous fag.

Although the show's British producers are used to queries about Tink's sexual orientation, PBS is clearly terrified that the same fundamentalists who boycott Disney are going to flip once they get wind of the latest lavender love puppet and have refused to send The Advocate photos from the show. Bert and Ernie are organizing a kiss-in protest as we go to print.

Barry Walters is a pop-music critic for The Advocate.