Gay Morning America

If Clay Aiken doesn’t want people to think he’s gay, he shouldn’t name his albums “Measure of A Man” and “A Thousand Different Ways."

If Good Morning America wants to beat the Today show in the national ratings, its producers had better start thinking a lot less TMZ and a little more FHM.

We just a got a look at Diane Sawyer’s interview with poor Aiken, and we gotta ask: are these guys serious? Charlie Gibson hasn’t been gone a month and they've turned the show into Queer Eye for the News Guy.

Yesterday morning, while the tabloid Today show was perving out about the phony Tiger Wood wife nudes, over at GMA, they were segueing from the twinkly weatherman to Diane Sawyer trying to make the poor kid singer come out of his closet—to a “stepping into the closet” joke teasing an Isaac Mizrahi segment! Isaac Mizrahi in the morning, ripping off Gordon Elliott's doorknock routine!

The Aiken segment was sad. It wasn’t the usual choppy, ham-fisted editing (despite an extra camera with the special gauzy Sawyer lens). It was the tone: Diane Sawyer, Nixon’s gal, bearing down on this pathetic little warbler trying to get him to admit he loves men, like she's the correspondent for the Michelangelo Signorile show or something. It takes a lot of nerve for Diane to insist, “Honest to goodness, I am a firm believer in people’s private lives,” when she’s done such a great job for so many decades protecting her own.

Despite Disney’s gay-friendly reputation, this interview and show may be a turning point in the reinvention of Good Morning America, which is already subject to open ridicule, referred to smirkingly by New York media websites and magazines as “Gay Morning America."

(See Gawker.)

Obviously there's a powerful gay contingent on both sides of the camera at GMA. But no matter what they think of Madeline Albright or who they do in their private lives, the producers have got to realize they’re living in a New York high life bubble but working a mainstream morning new show. The guys at CNN know it (and so does Fox News!). And take it from us, acclaimed as a fiercely gay-friendly news organization: if they don’t start thinking mainstream soon, they’re all going to wind up at Bravo. Or CBS.