If the question of whether or not the Teletubbies were gay has kept you awake at night for the past fifteen years or so, good news: you can finally get some shuteye. Nikky Smedley, a.k.a. Laa-Laa, a.k.a. "the yellow Teletubby," a.k.a. "the slutty one," has broken her years-long silence on the Teletubbies' sexual orientation by publicly stating that the beloved children's characters were not, in fact, playing for the same team.
"I think it's embarrassing for the people who said it," she recently told the Telegraph, addressing those on the religious right who alleged that the show had gay undertones. "What kind of person can take the obvious innocence and turn it into something else? We were hardly sexual beings."
Smedley, who played Laa-Laa for ten years before the show's run ended, was in part referring to evangelist Jerry Falwell, who famously claimed that Tinky-Winky (a.k.a. "the purple Teletubby," a.k.a. "the hot but ditzy one") was a "gay role model" for children because he carried a purse and wore the gay pride symbol of a triangle on his head. (Falwell forgot to cite that episode where the Teletubbies spend Fourth of July weekend on Fire Island and Tinky-Winky ends up being caught with special guest star Hal Sparks in a public shower, but I guess he thought the bag thing and the triangle were convincing enough.)
As one of the aforementioned individuals who has spent years lying awake at night, mulling over the sex lives of beloved English children's television characters, I, for one, would like to thank Smedley for having the courage to come forward and take this giant weight off my back. Now it's only a matter of time before the Telegraph runs a similarly revelatory interview with the stop-motion puppet who played Fireman Sam.
