I found a book of gay-adapted fairy tales in the bookstore a while back, and that was an interesting idea, but I take issue with the execution. The first story in the book was the one about the goose that laid the golden eggs. The boy who had the goose (named Jack, natch) paraded down the road in his village, goose under his arm, and this caused jealousy among his fellow villagers. One tries to snatch the goose away from Jack, but he gets stuck to him where he touched him. He couldn't let go.

Another helpful person tried to get the first one off, (Stop laughing.) and gets stuck to him. Eventually the scene turns into a gi-normous conga line gone mad. Jack soon passes the castle, blissfully unaware of the long string of stoop-backed rubes behind him. The prince sees this nonsense and bursts out laughing, curing his lifelong depression. So far, all is just as it was in the original fairy tale, except of course for the missing depressed princess.

One of the stuck villagers is the video rental store's manager. This was meant as a joke, but I didn't find it that funny. Not that I found it an offense to the almighty fairy tale; it just fell flat for me. No yuks.

Leafing through the rest of the book, we find that Goldilocks is now entertaining far more than three bears, and I'll let you guess what long slender thing a different Jack is now climbing instead of a beanstalk.

I didn't buy the book, but the idea stuck with me. Couldn't traditional fairy tales be adapted with gay themes with more cleverness, instead of going for the cheap laughs?

An editor named Andrew Lang produced a series of children's books called The (Colour) Fairy Book. You can find the Red, Yellow, Blue and Violet ones on-line even though there's about a dozen in total.

This is The Rainbow Fairy Book, an anthology of adaptations of these stories, some familiar, some not.

	A story with a bear versus the trolls. Need I say more?

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