Oh, he was just kidding! Isn't it so ironic how people who say or write horrible and disrespectful and make their living by remaining in the good graces of the public are suddenly so sorry once they are bitten in the ass by the backlash?
Latest case in point: Garrison Keillor of "A Prairie Home Companion" fame. Towleroad.com has just reported that Keillor has issued an apology for the "misunderstanding" he created in a column last week, an apparently "tongue in cheek" look at parenting and the good old days.
Here is, in part, what he wrote: "The country has come to accept stereotypical gay men -- sardonic fellows with fussy hair who live in over-decorated apartments with a striped sofa and a small weird dog and who worship campy performers and go in for flamboyance now and then themselves. If they want to be accepted as couples and daddies, however, the flamboyance may have to be brought under control. Parents are supposed to stand in back and not wear chartreuse pants and black polka-dot shirts. That's for the kids. It's their show."

Now he is singing a different tune and writes: "I live in a small world—the world of entertainment, musicians, writers—in which gayness is as common as having brown eyes. Ever since I was in college, gay men and women have been friends, associates, heroes, adversaries, and in that small world, we talk openly and we kid each other and think nothing of it. But in the larger world, gayness is controversial. In almost every state, gay marriage would be voted down if put on a ballot. Gay men and women have been targeted by the right wing as a hot-button issue. And so gay people out in the larger world feel besieged to some degree. In the small world I live in, they feel accepted and cherished as individuals, but in the larger world they may feel like Types. My column spoke as we would speak in my small world and it was read by people in the larger world and thus the misunderstanding. And for that, I am sorry. Gay people who set out to be parents can be just as good parents as anybody else, and they know that, and so do I."