"This is the most mature way wrestling has ever handled a gay storyline, which isn't saying much at all," Keller [the promoter who is the brains behind this idea] said yesterday. "But what I've noticed that's different this time is that the crowds have been surprisingly tolerant of the Billy and Chuck angle. It wasn't so long ago that you would go to a wrestling event and be sitting next to kids who were encouraged to chant, 'faggot, faggot, faggot.' This time the audience responds to the gay, or effeminate, characters in a fun way, instead of as a way to express hate."

Can it be that there are pockets in this country where people are willing to accept a gay couple for what they are--a couple of people who happen to love each other?

There may never have been a better time in the history of this country's struggle with the whole issue of homosexuality for Steve and Jimmy to be premiering their new play, which I am going to LA to see again this weekend.

It's a basically a simple story, told in very funny and at times quite poignant, dialog (much of which has been rewritten since I saw it in Laguna a few weeks ago). It's just the story of two people who grew up in very different worlds (Steve, the son of a Baptist minister, who wanted to grow up to be just like his father, and Jimmy, who was raised Catholic, entered the seminary, and wanted to be the first American pope), who came to accept their sexual orientation, eventually met each other, fell in love and have been living a gay marriage for the past 17 years, a fact that flies in the face of all those who say that homosexuals are incapable of deep love and are simply sex-crazed, going from partner to partner with little to no emotional involvement or commitment.

It will be interesting to watch The Big Voice as it smooths out the rough edges and prepares for its October opening at the Zephyr theatre in Los Angeles. Steve and Jimmy could be America's first gay comedy duo--the Burns and Allen of West Hollywood; the gay Lunts.

What's terrific about this play is that nobody lays on the "gay" thing with a trowel. They are two people in love, who just happen to be gay. There are no great messages here, no sensationalistic sex scenes, no "agenda" (for want of a better word) other than just to tell their story, and to make you laugh and cry with them in the telling.

When the curtain falls (figuratively--there is no real curtain), and they hug each other in elation because the show has gone so well, it's not the made-for-stage phony act of Billy and Chuck, it's the real thing--two guys who love each other, who have committed themselves to each other for far longer than an awful lot of straight marriages, and who thoroughly enjoy working together and the interaction with the audience as well.

Maybe, with the tolerance that red neck audiences are giving to Chuck and Billy, it's the dawn of a new era and Steve & Jimmy will be in the right place at the right time.