CHARLOTTETOWN, Prince Edward Island - Laura Robinson, professor of English, arrived at last month's Congress of Humanities and Social Sciences with a bombshell to toss among the literary cogitations. The title of her scholarly paper, presented at the Alberta conference, told it all: "Bosom Buddies: Lesbian Desire in L. M. Montgomery's Anne Books."
That's Anne, as in Anne Shirley, as in "Anne of Green Gables," the Canadian classic that generations of readers have innocently supposed to be a straightforward tale of a plucky, homely, effusively romantic red-haired girl coming of age on Prince Edward Island in the late 1800s.
But no. According to Robinson, the Anne novels - of which "Green Gables" was first and most famous - are actually meditations on lesbian lust. As for Anne's crush on schoolmate Gilbert Blythe, whom she eventually marries, the professor rips the lid off that facade: Their courtship and nuptials, the paper claims, merely represent the "triumph of compulsive heterosexuality."
Whatever.
Meanwhile, if you think the media didn't rise to Robinson's bait like big-mouth bass to a twisting worm, you've got another think coming. Details sizzled over the news wires, with front pages from Toronto to Tokyo blaring subtle headlines like "Anne of Green GAY-bles!"
Besmirch Anne and you besmirch Prince Edward Island, at least in the minds of businessfolk and officials presiding over the pint-sized province's $207 million tourist industry - half of it attributable to Anne. Hundreds of thousands of tourists flock to the various "Anne Sites," such as Montgomery's birthplace and the real-life Green Gables, now a national park.
"This is just another attempt to downgrade ... Prince Edward Island," inveighs Greg Deighan, minister of tourism. "Anne is good, Anne is strong, Anne and PEI will not be brought down."
The verbose orphan towers over the island like a pig-tailed colossus. Only potatoes and lobsters surpass her in economic value.
But the locals aren't all cheering Anne fans.
The provincial government nearly provoked armed revolt a few years ago when it emblazoned Anne's freckle-faced visage on license plates, making every car an advertisement for Anne.
As if genuine billboards and posters didn't loom large enough - Anne's impish, sunbonnet-framed grin is almost frighteningly omnipresent, especially along the tawdry tourist strip in Montgomery's home town of Cavendish.
`Sick of Anne'
