It's Girl Scout cookie season again which made me think of this box I've been hanging onto since the year 2000 or so. Just an innocent box of Tagalongs, right? Well, not so fast. Look a little closer and I think you'll agree something else is going on: lesbian subtext!
Years ago, LGBT activist and sex advice columnist Dan Savage wrote about the questionable box in Savage Love:
Hey, Everybody: If you haven't bought a box of Girl Scout cookies this year, I suggest you pick up a few boxes of Tagalongs Peanut Butter Patties pronto — these boxes are sure to be collectors' items one day. Pictured on the front of the box are two Girl Scouts up to their chins in water, nose to nose, looking deep into each other's eyes. "Go for it!" is written above their heads. I [heart] subtle and subversive homoeroticism, and despite the braces one of the girls has in her mouth — sure to get in the way of any late-night "going for it" back at the cabin — this photo qualifies as teenage lesbian erotica in my book.
If unsubtle homoeroticism is more to your liking, you need only flip over the box, where the text reads: "I just love water sports! Our teachers are complete pros! Jamilia and I actually synchronized our strokes …" [My italics.] Okay, let's stop and examine the first three lines: The Girl Scouts pictured on the box are only shown swimming — no one is shown on water-skis, playing water polo or snorkeling. Swimming isn't water sports, plural, it is a water sport, singular. So why doesn't the copy read, "I just love swimming!" Why "water sports"? "Pro" is slang for prostitute, and "strokes," well "strokes" has a vaguely sexual vibe.
Now the appearance of water sports, pros and strokes on the back of a Girl Scout cookie box could be a completely innocent coincidence, but, ladies and gentleman of the jury, I submit to you line four from the copy on the back of the Tagalongs Peanut Butter Patties box: "We did the whole length of the pool on our backs." On Our Backs, as any dyke worth her strap-on can tell you, is the grandmammy of lesbian porno magazines — this month's issue features lesbian nuns. Not interviews with members of the lesbian nun community, not an article about lesbianism in medieval convents — but big, glossy, black-and-white photos of two humpy young women in habits munching each other's cookies. (I'm guessing these girls aren't really nuns — unless genital piercings were recently approved by Rome.)
"Go for it!" "Water sports." "Pros." "Strokes." "On our backs." Someone, some deep-cover operative of the International Homosexual Conspiracy (IHC), has clearly infiltrated whatever agency designs Girl Scout cookie boxes. Like the IHC plant who designed Mattel's Earring Magic Ken — Ken came complete with a cockring on a chain around his neck — the Girl Scout operative succeeded in slipping a completely queer product past his or her completely clueless hetero supervisors, shaking the heterosexual dictatorship and striking a blow for lesbian visibility. When Mattel realized they'd been had, Cockring Magic Ken was quickly pulled off the shelves, and Mattel's press spokesperson denied they were in the business of "putting cockrings into the hands of little girls." The Girl Scouts, once they realize what's actually going on in that pool pictured on the back of the peanut butter cookie box, will probably do the same. Get a box of Tagalongs while you still can.
Let's get a little closer…
In an old Straight Dope forum, someone commented that the box was discontinued in 2001.
photos by Rusty Blazenhoff
