homosexuality before the episode aired. In the 1990 episode "Simpson and Delilah," the character Karl (voiced by Harvey Fierstein) kisses Homer, while the recurring character Waylon Smithers is often shown to be in love with his boss, Montgomery Burns, initially suggestively and since then more overtly. However, "Homer's Phobia" was the first episode to revolve entirely around homosexual themes. Two later episodes that explored LGBT issues were "Three Gays of the Condo" and "There's Something About Marrying". When the episode aired, the production team received "very few" complaints about its content, with most of the response being positive. Alan Frutkin gave the episode a positive write-up in the LGBT-interest magazine The Advocate, calling it "vintage Simpsons." Warren Martyn and Adrian Wood stated in their book, I Can't Believe It's a Bigger and Better Updated Unofficial Simpsons Guide, that: "Only The Simpsons could do this so tongue-in-cheek that nobody could get in a tizzy about it. Very good indeed." In the book Leaving Springfield, Matthew Henry praised the episode's critiquing of "the most common misconception about homosexuality: namely that gayness is somehow contagious", as well as its other themes. Catharine Lumby of the University of Sydney cited the episode as an example of good satire as it "managed to explore a lot of [homosexual] issues in quite a deep way [...] without being overtly political", which she claimed, along with the episode's humor, made its anti-homophobia message more successful than that of other gay-themed shows like Queer as Folk. In his review of The Simpsons – The Complete Eighth Season DVD, Todd Gilchrist said that the episode "certainly qualifies as one of the all-time greatest episodes". In 1998, TV Guide listed it in its list of top twelve Simpsons episodes. It was placed fifth on Entertainment Weeklys top 25 The Simpsons episode list. In 2003, USA Today published a top 10 episodes list chosen by the webmaster of The Simpsons Archive, which had this episode listed in tenth place. IGN ranked John Waters's performance as the ninth-best guest appearance in the show's history, with TV Guide naming him the third-best film-related guest star. In a 2008 article, Entertainment Weekly named Waters as one of the 16 best The Simpsons guest stars. John Patterson of The Guardian wrote that Waters' appearance "felt to me like a summit meeting between the most influential pop-culture figures of the last 25 years". When The Simpsons