No you can do as I am doing and get rid of the whole shebang. TV is a wasteland. I choose to protect my family from all of it. I am not going to make a stink to the DirecTV folks, just turn it off for good.
I have no comment one way or the other on the whole "gay Bravo" thing, but I can tell you that the days of your local cable companies only offering "take it all or take a hike" packages are going to come to an end. It won't happen tomorrow, but it will happen over the next few years.
Ironically, the main cause will be the most innocuous programming of all: sports. Channels like ESPN (but certainly not just ESPN) routinely screw cable companies to the wall, demanding outrageous per-subscriber fee increases when their contract comes up for renewal every year, because they know that the cable companies have no choice; any local cableco that stopped offering ESPN would lose half its customers inside of a month. So the cablecos are toying with the idea of moving all the sports channels to a special "a la carte" tier that subscribers have to specifically ask for. That way, the subscribers that DO care about sports will get all the channels they ant, but those that don't will stop seeing their bills going up 5% a year just because of Disney's extortion tactics ... and as an added bonus, ESPN's income will drop like a rock as millions of subscribers opt out and pay $0.00 for channels they never ever watch.
As far as I know, only one cableco has actually gone through with this threat so far, but from what I've read it's working. And once the idea starts spreading in terms of sports, customers will start demanding it across the board, and the cablecos will start giving it to them. (Now that digital cable allows for so many new channels, the chances of it happening are even greater, because the cablecos simply will not be able to get away with charging $100/mo for 300 channels, 250 of which the customer never watches. There's a finite limit to how much the consumer is willing to pay for the "take it all or take a hike" non-option, and we're at that limit. Pretty soon the consumer will indeed take the hike instead.) My guess: Within 5-7 years most cable companies will be operating under "cafeteria plans," where each subscribers simply ticks off which channels he wants and which ones he doesn't. Don't like Bravo or CNN? Your cable box will block those channels and you won't pay for them. (And NBC and AOL won't get your money.)
Of course, the more each of you calls your local cable companies on a regular basis demanding "a la carte" programming plans, the sooner this will happen. (It will help if you give the reason for your complaints solely as cost concerns ("I don't even watch sports, so why should I pay the increased ESPN fee every year?!?) instead of making a moral issue out of it. The moment you start going off about "the homos on Bravo!" or "those socialists on CNN!", the customer service rep is just going to mark you down as a crank. Plenty of industry studies have shown that people who call in with concerns about the price tend to be far more serious about considering a switch to/from satellite or cable, while those that just complain about the programming on a given channel are known to usually just be blowing steam and have no intention of changing their service. Guess which complaint gets taken more seriously.