Space Glam: Making the Case for an Animated Queer Herstory

Arts

May 27

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I want to take the time, if I may, to address how queer cartoons are. Many of you will probably be saying, “Duh, knew that!” But really, do you know? You may have shipped Peppermint Patty and Marcie and stuck around until the end of Adventure Time for the ultimate payoff of, spoiler alert, Princess Bubblegum and Marceline. You may remember Ren, of Ren & Stimpy, and his pectoral implants. And sure, you’ve seen icon Robert Crumb talk about his childhood sexual fixation with Bugs Bunny and how his entire œuvre may stem from a picture of Bugs in drag that he kept in his pocket that got so wrinkled his mom had to iron it until it turned brown!

But queerness is on the rise in animation. Or perhaps it never wasn’t? Forgive the double negative but I’m here to encourage, nay demand, radical readings of queerness in cartoon. Look no further than Abbi Jacobson’s character in the recent Netflix release of The Mitchells vs. the Machines. The queer reading of this film, Jacobson’s Katie rebelling against her dad’s dad-ness, was somewhat revolutionary for a computer animated film when all seem to rely on the straight, white, male gaze of dad-ness (i.e. the work of Pixar’s John Lasseter, Brad Bird, Pete Docter, etc.). In the end, I would argue that Katie learns to celebrate what makes her family queer while honoring her own individuality.

There’s something to be said for the queer experiences of childhood viewing habits. For many the touchstone has always been cartoons. Growing up, animation is something of a parent-free zone, generally too weird or zany for scrutiny. Generations of parents have depended on the dreaded Hays code & arbitrary/authoritarian MPAA and its “G” ratings to the point that all animated work, as long as it betrays some anthropomorphic cuteness or seeming “princessant” moralism, will end up lumped under the catch-all descriptor, “Family.” There’s a great line from John Waters’ outlaw-cinema manifesto of a film Cecil B. Demented, “‘Family’ is just a dirty word for censorship!” Queerness is genre work, an outlier or aberration in anything “family”-oriented because parents don’t want to explain to their kids what queer is, rather preferring to wait until it’s weaponized against them at school or on the street. But queerness is like the message hidden in the show that only those with the secret decoder ring can unlock. Queerness involves making space for those characters operating outside the hero/heroine and, for the audience, feeling kinship towards them.

*FIG 1-3, LEFT TO RIGHT:* MORTICIA ADDAMS *BY CHARLES ADDAMS (1963); ELVIRA, MISTRESS OF THE DARK; DRAG QUEEN SUPERSTAR SHARON NEEDLES AS ELVIRA*

I think the most productive way to understand and track queerness in cartoons would be to look at the historical presence of drag, a radically transformative expression of gender, in cartoons, an artform that is all about the transformative. Both are all about embodying that magical possibility. Listen, drag and cartoons have been in a serious relationship for a long time, longer than you’d think. Both animation and drag culture, as we know it in the American realm of entertainment, both have underpinnings in the vaudeville circuit. Early female impersonating superstars like Julian Eltinge and Bert Savoy took to the stage at the same time that early animated novelties like Gertie the Dinosaur (1914), the first keyframe animation, swept across American vaudeville stages, sandwiched between the live acts. Over time, both artforms would take routes of both overtly subversive and mass cultural appeal.

There’s a reflexive, intertextual relationship between both drag and cartoons in how they both do the work of signifying gender, and to the back of the house at that. From Morticia Addams (originally a New Yorker cartoon!) to Elvira, Mistress of the Dark, or anime to any number of current drag superstars, the mutually symbiotic relationship is clear. Depression-era star Mae West (of “Why don’t you come upstairs and fuck me in the ass sometime?” fame), when not lampooning herself, was lampooned in cartoons frequently. An early Looney Tunes short, Buddy’s Beer Garden (1933), is a pre-Bugs entry in what would become a long-standing tradition of the brand’s drag as beguiling stagecraft, this time through the lens of Mae West-style femininity, perfectly suited to the subversive wink of pre-code film and animation. Bugs Bunny would turn representations like this of genderplay on its head by utilizing drag as a queer survival tactic. I’ve always read Bugs’ evolved queerness as allowing the character to outsmart all others.

*FIG 5-8, LEFT TO RIGHT: FEMALE IMPERSONATORS JULIAN ALTINGE & BERT SAVOY; A MAE WEST FACSIMILE IS REVEALED TO BE BUDDY IN DRAG IN* BUDDY’S BEER GARDEN (1933) DIR. BY EARL DUVAL.

I have to bring up Looney Tunes again because this summer will see their first wide-released film since 2003 with Space Jam: A New Legacy. In 1996, Space Jam was a big deal for me growing up. Living in Chicago, even a queer kid like me couldn’t escape Jordan idolatry. There’s something to be said for cartoon characters sharing space with live actors. In films like Who Framed Roger Rabbit? (1988) or, to a queerer extent, Cool World (1992), it is queerness embodied in showing what sets these characters apart from the quotidian reality of straightness and, at times, their failure to assimilate.

This is all not to say that cartoons are completely free of straight tropes and that they don’t frequently traffic in grotesque stereotype. But queerness is still a fundamental aspect of animation as a form and should be recognized and championed as a channel for queer expression. And likewise, as drag becomes more mainstream as animation did long ago and seemingly less of a countercultural touchstone for the queer “community,” I believe it’s important to hold onto the ideals that made us freaks and use that to continue to build our queer utopias.

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Philip is a writer, theatre-maker and PhD student, from Chicago, living in Atlanta.

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