People immediately started screaming at me. Even today, every few weeks someone finds the article and starts screaming again:
"It's a kid's cartoon!"
"You're reading too much into it!"
"The cartoonists never intended them to be gay!"
"Can't two guys be friends without everyone thinking they're gay?"
"How can they be gay, when they aren't Wearing a Sign?"
Except I never said that the Yogi Bear and Boo Boo were "really" gay, whatever that might mean for beings with no bodies or minds, who don't exist at all outside of some images painted on celluloid. Or that the producers meant them to be gay. I said that their partnership provided a model with which gay kids could identify and validate their own same-sex desires.
A lot of the things I know about the world -- avalanches, duels, Napoleon, gangsters, daffodils, Shakespeare, karate, King Arthur, submarines, Egyptian hieroglyphics -- I probably first heard from the block of cartoons that Hanna Barbera broadcast on prime time in the late 1950s, and aired through the 1960s on Saturday mornings and on late-afternoon kids' programs like Captain Ernie's Cartoon Showboat.
Huckleberry Hound
Lippy the Lion and Hardy Har Har
Pixie and Dixie
Quick Draw McGraw and Baba Looey
Ruff and Reddy
Snagglepuss
Wally Gator
Yogi Bear and Boo Boo
Note that they usually came in pairs who lived together, traveled together, and worked together to defeat the bad guy who wanted to eat or confine them. I know now that they were reflections of the movie-comedy teams of the 1940s and 1950s, like Abbott and Costello, Hope and Crosby, and Martin and Lewis.
I didn't know then.
I knew only that every adult man in the real world had a wife, and every teenage boy had a girlfriend whom he hoped one day to marry. I saw no men, heard of no men -- none at all -- who lived together, who built a life together, who didn't need or want wives. But at "cartoon time," in plain view, there was Yogi Bear and Boo Boo, Pixie and Dixie, Quick Draw and Baba Looey.
See also: The Three Stooges and The Flintstones.
I had the privilege of watching Hanna-Barbera jump the shark with the Jellystone Mall.
ReplyDeleteStrangely enough, while Scooby-Doo has gone through many iterations, including one that ends with them enrolling at Arkham, and Adult Swim has done much of the "what grown-up gen xers think of their cartoons now" genre (Robot Chicken, Sealab 2021, Harvey Birdman, Space Ghost Coast to Coast), there has never really been a reboot of limited animation, 8-minute cartoons by Hanna-Barbera. Even Masters of the Universe got a reboot, and Filmation has been dead since the 90s. Cartoon Network has been doing bad comedy reboots of their own shows, demonstrating WHY this is an Adult Swim thing.
Then again, AOL Time Warner owns the rights, and I don't trust Cartoon Network with anything anymore.
"Harvey Birdman" was good at reviving long-forgotten Hanna-Barbera characters.
DeleteI had a similar reaction when I suggested "Jonny Quest" had two dads. Dr Quest and Rex Bannon are obviously a couple. Yes Bannon was given a female love interest in one episode but for the rest of the series Bannon and Dr Quest shared bedrooms and tents. They even lived in Key West?!
ReplyDeleteBefore I yell at you, is it possible to read said "scholarly article outlining the homodomestic relationship between Yogi Bear and Boo Boo."? Thanks
ReplyDeleteI don't remember which one it was, "Queertoons" or "The Same Thing We Do Every NIght." Here's the Queertoons link:http://www.icce.rug.nl/~soundscapes/VOLUME06/Queertoons.shtml
DeleteANd "The Same Thing We Do". https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/01956050309603674
I also have one on "Fairly Oddparents"
Authorial intent matters if they're meant to be like, father and son, such as Batman and Robin. (Thankfully you can find Batman subtext 38th Superman, Aquaman, Hal Joran, and Barry Allen. And of course the Joker, one Joker, is canonically I'm love with Batman. For Robin, you have to specify, but I can find stuff for all five of them.) I'm not ready to ship incest. But away from that, you have lots of ships.
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ReplyDeleteIn 2020, Nickelodeon--which produces children's shows, including SpongeBob Squarepants--announced that SpongeBob is indeed gay. They also identified Schwoz Schwartz from Henry Danger, and Korra from Avatar: The Legend of Korra as members of the LGBTQ+ community.
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