Lab testing on fictional animals.

The following post was made in January of 2006 on my old domain. I thought it was (1) too good to die and (2) the perfect test post to help me tweak some blog settings since I haven't used Blogger in years. Enjoy. Or not. Whatever. By the way, I have no idea if those links work anymore. Click on your own risk.

Bugs Bunny: teh Homersexual

This cracks me up. Where does this come from? I just thought it was the funniest thing I've seen in a while. Why do we need any proof he's straight? There was never anything gay about Bugs Bunny, though I'm sure the Rainbow Network would beg to disagree. Let's find some of the main reasons here and dissect them, just for kicks:

"Bugs doesn't have a girlfriend." I can accept this as a fact, only because I'm despise Lola being created to simply play the cliche role of "the girl" and nobody and their ass even counts Honey Bunny, provided you even know who the hell she is. Nice arguement, but if you go by that standard, that leaves a *lot* of homos in the Looney Tunes universe. Who DOES have a girlfriend? Not even Porky, though at least given something of canon girlfriend with Petunia, seems to be going steady. The only ones who seem to get laid on a regular basis are Granny/Yosemite Sam and Foghorn Leghorn/that demented old hen, and really, did we even need to think about it? (Because I'm damn sorry I did....) Getting down to the nitty-gritty, it was just inconvenient and unnecessarily to bring in females in most of these shorts. They were about gags, not relationships. Come on... Daffy doesn't have a girlfriend either AND he talks with freaking lisp. Why aren't we calling *him* gay?

"Bugs wears drag and kisses men." No, he wears disguises. It's not the same thing. People don't wear drag to escape stuttering huntsman and short gun-toting rednecks. He certainly doesn't go through day to day pretending to be a woman. He kisses his pursuers to piss them off or merely throw it in their faces that they'll never catch him, among other not-gay reasons. It's a joke and gag and a damn funny one. It doesn't make him Kyan from "Queer Eye".

"Bugs stands with a hand on his hip." Well holy sh!t, I'm convinced. It's a freakin' stance. He couldn't very well be standing with his arms crossed (which studies have shown, give a negative, closed-off vibe) or akimbo or dangly-dingly to the side. It would just look weird. Considering that we got here, I'm surprised no one has equated his oral fixation with carrots to be some sort of metaphor for penchant for fellatio. He's a rabbit munching on a vegetable. What else is he going to use: a head of cabbage, a stalk of celery, a dainty squash? I'm sure people would've loved that last one...

"Bugs loves show tunes and the opera." Let's not even dignify that. What else was going on in the 50's? Certainly not video games and cable television. Let's not forget the WW2 cartoons. Next thing they'll say is that they all love war or something.

Now I'm the last person to criticize looking too deep into cartoons and reading crap into them. Hey, I'm with you on Velma (and Fred... sorry but, kerchief?), Peppermint Patty, Vanity Smurf, Snagglepuss, and Spongebob being all queer-mo.... but Bugs?

This piece on the subject says it best:

"Kevin Sandler's chapter "Gendered Evasion: Bugs Bunny in Drag" confronts the cross-dressing antics of Bugs Bunny and suggests that, rather than transgressing or blurring gender boundaries, such narrative themes reinforce the binary "ideals" of male and female gender roles. Using the theories of Judith Butler (the notion that all gender is drag), Sandler interestingly explores the idea that "gender imitation in animal characters does not copy that which is prior in humans since gender already is a fiction; it copies what is already assumed to exist in humans" (159). He states that it is only the female animal characters that are sexually coded with breasts, long eyelashes, red lips etc., whereas the male animal characters, such as Bugs and Daffy, are identified as male precisely because they lack any overt sexual signifiers. Sandler maintains that the transvestite gags remain safe because the joke relies on the fact that the audience understands that it is a disguise (to evade capture). Thus, when Bugs kisses his enemy, whether in drag or not, it is not viewed as transgressive because it is mediated through the act of "taunting" his opponent. This chapter, along with those on race and other ideological subtexts or insensitivities, implies that Warners' cartoon narratives, like Disney's, are explicitly white, heterosexual and male orientated. This is not explicitly criticised, possibly because of the nostalgic nature of the book as a whole. It is suggested that, although many of the cartoons are explicitly racist and/or sexist, this is a feature of society at the time (often the World War II years)."

So sorry, but Bugs is as straight as an arrow, and someone over at Rainbow has a broken gaydar