Saturday, February 5, 2005

Gay Cartoons

This loony stuff about SpongeBob being gay reminds me of some of the goofy fundamentalist pamphlets I used to see as a teenager.

One that sticks out in my memory was how dancing would lead to a life of decadence and degeneracy.  And, no, I don't mean nekkid pagan dancing, I mean just regular old dancing with your clothes on.  Part of the proof offered by this particular pamphlet was a woman who was an inmate in what the pamphlet described as an "insane asylum."  She said that the beginning of her slide to ruin was when she started going to dances.

I always wondered, if she was so insane that she had to be permanently institutionalized, should we really be taking at face value her own testimony about what started her break with reality?

Now, this article from Salon reminded me of something else: More gay cartoon characters revealed! by Liz Larocca Salon 02/08/05.  Back in the 1950s, some religious fanatic and/or scamster wrote a book telling about how comic books were destroying the morals of the youth, and explaining that Batman and Robin had a homosexual relationship, and so on.

Now, the best you could say for this was that it wasn't quite as nutty as the later idea that Satanic messages were "backmasked" (recorded backward) on Beatles records and that they were subliminally influencing people to do, I don't know, nekkid pagan dancing or something.

More specifically, the book was Seduction of the Innocent by Fredric Wertham (1954).  It inspired the creation of a restrictive code for comic books.  As Les Daniels explains in Batman: The Golden Age (2000), this led to creatively questionable changes in Batman comics:

Batman's classic crooks gave way to [space] aliens whose deeds couldn't be emulated by impressionable youths, and in response to charges that Batman and Robin might be gay, they were saddled with an unwieldy "Batman family" that included Batwoman, Bat-Girl, Bat-Mite, and Ace the Bat-Hound.

Of course, these days,  Pennsylvania's Senator Rick Santorum might take a dim view of Ace the Bat-Hound, too.

Can't these folks find some real problems to  worry everyone else about?

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Bruce,

Your last line says it all: "Can't these folks find some real problems to worry everyone else about?"  Spongebob is gay?  That's nice.  Batman and Robin are gay?  Do I care?  Thirty thousand people will die today because of malnutrition.  Millions of people do not have adequate access to clean drinking water.  Millions more will die this year due to treatable illnesses that are not treated because of protectionist trade agreements enforced by the WTO.  The list goes on and on, and somehow we're discussing the sexual prefrences of cartoon characters?  This is just stupid.  

dave

Anonymous said...

No, actually they don't.  You must remember that these people think that married gay couples will, to quote Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Center (one of the groups that chided the president recently), allowing gays to marry will "wreak havoc on our society, redefine the institution of marriage, and deny children of a mother or a father."  Nothing could  be of more immediate importance to these people as gays.  Truth is, they make more money combatting gays than they do selling prayer cloths and pieces of the cross.

That Happy Chica,
Marcia Ellen