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PaperclipPerfector  9mo ago (text post)   31905 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 17, 2023

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As Jacob Weisberg pointed out in Slate in response to the Falwell kerfuffle, many children’s characters look subtly queer now in ways straight audiences would not have picked up on: Batman and Robin, Peppermint Patty and Marcie, Bert and Ernie, Timon and Pumbaa, Frog and Toad.

Except Batman and Robin were claimed to be a gay couple in the (in)famous 1954 book Seduction of the Innocent. Ernie and Bert could be seen as gay or queer, but only if you put on glasses with those lenses - I don't believe that even Jim Henson and Sesame Street had a secret gay agenda going on there. If we're going to say "male room mates? nudge nudge wink wink", then what about The Odd Couple, the long-running TV series based on the Neil Simon play?

This kind of "read historical characters as really queer" often goes on, both pro- and anti-. I'm sure that there are explicitly queer characters in kids' TV today, since we're being told they are. Was Tinky-Winky gay? Maybe, maybe not: a lot of people enthusing "ooh, this is gay gay gay!" were looking to see that if they could, because of representation (though that was not so important back then) but more as the political act of queering the mainstream and the rest of it.

I don't know if Falwell was right or not; the entire swirl around Tinky-Winky had to do with coloration (purple is a gay colour?) and the handbag (the gender roles we ceaselessly argue over). Do we even know if Tinky-Winky was a guy or not? None of the Teletubbies had distinguishing sexual dimorphism.

If anybody was turned gay by Tinky-Winky, I think they probably had the inclination already.

True, but on the other hand, I think there are times you could make a fairly solid case of a character being stealth gay. To take Burt and Ernie as an example. They live in the same apartment, as unrelated males. They (later on) have a child (Bort). They have no girlfriends or wives or dates, or anything else that implies an interest in women. It’s not impossible to see gayness in a set of characters in that circumstance.

They (later on) have a child (Bort).

it has been a long long time since I watched Sesame Street so I've missed that one. Thank God. I'm sticking with Bert being interested in pigeons only.

It was honestly from memory. Bert does have a child, but the name was Brad not Bort. And he’s a ginger too (https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/muppet/images/7/73/1068_Brad.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20190804132642)

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