Recent events in the world of animated children’s shows have caused people to question whether the cartoon industry is promoting a homosexual agenda. Allegations have been directed at SpongeBob SquarePants for participating in a pro-gay video, and at Buster the Bunny for his fraternization with a lesbian couple and their children. While some have dismissed these allegations as the rantings of ultraconservative Christians, gay cartoon characters do in fact exist, and some of them are even politically active. I recently asked some of them to share their stories.
Sitting in the living room of his well-appointed Cape Cod-style home, a cultural icon recalls his heyday with sadness and regret. “I was in constant fear of being found out,” says Popeye, sipping herbal tea. “I thought once I cast Olive Oyl, everyone would know. She was so tall and lanky, with that boyish figure …”
He trails off, shaking his head. “If you want to know the truth, I picked her because she reminded me of someone.” He smiles and looks wistful. “Ensign Robert Flynn. Some of my fondest memories of the Navy revolve around him.”
Popeye the Sailor Man, the animated embodiment of testosterone, lived in terror of being outed, as it would have ended his lucrative career. “Bluto threatened me with that a couple of times,” he confesses. “I always wondered about him, though. He was so hypermasculine, always swaggering around like he had something to prove.” He sighs and leans back against the antique sofa. “Maybe I’m just projecting, though. I did a fair amount of macho posturing myself.”
First making the scene in 1929 as a bit player in a comic strip, Popeye became an immediate success. The series was finally renamed for him, and movies followed. In the ’30s, Popeye’s films were even more popular than Mickey Mouse’s.
“Even though we were rivals, Mickey was one of the few people who were nice to me after learning I was gay,” Popeye says.
“You know, people don’t realize how different it was back then,” he continues. “It wasn’t like today, where only a few religious nuts get upset and boycott your work. My whole life would’ve been ruined if I’d come out. I had no choice.”
Popeye stops and stares at the floor for a moment. “But still,” he almost whispers, “every time I said ‘I yam what I yam,’ I felt like a fraud.”
Reluctant to say more, Popeye tells me to check out the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Cartoon Alliance. He says the group helped him immensely when he finally decided to come out as gay after being brutally caricatured on-screen by Robin Williams.
Three days later, I’m in the parlor of a lovely San Francisco townhouse, being entertained by a self-described “proud queer, an old queen, ev-en!”
“I can’t believe America didn’t know,” says Snagglepuss. “I mean, the cuff links, the flamboyance, the theater jargon — plus, I’m pink, for heaven’s sake!”
“I think it’s terrific what SpongeBob is doing,” he declares as he accepts a white wine spritzer from longtime companion Huckleberry Hound. “I’ve heard rumors about Squidward, too.” Snagglepuss looks at his partner. “Two out and proud gays on one show, wouldn’t that be fabulous?!”
The more reserved Huckleberry shakes his head. “I just wish it wasn’t such a big deal. It would be nice if they’d leave his private life out of it and just allow him to be the amorphous asexual blob that he was drawn to be.”
“I had a much different Hollywood experience than Puss,” he continues. “The producers were looking for someone to host a show, to be a major player. They didn’t care that I was gay, but this was 1959, and they didn’t want any speculation about me.” He sits down on the end of the chaise longue and puts his hand on Snagglepuss’ leg. “They liked my look, but I sounded very effeminate.”
“Luckily, he could do wonderful impressions,” Snagglepuss chimes in. “They just fell in love with his Andy Griffith!” Snagglepuss grins. “Guess how we met. I was a guest on his show and then got my own segment. It was love at first sight.”
“We were well known among industry players after that,” Huckleberry says, looking sheepish. “I’m a homebody, but Puss always wanted to be out at all the parties.”
His sociability proved fortuitous. Snagglepuss and Huckleberry soon became confidants of other prominent cartoon characters struggling with their homosexuality. And what started as an informal support group slowly morphed into a political action network.
“During the mid-’70s, the public became more aware of just how many celebrities were gay,” explains Snagglepuss, turning serious. “Well, that included us, and people began speculating about cartoons the same way they did about human actors.”
“The ironic thing is, they were wrong about one of the first gay icons,” he adds. “There was always a lot of talk about Velma, but she’s strictly hetero.”
“That’s true,” agrees Huckleberry. “And a militant feminist. She carried around a dog-eared copy of ‘The Second Sex’ and refused to dumb herself down for the cameras. That’s how the rumor got started.”
“Even we believed it,” Snagglepuss admits. “But then Daphne, who’s actually bi, told me that she’d tried to get Velma to ‘experiment’ a couple times, but she wasn’t interested. Velma’s always been supportive of our cause.”
“Everyone including Scooby-Doo has been supportive,” he continues. “I guess once … apparently, Fred and Shaggy both had a lot of Scooby snacks, and, well, one thing led to another …”
“Let’s just say it changed their perspectives,” concludes Huckleberry. He looks at Snagglepuss. “We can leave it at that.”
Asked which characters are members of the LGBT Cartoon Alliance, Snagglepuss runs off some names: Jabberjaw, Auggie Doggie, Mr. Slate of “The Flintstones,” Elmer Fudd, Pepé Le Pew (“He’s what’s now called pan-sexual,” says Snagglepuss), everyone in “Josie and the Pussycats,” all three members of “The Hair Bear Bunch,” several Smurfs, and Gargamel, and Foghorn Leghorn.
“That last one surprised even us,” Huckleberry says. “And Bugs Bunny hasn’t officially joined, but he has been to a few meetings.” He divulges, “He had to dress up as a woman a lot on the show, and then found himself doing it off-screen.”
Snagglepuss adds, “Of course, he could just be a straight cross-dresser, but he enjoys flirting with men. You may have noticed that he kissed a lot of male co-stars on his show, too.” Huckleberry nods. “He’s still trying to figure himself out.”
Though both admit to some progress for gay cartoon characters, they’re worried about the future. The increasing influence of the religious right and the passage of state laws banning gay marriage have Snagglepuss rallying the troops for the battles they may face in the next four years.
“I guess the most significant thing is that we’ve reached out to the puppet community,” says Snagglepuss. “It’s an important alliance. Tinky Winky weathered the storm, Bert and Ernie are still going strong after all these years, and Big Bird and Snuffleupagus just announced their engagement. Except for the hullabaloo about Buster the Bunny’s human friends, PBS has been very supportive.”
Huckleberry is less optimistic. “I just don’t know what these next few years are going to bring. I’m concerned, very concerned.” He shakes his head. “If these people knew what it used to be like for us they wouldn’t force us to deny who we are. They’d have some compassion.”
Snagglepuss puts his arm around the man he calls his husband. “They’re only human beings,” he says gently. “They just don’t have the kind of depth that we do.”
A couple of weeks ago, we wrote about how the media giants who own your local commercial television and radio stations have been striking like startled rattlesnakes at an FCC proposal that would shed a light on who’s buying our elections. The proposed new rule would make it easier to find out who’s bankrolling political attack ads by posting the information online.
The stations already have the data and are required by law to make it public to anyone who asks. But you can get only it by going to the station and asking for the actual paper documents – what’s known as “the public file.” Stations don’t want to put it online because — you guessed it — that would make it too easy for you to find out who’s putting up the cash for all those ads polluting your hometown airwaves.
If approved, the new rule would require the ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox affiliates in the top 50 markets to make their files on political advertising available online immediately. Other stations would have a two-year grace period.
In the meantime, the mighty giants of broadcasting have been fighting back. A number of senators serving the industry have spoken up against the proposal and the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) — led by their top lobbyist and president, the frozen food millionaire and former Oregon Republican Senator Gordon Smith – have been meeting with commissioners urging them to scuttle its proposal or at least water it down until it means nothing.
As Jeffrey Rosen of The New Republic magazine wrote:
“The arguments against transparency offered by the networks show that, having experienced the windfall of advertising dollars that Citizens United unleashed, they have little interest in meeting their legal and ethical responsibility to serve the public interest.”
The FCC is scheduled to vote on their proposal on April 27, and on Monday its chairman, Julius Genachowski, walked into the lion’s den – the really nice one in Las Vegas – and addressed the NAB’s annual convention. He noted that, “Using rhetoric that one writer described as ‘teeth-gnashing’ and ‘fire-breathing,’ some in the broadcast industry have elected to position themselves against technology, against transparency, and against journalism.”
He added, “[T]he argument against moving the public file online is that required broadcaster disclosures shouldn’t be too public. But in a world where everything is going digital, why have a special exemption for broadcasters’ political disclosure obligation?”
Whatever the result on the 27th, those negative attack ads already are cluttering the airwaves like so much unsolicited junk mail and it’s only going to get much, much worse as the super PACs, political parties, the moguls and tycoons, many acting in secrecy, lavish perhaps as much as three billion dollars on local stations between now and November.
But now there’s something new in the mix, especially appalling to anyone who truly cares about public broadcasting. On April 12, by a vote of 2-1, two of three judges on the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals found in favor of KMTP, a small public station in San Francisco, and struck down the federal ban against political and issue advertising on public TV and radio. For decades there’s been a rule against turning those airwaves over to ads for political campaigns and causes. Now the court has ruled that the free speech rights of political advertisers take precedence.
Imagine if you turned on your TV set someday soon and were greeted by “Sesame Street,” brought to you by the letter C, for “creeping campaign cash corruption.” Perhaps that’s a bit of a stretch, but as the late William F. Buckley, Jr., used to say, the point survives the exaggeration.
If ever there was a camel’s nose under the tent, this is it – and we don’t mean one of those humped creatures that show up on PBS’ “Nature” or an episode about backpacking through Egypt on “Globe Trekker.” The current public system was signed into law by President Lyndon Johnson in 1967. “It will get part of its support from our government,” Johnson said, “but it will be carefully guarded from government or from party control. It will be free, and it will be independent — and it will belong to all of our people.”
The Public Broadcasting Act uses the word “noncommercial” 16 times to describe what public television and radio should be. And it specifically says that, “No noncommercial educational broadcasting station may support or oppose any candidate for political office.” We’ve taken that seriously all these years, and most of us who have labored in this vineyard still think public broadcasting should be a refuge from the braying distortions and outright lies that characterize politics today — especially those endless, head splitting ads.
But in its majority decision the court wrote, “Neither logic nor evidence supports the notion that public issue and political advertisers are likely to encourage public broadcast stations to dilute the kind of noncommercial programming whose maintenance is the substantial interest that would support the advertising bans.”
Sorry, your honors: This is the same so-called “logic” that led the U.S. Supreme Court to issue its notorious Citizens United decision, the one that opened all spigots to flood the political landscape with cash and the airwaves with trash. “To be truthful” one former PBS board member said, “it scares me to death.” Us, too.
The court decision did uphold the ban on public broadcasting selling ad time for commercial goods and services, although, as corporations and others cover the cost of programming through what’s euphemistically referred to as “enhanced underwriting,” public TV already is close to the line of what differentiates it from commercial broadcasting.
And understandably, with our stations always in a financial pickle, frantically hanging on by their fingertips, it won’t be easy to turn down those quick bucks from super PACs and others. But hang in there, brothers and sisters in the faith: If ever there was a time for solidarity and spine, this is it.
Stations KPBS in San Diego and KSFR, public radio in Santa Fe, have said they won’t do it. If enough of you say no, this invasion might be repelled. And viewers, they need to know you’re behind them.
Neither of us is old enough to have been fooled by the Trojan Horse (see Wikipedia). But we each have been working in public television decades enough to remember the days when distribution was handled by physically transporting bulky 2-inch videotapes from station to station — “bicycled” was the word — and much of the broadcast day and night was devoted to blackboard lectures, string quartets and lessons in Japanese brush painting: The old educational television versions of reality TV.
Yet it also was a time of innovation and creativity. As the system evolved we saw bold experiments like “PBL — the Public Broadcasting Laboratory” and Al Perlmutter’s “The Great American Dream Machine,” each a predecessor to the commercial TV magazine shows “60 Minutes” and “20/20.” The TV Lab, jointly run by David Loxton at WNET in New York and Fred Barzyk at WGBH in Boston, nurtured and encouraged the first generation of video artists — Nam June Paik, Bill Viola and William Wegman among others — and the early documentary work of such video pioneers as Jon Alpert and Keiko Tsuno of the Downtown Community Television Center, Alan and Susan Raymond, and the wild and woolly, guerrilla camera crews of TVTV.
The descendants of those pathfinders are the independent filmmakers whose works have not only re-energized the motion picture industry but also have vastly expanded the realm of the documentary — in both the scope of its storytelling and the size and diversity of its audience. Public television has faithfully provided an enormous national stage where non-fiction films can be seen by far more people than could ever buy tickets at the handful of movie houses willing to put documentaries up on their theater screens.
As Gordon Quinn of the independent documentary company Kartemquin Films (“Hoop Dreams”) told Anthony Kaufman of the website IndieWire, “In terms of having an audience in a democratic society, in terms of getting people talking about things, there’s nothing like a PBS broadcast. PBS is free, and it’s huge in getting into rural areas. That reach, all over the country, it’s a critically important audience that’s vastly underserved.”
Two PBS series have provided outstanding showcases for the work of new and established documentarians and between them have 13 Oscar nominations and 54 Emmys to prove it. For years, “Independent Lens” and “P.O.V.” held a nationwide time slot as part of the PBS core schedule on Tuesday nights, with public TV stalwart “Frontline” as a worthy lead-in, funneling to the independent films just the kind of audience that enjoys and appreciates documentaries.
But this season, PBS chose to move “Independent Lens” and “P.O.V.” to a new time slot — 10 pm, ET, on Thursday nights. This may not seem like such a big deal at first, until you know that on Thursday nights stations can broadcast any program they like in prime time, whether it’s part of the PBS schedule or not. Many take the opportunity to offers viewers locally produced programs, British sitcoms or reruns of “Antiques Roadshow.” As a result, episodes of the independent documentary series can now be run anywhere local stations choose to fit them in (here in New York, WNET airs the films at 11 pm on Sundays) or maybe not at all.
“P.O.V.” does not begin the new season — its 25th — until June, but as Dru Sefton first reported in the public broadcasting trade publication Current, in the first few months since “Independent Lens” was shuffled into its new Thursday time slot last October, ratings plummeted 42 percent from the same period last season. With programs scattered throughout the schedule in different cities, not only is it now more difficult for viewers to find them but coordinated national advertising and promotion campaigns are, at best, extremely difficult.
The team at PBS consists of dedicated people; all are our colleagues and many are our friends. They are constantly looking for ways to increase the audience that watches public television. But there is always a danger, in any organization, of only seeing the world from the top down, and then counting heads to measure whether something is good or not. An open letter to PBS from Kartemquin Films says it well:
Public television is not just a popularity contest, or a ratings game. Taxpayers support public broadcasting because democracy needs more than commercial media’s business models can provide. PBS’ programming decision makes a statement about PBS’ commitment to the mission of public broadcasting.
It goes on to note the mandate cited in the recently revised and reissued Code of Editorial Integrity for Local Public Media Organizations: “Our purposes are to support a strong civil society, increase cultural access and knowledge, extend public education, and strengthen community life through electronic media and related community activities.”
Most of both our careers have been in public television. Our affection and gratitude for it abideth, but we are not blind to the problems. Public broadcasting’s ever-tenuous funding places it in a perpetual dilemma and forces it into a delicate balancing act. PBS provides programming like “Independent Lens” and “P.O.V.” that may not garner the most viewers but helps fulfill its essential mission of public service — and, candidly, attracts grants from kindred spirits who believe in a robust mix of ideas and visions. But to lure a wider audience, it also airs what our neighborhood diner calls “lighter fare” — whether entertaining, upscale imports like “Downton Abbey,” home-grown, how-to programs like “This Old House” or (during pledge drives) nostalgic reruns of folk musicians, pop crooners, and financial and spiritual gurus — aimed at older viewers with, presumably, more disposable income.
Add to this the constant political pressures, especially from conservative politicians ever eager to cut off its funding (Mitt Romney says he wants to see commercials on “Sesame Street”), plus the self-censorship that all too often results, and you get a tendency toward orthodoxy and an aversion to controversy.
A PBS spokesperson told The New York Times that the service “is fully committed to independent films and the diversity of content they provide.” That can quickly be demonstrated by reversing a bad decision and returning to a national core time slot the independent documentaries created — often at real financial sacrifice — by the producers and filmmakers whose own passion is to reveal life honestly and to make plain, for all to see, the realities of inequality and injustice in America.
Along with its open letter to PBS, Kartemquin Films published a petition and asked for signatures from independent filmmakers and their supporters. We two are among the more than 300 who have signed it as of this writing. If you think the creativity and unique visions of life captured by independent producers, journalists, and filmmakers deserve the best possible platform on public television, you can read and sign it yourself.
The effort has made a difference. Talks are ongoing and the Times reports that PBS now has “agreed to find a new home next season” for the two series. An announcement is expected to be made at the PBS annual meeting in May. That’s good news, but until the decision is made, it’s important to keep letting them know how you feel — write PBS or sign that petition.
How do Americans deal with religious zealots?
In the case of the Amish, many take bus tours through their compounds, buy their goods, take snapshots of their kids from afar and make a weekend trip out of watching their spiritual direction.
There are 250,000 Amish in America in hundreds of different communities, the beautifully made and instructive film “The Amish” points out, in its Tuesday premiere on PBS’ “American Experience.” But they are visited by nearly 20 million Americans annually.
Some of the Amish wonder if this is particularly good idea, since they have to rub shoulders so much with “the English” — as they call the outside world — with their excess weight, leisure time and unusual questions.
Surrounded by the supercharged evils of modern America, they live in rural settings of hard work and simplicity that must not be so different from life 200 years ago. But it’s different enough to make some striking images: Bands of one-room school-bound kids in bonnets and straw hats but carrying matching new red mini-coolers lunchboxes; a scene of potato pickers at dawn that seems right out of a Corot painting; kids playing outdoors in their old-fashioned clothes but on a new-fangled trampoline.
It may be true that Puritans fled England for religious freedom, but only to a place where they could practice their beliefs and prevent others from practicing theirs. So in the early days of the Amish, according to the film by David Belton, thousands were killed for the outlawed behavior of adult baptism.
That led to these tight-knit communities in outposts that allowed such behavior, and the survival of it today depends on shunning outside temptations, especially for the young people.
Because of a belief not to be photographed, no Amish speak on camera in the documentary; they sit in shadows or more often speak off camera as remarkable, mesmerizing, slow-paced agricultural footage unspools before us. One speaks of the daily schedule as we see a group of young Amish women from afar walking up a road. It seems we see them go about a quarter mile. The voices of the elders explain their thinking, augmented by sociologists and anthropologists (whose faces we do see), speaking with some insight and little condescension.
The Amish have successfully shunned the mainstream all these years, with general success. There are compromises: They’ve had to put those orange triangles indicating a slow vehicle on their buggies (and they generally hate bright colors like pink and red).
There have been local skirmishes about obtaining building permits before a barn-raising or adhering to smoke detector requirements. But they famously won a 1971 Supreme Court case that defended their practice of educating until the eighth grade and that’s it. (Though at the time the sect was so little known that Walter Cronkite, reporting the news, called them AIM-ish).
The key to understanding the rules of the Amish is to understand that each of the communities make their own set of rules and revise them regularly. One community may ride bikes while the next one down the road bans them.
There is a brutality to the choice given to young people: Join forever or forever be shunned, and a couple of people who decided against the Amish lifestyle speak of their experiences.
The Amish have had to adjust, too, to national economic realities. It’s not practical for so much of the community to rely on agriculture as their sole income. So some have enlisted at local factories and a shot of Amish men scrambling at a factory building trailers is the most fast-paced moment in the film.
The residents of “Sesame Street” have their share of challenges. You’ve got a guy who lives in a garbage can. A cookie-addicted binge eater. And an annoying little ginger who talks about himself in the third person. But on Sunday, the Street will get a Muppet with a different problem, one that nearly one in four American children will relate to — hunger.
In the one-hour prime-time special “Growing Hope Against Hunger,” viewers accustomed to Sesame Street’s usual adventures involving the letter K or the number 6 will learn a different kind of lesson from Lily, a young Muppet who talks about living in a home where a meal on the table’s not always a sure thing. Along with Brad Paisley and Kimberly Williams Paisley, Lily will help Elmo and his friends plan a food drive. They also visit a community garden to see how nutritious produce can be grown locally.
The harsh reality of childhood hunger may not be quite what one would expect from the place where the air is sweet, and it certainly isn’t an issue one would instantly associate with the special’s sponsor — Wal-Mart. You remember Wal-Mart: the company famed for its aggressive anti-union stance, the one that just last year wiped out its profit-sharing program while continuing to award bonuses to top executives? Maybe Lily’s family is hungry because her parents work for a corporation that could easily afford to pay its employees a better hourly wage, but doesn’t.
Yet the much reviled corporate behemoth has in recent years listened to the demands of its patrons in other regards — offering more eco-friendly products, reducing waste, and selling some healthier food. Sure, responsible acts make for good press for a company badly in need it, but they also help people. And you can loathe Wal-Mart’s corporate practices and still note that the company’s $1.5 million anti-hunger initiative is nothing to sneeze at — especially when you’re talking about cash-strapped PBS.
Despite its breezy tone, Sesame Street has never been a place where everything is A-OK all the time. The Muppets have helped kids work through the deaths of loved ones, the challenges of having a parent serving in the military and of living with HIV and AIDS. That in the midst of an ever-worsening economic crisis, the show would take on a painful and all-too-common subject shows its enduring innovativeness and a deep sensitivity to its audience.
Childhood is not all happy songs and manic monsters. The Department of Agriculture estimates that 17 million American children have “limited or uncertain” access to affordable food. In New York City alone, the number of homeless children in the public schools has skyrocketed 41 percent in the just the past few years. A couple of talking furballs and a country singer alone won’t change that. But they can help kids and families understand and empathize — and maybe to see that the school breakfasts and lunches some of their classmates are getting may be the only meals they receive that day. More significantly, they may just inspire families to take actions like participating in local food banks and gardens. Or even add themselves to the growing tide of Americans demanding that executive greed stop interfering with sustainable wages, so fewer real-life Lilys have to go to bed hungry.
A still from "The Amish: American Experience." (Credit: PBS) 
Former host of "Reading Rainbow" LeVar Burton, with the program's old logo. 
