J. J. Sedelmaier | The Ambiguously Gay Duo: It Takes Two to Tango / 1996 [TV animation]

grab me so we can support each other

by Douglas Messerli

 

Robert Smigel (screenplay), J. J. Sedelmaier (director) The Ambiguously Gay Duo: It Takes Two to Tango / 1996 [TV animation]

The first episode of The Ambiguously Gay Duo was shown on The Dana Carvey Show on March 19, 1996. That show’s executive producer, Robert Smigel was seeking comic cartoons in order to distinguish their show from Saturday Night Live.

   Writer Dino Stamatopoulos argued for a parody of the Wallace and Gromit series wherein the implication would be that the dog was providing oral sex to the human, but Smigel realized that such a cartoon series would be nearly impossible to get clearance from ABC. Borrowing instead from the idea of super heroes such as Batman and Robin, about which there had been long speculation (based, in part. on Fredric Wertham’s now dismissed book of 1954, Seduction of the Innocent) that the title character and his protégé were a homosexual couple, Smigel determined to create another superhero duo who everyone suspected were gay except perhaps for the couple themselves. As Smigel noted in an interview with The Daily Beast that the cartoon series was basically concerned with an “obsession with sexuality,” funny because both homophobes and LBGTQ+ individuals were determined to find out if the couple were gay, making it a “sport and titillation. “The point of the cartoon was that it doesn’t matter whether the superheroes have sex or not,” arguing that given the amount of progress made in the LGBTQ+ since the cartoon series, he would not write such a work today.

     I would argue that it truly does matter, since these “gay” superheroes would alter the entire notion of what being a macho savior of the society might mean, something the cartoonists themselves began to realize shortly after, introducing gay figures into the mainstream cartoon world. Whether or not the original Batman and Robin figures were gay, today they are joyfully perceived as being precisely that, and the significance of their relationship has been important to thousands of young boys and men.

      But perhaps, even more importantly, the series of two totally affectionate men running around in blue tights and outsized yellow cod-pieces was far more fun than Superman—even if we might imagine a gay relationship between Clark Kent and Jimmy Olsen, the later of whom was actually played by a gay man, and despite the fact that the character Kent plays as the alternate persona to Superman was based on other often-perceived bisexual males as represented in the literary and cinematic figures  The Mark of Zorro and The Scarlet Pimpernel (see my essays on both of those films and film series). The very fact that Ace and Gary couple “dabbled in photography,” that Gary often seemed, at heart, to be a mad interior decorator, and that Ace was constantly putting his hand to Gary’s ass brought smiles and giggles from most open-minded viewers. This “ambiguously gay” couple, constantly curious why people stared at them oddly for their own seemingly normative behavior, were far more enjoyable as a couple that Batman and Robin might ever have been.

     In this very first episode Bighead (the mastermind of the many villains presented in this series, and the one most serious obsessed with Ace and Gary’s sexuality) has created a formula that when introduced into the Metroville water supply, will destroy most of the inhabits, evidently vaporizing them as he demonstrates on his pet “ratling.”

     Even Bighead’s thuggish assistants debate whether or not the duo, whom Bighead claims can no longer stop them, are gay, one seeing them as possibly being gay, the other arguing that he’s crazy. Bighead, of course, believes they are truly gay.

     But in the meantime, the Police Commissioner has tracked down Bighead and contacts the dynamic duo, in the midst of a workout which shows Gay without a shirt, as they promise not to let him down.

 

     Back at Bighead’s quarters, his two thugs continue to debate about the sexuality of the duo, frustrating Bighead who clearly has larger matters on his larger than normal head.

     Speeding in their penis-shaped Duocar to Bighead’s place, the couple arrive, grabbing up the test tube which contains the dangerous formula, and knocking out the scientist’s thugs. Gary catches up the tube mid-air, Ace congratulating his friend by placing his hand a couple of times on his butt. The famed deadpan lines are uttered in this episode for the first time:

 

                    Ace [patting Gary on the buttocks]: Good job, friend-of-friends!

                    Villains/Bystanders [gasps, and ghastly stares]

                    Ace: What's everybody looking at?

                    Villains/Bystanders in unison: NOTHING!

 

The scene is repeated numerous times throughout the series.

     Yet, at the last moment, Bighead manages to hook them both up with forklifts and hold them over his “vaporizing solution.” There seems to be no way out, until Ace suggests Gary grab him so “we cannot support each other,” as they thrust their bodies into one another, and join each other in what appears to be fascinating head-on kamasutra sexual position. As the two hang, hugging together midway, Ace wonders, once more what they are all looking at, to which the stock reply is once more, “Nothing,” the announcer suggesting we tune in next week to find out what happens.

      If nothing else, we surely know that these men are in a position that no heterosexual males might every permit themselves to enter, a union of male support. In this case we simply have to assume that it is Ace and Gary’s solution to how to escape, not an unusual position at all for gay men and women throughout history.

      

 

 

Los Angeles, June 15, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (June 2024).