sissies for kids
by Douglas Messerli
By 1935 US motion pictures approved
by the Hays Board has rousted out the portrayal of “pansies” and “sissies” from
almost all moving picture frames, which, along with the restrictions concerning
portraying any homosexual activity virtually banned LGBTQ figures from being
represented in any form in US cinemas. Queers, as far as Joseph Breen and Hays
Board committee members, were gone and dead, no longer able to sully the silver
screen of their criminal sexuality.
As I note throughout these pages,
cleverly coded films arose precisely to get around these restrictions. But
strangely, Disney films, particularly The Silly Symphony cartoons somehow
escaped notice, in at least two instances in 1935—that crucial year in which
filmmakers and their audiences realized that the gays and lesbians had now
fully disappeared from their screens, presumably forever—slipping in gay
sissies by simply getting them up in extravagantly original costumes and
disguises.
In fact, through the later 1930s and straight through the next two
decades during the height of the Motion Picture Production Code’s iron first,
cartoons of all kinds were basically ignored both for their sexual and violent
content. Perhaps Breen and others simply felt that the figures they saw on the
screen were not human, but animal figures such as Bugs Bunny who weren’t
breaking the code simply because they weren’t human. We can even wonder,
although I strongly doubt it, whether the Hays board saw these drawn figures as
a kind of art that like many of today’s AI figures were seemingly except from
the law simply because they were expressions of the artistic imagination as
opposed to the real humans pretending to be someone else. Films performed by
real human beings were just too close to life to ignore, while the animated
drawings were just fantasies. If so, we can argue that film’s relationship to
photography helped to make it a dangerous mode of expression which the nation’s
censors throughout history have felt needed to come under control. Can you
imagine if Robert Mapplethorpe or Andres Serrano (the photographer of “Piss
Christ”) were to have made commercial movies? The outcry might have closed down
the industry even into the 1980s and 1990s continuing even to today in the US
right’s attacks on photographic imagery.
Some comedians have even argued that nearly all of the Disney cartoons,
including Bambi, are gay friendly. As the TV sitcom character Maude (Bea
Arthur) argued with the troublesome bigot Arthur, who asks her if she approves
of homosexuals: “Arthur, it doesn’t matter if I approve or disapprove, they are
human beings and they exist. It’s like asking me if I approve of dwarfs.”
Arthur responds, “That’s different. There’s no such thing as gay dwarfs.” Maude
reacts: “Come on Arthur, you’ve read Snow White. Seven little men living
together like that, wake up and smell the coffee.” Although I might have wished
for her to have argued for her complete acceptance of homosexuals and the
writers, by speaking of the original written version of the fairytale, legally twist
out of publicly associating it with the Disney film creation, we all know the
Disney version of the story is really behind that statement, not the Grimm’s folk
tale.
Whatever their reasons, Joseph Breen and the Hays Code board appeared
generally to ignore cartoons like the ones I mention in this section and later,
including Popeye and Bugs Bunny, somehow not even registering the fact that
their rules were being utterly ignored by those programing for the nation’s
children, kids who immediately recognized these wild doodles as representing
human beings and their behavior. If Bugs could transform into a woman in an
instant and poor effeminate Percy even get applause from his school peers, then
perhaps there was hope for all of us who felt so different growing up from
those around us.
Is it any wonder that we who were post-World War II kids of the 1940s
and 1950s, watching these same cartoons on TV, eventually reached out for a
more generous cinema rating system, despite its continued problems, beginning
in the early 1960s, pushed for approval by Jack Valenti in his efforts to allow
films of the early 1960s such as Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and Blowup
to be shown, free, as he put it, of the outdated “odious smell of censorship.”
Los Angeles, August 7, 2025
Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog
(August 2025).
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