Lew Gifford and Paul Kim | Queerdom / 1978 [animated short]

something in the air

by Douglas Messerli

 

Lew Gifford and Paul Kim (directors) Queerdom / 1978 [animated short]

Korean-American Paul Kim and Lew Gifford created their own animation company, working on numerous commercials and on School House Rock, the animated series that began in 1973.

    Their 1978 film Queerdom is a truly outrageous gay fantasy where one day a handsome, muscular man with a wife and children wakes up to find he’s feeling rather strange. His head is spinning and he feels dizzy. The day is no different from any other day, but he can’t quite determine what it might be.

    He looks out the window and finds it to me a perfect day, but still he feels somewhat strange. “What was this mad sensation that came over me?” Indeed, he feels a little queer  today.

    But it is time to catch the bus to work. He quickly puts on his tie and rushes off, lifting the bus-stop sign itself and even carrying it off for a moment into the bus as if to prove he was a he-man. He quickly returns it to its proper place before the bus speeds off.

    At work, his colleagues greet him quite normally, “saying good morning in their usually normal way,” yet something feels different, and at that very moment his boss enters his office to tell him “I love you.” 

    Our hero is quite startled to hear such words from another man. He feels funny. A man never said he loved me before, it was only women. Pulling out a girlie magazine as if to prove his heterosexual interests, he ponders that such words are not usually spoken to a man. Yet in the middle of the magazine, the centerfold contains a full pull-out of his boss. And he recognizes, that something strange and weird has happened: “I liked it.” 

     The boss tells him to meet him to lunch that afternoon. “I asked him why?” And once again the boss replies: “I love you.”

    “Why did he stay he loved me? What would my wife say, and my kids when they found out their father was a…HOMOsexual?”

    So what if I am a homosexual, our hero ponders. That doesn’t mean I should be rejected from society. “Some people like women, and other people like men,” he declares in a slightly hysterical voice. “Just because I happen to like a man doesn’t mean I should be rejected like that.”

    However, he admits, in a now much calmer voice, he not only likes the idea, but loves the idea. As the time for lunch comes, the boss again comes by, grabs him by the arm, and repeats: “I love you.”

     Why did he say it again, he wonders, realizing that he’s beginning to “like this man.” “The man began to appeal to me.” The boss pushes him and his swivel chair in to the elevator and they are off the a truly underground Chinese restaurant, Mama Fugami’s, where they are greeted by Mama, who he suddenly realizes is not a woman, but a man. In fact, there are only men in this restaurant. “Today I love men, and I don’t know why. Why should I love men? Oh well, we ate lunch and listened to some crazy music (the bongo drums and jazz clarinet get louder).”

      As they leave the restaurant the boss again tells him he loves him. “Yes, it was a mad, crazy feeling being a homosexual. It was fascinating,” he observes as his face suddenly becomes textured in variously different patterns. 

    The boss now takes him home to his apartment filled with strange art of naked men and…well actually filled with naked men, naked men dancing, naked men playing.

    Suddenly, the boss says something different: “Let’s go to bed, baby.” All the other men leave, giggling on their way out.

     Delighted with being thought of as “grand,” our hero is so completely delighted that he grows a head piece of dangling penises, that eventually attach to his entire body. His enchanted feelings are now most definitely queer as he’s on his way to buy a bowsneck, tennis shows, a pair of tight denim pants and walk down Sixth Avenue. “O, I love queerdom.” And off he trots down a lane with his short statured boss, the catching a ride on the moon—or is it the morning sun?

       Throughout the credits we hear only the sounds of the sexual moans and groans.

     Obviously, this isn’t an experience that suddenly comes over a man in a single day, but I’ll give creators Kim and Gifford the benefit of the doubt by arguing that for a closeted man in a marriage with kids, coming out may seem like a sudden overwhelming experience of a single day in his life. The creators suggest through their continual markers of sunsets and sunrises that, in fact, this all takes place over a period of time.

     Similarly, our rumbustious hero’s constant associations of his new gay feelings with being cartoonish perceived as having to do with becoming a woman, are again those of a man who has pretended he was straight for so long that he cannot explain his feelings except through standard gender binaries.

      I wish I knew who voiced the central characters, particularly our new joyous queer, who sometimes, in his New York accent, seems to be alternating the voices of Joe Friday of the 1950s TV series Dagnet and Dudley Do-Right, the Canadian Mountie who appeared on The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle and Friends.

 

Los Angeles, October 30, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (October 2025).