Maryam Karimi | Burl's / 2003

variations of gender, desire, and love

by Douglas Messerli

 

Maryam Karimi and Mark Cancelliere (screenplay, based on a story by Bernard Cooper), Maryam Karimi (director) Burl's / 2003 [9 minutes]

 

Bernard Cooper (Chandler Kane Kelly), a young middle school boy, wants a dog, but his rather authoritarian father in the style of the late 1950s or early 1960s doesn’t want a pet messing upon his perfectly carpeted living room floor. The family, Bernard, his mother (Marnie Mosiman), and father (John de Lancie) are dining out at Burl’s (read the Los Angeles Miracle Mile favorite of the period Johnnie’s, where it was filmed) and the boys asks if he can just stop by after to see the dogs.  

    To shift his mind off the idea and perhaps to discuss the problems he’s recently been observing with regard to their long-haired son, he sends out to the streets to get a newspaper. There the boy immediately encounters three drag queens, who in little Bernard’s quick mind represent (as the narrator Mark Hamill explains it) what seems the perfect solution to the feelings he’s been having about gender; here are “boys and girls sliced together.”

     The transvestites (as they were known in the day, played by Danyon Davis, Christian Reeve, and Michael Gutierrez) ooo and ahh about the young boy, one of them remarking “I think he’s just adorable.”

     Soon Bernard is searching out his mother’s closet in search of lipstick, heels, a wig, and a proper frock he might wear. When she discovers him partially in drag, young Bernard and his father, perhaps to keep his mind off of such unmanly thoughts, speed off to the pet shop.

 

     But while Mr. Cooper checks out the beagles, his son’s eyes are captivated by another kind of animal, the terribly handsome young worker in the store, Pete (Jarid Gibbs), stocking the shelves. Following the intense stare of his son’s eyes, the father immediately sees what’s captured his attention and demands the boy come hold the dog. But even then, Bernard cannot keep his eyes off of Pete.

       

     Almost immediately, the boy is dragged off by his now frightened father to a young boy’s wrestling practice at Bernard’s school. Mr. Cooper introduces him to the school’s wrestling coach (Jack Riley). One of the boy wrestlers looks over at the young newcomer with such a mean intensity that Bernard immediately has the urge to go to the bathroom.

     In the locker room Bernard soon after encounters a half-dressed older man (Mookie Barker) who observing the young beauty staring at him, signals him to come closer, Bernard rushing off in the opposite direction.

     Soon after, however, he is sent away on the bus to wrestling class. While waiting for the bus, however, Bernard sees who he believes is Pete stop at the corner and stare at him. It’s clear the boy would ride off with Pete anywhere if he only asked, but he’s been wall trained as boys were in the late 1950s and early 1960s not to catch a ride with strangers, and he turns his glance in the other direction. Indeed, he wonders whether it was his own imagination, thinking of stopping by the pet again to check out to see if Pete is there.

     Soon after, however, he sees what he believes is the same car again, and this time he is clearly ready to catch a ride with Pete, but the man behind the wheel who stops and asks if Bernard would like a ride is not at all the cute pet store worker but the same man from the locker room, the kind of stranger who school boys like Bernard had been warned of in movies such as Boys, Beware. Our young hero immediately speeds back home, telling his mother what happened at the bus stop.

     The incident frees him from having to explore wrestling, and he is rewarded a pet dog in reparation. So everything turns out quite nicely. Except, his father is kept busy, just as he feared, cleaning up after the dog.

     Some of the Letterboxd commentators though the movie was “cute,” if unconvincing. But I would hardly describe a film that shows the late 1950s and early 1960s to be filled (at least in Los Angeles) with adults who each seem to pull the young boy away from his innocence with positive and negative sexual alternatives about which he is far too young to perceive the repercussions as something I might describe as “cute.” If his mother is afraid, as she tells him, that he is too young for a dog, I would argue he is too young for the sexualized society surrounding him. As a young gay boy in the making, he is attracted to and frightened of adults who all seem to be pulling him in directions he hasn’t yet imagined and about whom he has no idea what his contrary reactions might mean.

     Like almost all young gay men, he will one day awaken to suddenly realize what his desires and fears were all about, if he can just steer clear of being channeled by his parents into a cul de sac of normality from which there is no escape.

 

Los Angeles, November 4, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (November 2025).

  

 

Ub Iwerks | Flip the Frog—Soda Squirt / 1933 [animated cartoon]

the transformation

by Douglas Messerli

 

Lee Blair, Shamus Culhane, Al Eugster, Grim Natwick and Irven Spence (animators), Ub Iwerks (director) Flip the Frog—Soda Squirt / 1933 [animated cartoon]

 

Ub Iwerks’ 1933 character Flip the Frog makes his final appearance in a cartoon by Lee Blair, Shamus Culhane, Al Eugster, Grim Natwick and Irven Spence in Soda Squirt.

     Flip has apparently opened a splendid new drug store with a soda counter that has clearly attracted everyone who is anyone in town. Among the special guests for its opening are cartoon renditions of Laurel and Hardy, Joe E. Brown, the four Marx Brothers, and Mae West, all playing pretty close to character. Joe E. Brown swallows down a special by opening his large mouth and consuming it all at once. Upon the arrival of Mae West, Harpo goes on the run after her, with the brothers following. Flip’s new place, unlike his previously disastrous lunchroom and barbershop, seems to be a great success.

      That is until an obviously gay “nance” shows up attempting to get Flip’s attention while he’s busy serving up something special to Mae. The pansy drums his fingers and flaps his hankie, calls out to Flip, and almost has a pernickety fit before he finally gets the frog’s attention, finally ordering up a chocolate soda.

      Still distracted by Mae, Flip spoons out an impossible assortment of ingredients, including at one point what appear to be a bag of tacks, mixing all together in an elixir of odd assortments that get a final soda squirt before being served up to the thirsty purse-lipped man with rouge dots on his cheeks.

      When the chocolate soda finally arrives, he drinks it up quickly and covers his mouth to disguise an obvious belch of indigestion. But something more terrible seems to be the problem as his polite demeanor suddenly turns into a fierce display of his teeth, and he stands up with now a fully hairy body. Like Dr. Jekyl and Mr. Hyde our prissy queen has suddenly transformed into a version of Wolfman who just as quickly goes berserk, throwing the room’s objects at walls and roaring in horror, as even the opera-wrecking Marx Brothers bend down out of site and Flip goes on the run with various contents of the soda counter being thrown at him and crashing through the walls.

      He finally captures Flip and lays him down on the puff of a gigantic bottle of Eau de Pansy as  he straddles him in a manner that suggests some terrible sexual perversion, with Flip’s feet pushing up against his now hairy legs.

     In this horrific depiction of homophobic terror it is quite apparent that even the most popular of cinematic forms, animation perceives the homosexual—as I have observed in my essays on Paul Wegener and Stellan Rye’s The Student of Prague (1913), Norman McLaren’s Narcissus (1983) and several other films—as a kind of double, in this case as a neutered overpolite male who can just as suddenly turn into a brutal beast in his sexual lusts, a being who, in love with himself, is a kind of Gemini who contains another within who is the opposite of the pose or the cover of the man who appears normal on the outside but lives a closeted “other” life at night. You only need to cross his path before you may discover that terrifying other he keeps within himself that is certain to destroy all those with whom he comes in contact.

     And just as suddenly, our Wolfman turns back into the sissy, who leaves behind an entire destruction of formerly normative world, Flip ringing up the register to read “No Sale.”

      It’s strange in this cartoon that the silly handkerchief-waving emasculated visitor turns into such a powerful creature than even stolid representatives of gender such as Mae West disappear, the Marx Brothers are scared out of their disguises, Joe E. Brown howls out in fear, and Ollie begins to cry.

      If you ever wondered why heterosexuals were once (and still are in many cases) so very afraid of LGBTQ people, you need only watch this child-like fable. The nance, sissy, pansy, whatever you to describe him as, is one of the most powerful and seemingly destructive beings in the world in his ability to transform himself.

 

Los Angeles, July 24, 2021

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (July 2021).

Walter Lantz | King Klunk / 1933 [animated cartoon]

klunky love

by Douglas Messerli

 

Manuel Moreno, Lester Kline, Fred Kopietz, Charles Hastings, and Ernest Smythe (animation), Walter Lantz (director) King Klunk / 1933 [animated cartoon]

 

A parody of Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack’s King Kong, released in April of the same year, Walter Lantz’s animated film begins with its characters Pooch the Pup, and a girl coonhound arriving in Africa to photograph King Klunk, the largest gorilla in the world.

      Their adventure begins with a group of natives dancing a line dance, once more like Bobby Watson’s fairy chorus boys, wrists and hands waving in the air, while nearby a native woman placed in a dish as an offering for the Gorilla cries her eyes out.

      As the camera, Pooch, and his girlfriend walk in tandem toward the Gorilla’s location, King Klunk seeing what the natives have to offer, rejects it, grabbing up the coonhound girl in her place without Pooch even being cognizant of the fact, Pooch’s girlfriend immediately being replaced by the native virgin who when Pooch discovers her, mutters “Goona, Goona,” a phrase she utters through Lantz’s racist and homophobic concoction.

      Of course, Cupid appears, a baby sissy, who shoots love into the Gorilla’s heart, and accordingly instead of eating Pooch’s girl, dukes it out with a dinosaur to keep her out of his jaws. At one point it appears the remnant of an ancient age will overpower the gigantic mammal, sending him in a single punch around the planet; but King Klunk comes back to earth like a meteorite crashing into his opponent to wipe out the last of his species.

     Pooch rescues the girl coonhound briefly, but is chased by Klunk, the two on the run, discovering a giant egg—perhaps truly the last of the dinosaurs—and push it toward him, cracking him on the cranium, resulting in his defeat.

      Chaining him, they rush him back over the Atlantic to US soil, the Gorilla being so large that he walks behind the boat. As in King Kong, Klunk’s captor becomes his promoter as a crowd gathers to observe his antics. But basically by this time Klunk, just as we are, has become rather bored, the pesky Cupid returning to make him fall in love with the coonhound girl all over again.

     As Klunk clinks his chains in heated desire, the spectators flee the theater, he escaping and attacking New York before scaling the Empire State.

      To save his sweetheart once again, Pooch jumps on a fighter plane and flies off, attempting to do Klunk in with a cannon. The cannon doesn’t work, but a gun aimed at his derriere forces him to fall to his inevitable death, whereupon the native woman appears from nowhere, muttering “Goona, goona” as Pooch and coonhound kiss.

 

Los Angeles, April 21, 2022 | Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (April 2022).

Rudolf Ising | The Organ Grinder / 1933 [animated cartoon]

monkey business

by Douglas Messerli

 

Rollin Hamilton and Thomas McKimson (animation), Rudolf Ising (director) The Organ Grinder / 1933 [animated cartoon]

 

The organ grinder and his monkey travel down a New York street, performing to the pleasure of several high-rise apartment dwellers, one of whom, a very large woman, takes particular joy in the daily musical interlude. At the end of the song, the organ grinder sends his monkey scrambling up the side of the high-rise to get his tips.

     He climbs one building by propelling himself off of rolled-up shades, then jumping into a pair of women’s panties whereafter as the sound score lets out a hoot of “woo-woo,” as even the monkey cannot resist reverting into a hand-flapping queer, riding the clothes-line across the street to collect the other’s patron’s donation.

     After dancing for a group of gathered children, the chimp uses nearby movie posters to imitate Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy before donning a wig and playing a harp as Harpo Marx. Finally, settling down to a piano, he performs the song “42nd Street.”

     Inexplicably he finds himself at the wheel of a runaway car which, after running down a fruit stand, crashes into a music store, the constantly metamorphosing monkey coming out as a one-man band followed up by his organ grinder companion.

 

Los Angeles, April 21, 2022

Reprint from My Queer Cinema blog (April 2022).

Rudolf Ising and Isadore “Friz” Freleng | Young and Healthy / 1933 [animated cartoon]

finding his place

by Douglas Messerli

 

Rudolf Ising and Isadore “Friz” Freleng (directors) Young and Healthy / 1933 [animated cartoon]

 

      The movie begins with the entire court announcing his majesty’s entry, as first his buglers, followed the hot dog, a brush attached to its tail, and a young pansy, tossing out flower petals and repeating the pansy cry “Woo,” from time to time. The King follows.

     Poor roly-poly King Louis, absolutely bored by playing out his role, dozes after momentarily playing with his jack-in-the-box with Jimmy Duarte head which springs into action whenever he wants a good laugh or desires to be distracted from his wife’s attacks.

     She demands that he awaken and plan for the royal ball, but the King, so distressed by the fact that his broken toy has spoken its last words (“I’m mortified”), bursts into tears.

     Looking out the window, he sees children at play and quickly envies them, deciding to join them in the fun. He does so, while the queen, observing his pleasures, screams for Louis to return to his throne. Meanwhile, the children invade the castle, spinning the queen around in her bustle until the dress has ridden up to her mid-riff, leaving her only in her pencil-thin leggings.

     The King himself trips and rolls down the staircase right into the royal fountain, spitting up fish like a sculpted fountain figure who finally found its home.

      Ising and Freleng would return to homosexual jokes and puns in their numerous cartoons throughout their careers.

      The major song here, sung by the Queen, her courtiers, and the children is “Young and Healthy” backed up by the Rhythmettes. The King shares those feelings only when he plays with the kids.

 

Los Angeles, April 21, 2023

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (April 2023).

 

Dave Fleischer | Betty Boop's Penthouse / 1933 [animated cartoon]

from monster into pansy

by Douglas Messerli

 

Willard Bowsky (animator), Dave Fleischer (director) Betty Boop's Penthouse / 1933 [animated cartoon]

 

Mae Questel’s Betty Boop, as directed by Dave Fleischer, appears to have enjoyed relationships with gay men or, perhaps we should say, men whom she turns gay. She also becomes a rather noted cartoon drag performer of male figures, including politicians, presidents, and Maurice Chevalier.

     In Betty Boop’s Penthouse she gets the opportunity, faced with a Frankenstein monster-like creation from the experimental laboratories across the street of Bimbo the clown and his assistant Koko, to perform her wiles on the dangerous cat-made creation.

     Bimbo and Koko try out various chemical mixtures on their cat, a poor mouse endlessly running after a piece of cheese, and even themselves, ending in a racist moment when Bimbo finding himself in blackface created through one of the experiments, suddenly pulls away the mask which cries out, “Mammie!”

    Meanwhile, Betty is enjoying her penthouse, a life away from the all her men friends but close enough for the joy of city living, as she waters her flowers, a rose momentarily falling for a nearby flower until she realizes that he’s a pansy, dutifully pointing him out to her neighbors.

     Bimbo and Koko’s chemically changed cat, meanwhile, mixes up his own chemicals, accidently creating the monster, who spotting Betty across the way, tiptoes, like a circus acrobat, across the telephone line to reach Betty’s penthouse, suddenly rearing up behind her.

 

    With a few sprays from her bottle of perfume she turns the growling horror into a dancing male fairy who become becomes a full-out pansy, Betty giggling at his silly behavior.

     And we now know that it’s Betty Boop’s perfume that transforms a growling he-man into a faggot.

 

Los Angeles, October 24, 2023

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (October 2023).