Photo Credit: Jean-Gabriel Fernandez
The rainbow crosswalk at Cathedral Square.
If nothing else, all the furor of late over Pepe le Pew, has put me in a rather nostalgic state. I grew up on Looney Tunes and I’m glad I did. Mind you, it was the baby boomer era and systemic change was in the offing as the nation teetered on the cusp of the various civil rights movements. For me, as a kid in the midst of it all, those cartoons and their cast of characters inadvertently helped shape my world view.
I was never a fan of Pepe le Pew. Even as a child, I found his antics repugnant…well, as much as a child feels such things. All I knew was, I was not amused. For one thing, his aggressive one-note straightness was neither relatable nor particularly entertaining. The unsubtle ethnic stereotyping wasn’t the problem, really. Frenchmen had the reputation of womanizing. I recall Maurice Chavalier’s tune from the 1957 film Gigi, “Thank Heaven for Little Girls” and the flirtatious French POW, Le Beau, from “Hogan’s Heroes.” For the adults in the room, Pepe may have simply been an amusing mockery of that familiar stereotype, yet the young male viewer may have taken a cue or two from the relentless skunk and learned “no” doesn’t mean “no.” I suppose had I been a precocious heterosexual boy, I might have had more of a connection to Pepe. But, mercifully, I wasn’t and didn’t.
Bugs Bunny, on the other hand, had an allure. The Groucho Marx of the animated pantheon, Bugs possessed a self-assured cleverness and wit. Beyond his ease in suffering fools or negotiating an aggressive world of bullies, he could always muster a condescending flippancy towards them. He also managed to easily exploit their naiveté and always with a pithy aside.
Something Gay?
In retrospect, I may have suspected something gay about Bugs. Of course, his bon vivant sophistication had a noticeably gay flair. After all, he had a mastery of repartee a la Paul Lynde, appeared frequently in drag (in a wedding dress, on occasion, presaging marriage equality perhaps), and was never shy about kissing another guy. It’s all a matter of taste, of course, but he locked lips with the likes of Elmer Fudd (whose uncle Louie lived in Worser, WI, by the way), Porky Pig and Yosemite Sam (he obviously had a type). He also had his unabashedly queer moments posing, non-offensively, as a quintessentially fey hairdresser. One might see negative stereotyping in that guise but, as I kid, I knew what was up, and somehow, even in my pre-pubescent way, found a subliminal validation.
I certainly owe a part of my earliest musical education to Bugs, too. He played Chopin and Liszt on the piano and many of his madcap moments featured the music of Brahms, Rossini, and Wagner (to the tune of the Ride of the Walkyries, the memorable and ear worm inducing “Kill the Wabbit” episode with Elmer Fudd as the Teutonic hero and Bugs in drag, again). Along the way, the wily wabbit channeled our own West Allis gay blade, Liberace, and the world famous conductor, Leopold Stokowski. I’m still a classical music snob and opera fan as a result.
Besides, Bugs’ Brooklyn patois connected with me as well. My mother’s side of the family came from Brooklyn and my father’s from Queens, so he was practically family.
As for Pepe, that’s all folks. But for Bugs, my humble thanks for the memories and life lessons.
