Bugs Bunny is a brilliant fictional character. He is the right mix of bastard, drag queen, hero, anti-hero, charmer and cool that makes him loved by the audience and hated by his enemies.

Though there are certain elements that contribute to this success.

The typical Bugs cartoon contains these three elements: Bugs saying, “What’s up doc?” while eating a carrot. Bugs dressing up as a female to seduce his enemy or lull them into a false sense of security or dressing up an explosive or robot as a female to do the same. Then there is the matter of him always kissing his same sex enemies with nice wet, slobbery kisses.

Separately these mannerisms would probably mean nothing but together they do raise some suspicion as to Bugs Bunny’s sexual preference. In the cartoons he is always getting harassed when he is minding his own business and munching a carrot (possibly a phallic metaphor?). The cross-dressing and kissing the same sex needs no further inference. For some reason Bugs always does an impression of Liberace when behind a piano, uttering the words “This is for my brother George” in the most lascivious voice to crawl into the human ear. Is it to mock Liberace or to make sure his name is not forgotten lest he becomes an obscure gay icon?

Then there is Elma Fudd always hunting him with a double barrel shotgun and in one cartoon Fudd is a Royal Canadian Mounted Police officer sent to arrest Bugs Bunny. In the cartoon where he is an RCMP officer does that represent the harassment carried out by the authorities against the gay community? Though through the entire cartoon he is never informed what his crimes were. True to the RCMP motto “We always get our man” Fudd busts Bugs, well kind of, remember Bugs is the hero.

Elma Fudd is white and bald, could he possibly represent anti-homosexual bigotry?

Cartoons are definitely a metaphor for societies zeitgeist as seen through the eyes of the cartoonist. In a little known Warner Brothers cartoon “Lumber Jerks” starring “The Goofy Gophers” there are two gophers living in a tree that have recently been made homeless by the local sawmill and decide to fight back. They infiltrate the sawmill and see the way trees are wasted. Trees getting chopped down into sawdust to make cheap chipboard furniture and whole trees getting ground down into tiny tooth picks. The cartoon is a blatant attempt at illustrating the overexploitation of the environment by the faceless corporations. After the gophers get back what is left of their home which is a pile of furniture it ends with the brilliant lines by the gophers: “Television is a really marvellous invention we really have been missing out” to which the other gopher replies: “Imagine how wonderful it will be once we get electricity”. It ends with them looking at a blank television.

The question is: Could Bugs Bunny be the greatest coup by the homosexual or minority artists at the time to breed a hero capable of softening the opinions of homosexuals and other disenfranchised minorities in the United States of America?” or “Is he just a really camp hare who is comfortable with his sexuality?

I’d like to think he is trying to push the boundaries of societies idea of what it means to be masculine for the betterment of mankind.

The question to who Bugs really is may never be answered but the question of why there are no more Bugs Bunny cartoons being made should be.

Is it possible that the right wing, Christian majority in the USA have woken up to the true reason for the creation of Bugs Bunny and halted the production of his cartoons because junior started asking what’s wrong with dressing up as a girl and kissing boys when you’re a boy?

Or is it because he challenges the macho idea of what it means to be a man and that would destroy the Hollywood propaganda machine, which brainwashes little boys into thinking being a man, and not being butch is bad?

Gay or Straight Bugs is one of the unsung revolutionaries of self-expression that has had an impact on the way the world sees itself and who its children become.

By Punjabi_Goth

Submitted by: admin