Recently, J. Crew came under media fire for an ad in which their president and creative director, Jenna Lyons, is depicted affectionately gazing at her son - who has just had his toenails painted pink. Beneath the photo a caption reads: “Lucky for me I ended up with a boy whose favorite color is pink. Toenail painting is way more fun in neon.”
While J. Crew treated the ad as a non-issue, almost all of the major news outlets not only helped to create but stir the argument that the advertisement was "blatant propaganda celebrating transgendered children."
Whether or not one personally believes that the ad purposefully blurred the “gender lines,” or looked to condone and promote a “homosexual life style” amongst children, gender and sexuality is a topic that is often called into question in media that is aimed at or involves children, whether the intent to create a sense of overt sexuality is there or not.
While the subject definitely pre-dates it, perhaps the most famous case of a character from “children's entertainment” being “exposed” as homosexual propaganda was in 1954 when Dr. Frederic Wertham proclaimed that Batman’s relationship with Robin was “like a wish dream of two homosexuals living together.” Furthermore, Wertham claimed that “the Batman type of story may stimulate children to fantasies.”
While both Batman’s sexuality and the effect of depicting it in the comics have been the subject of debate ever since, other characters, especially in the medium of television animation, have been dragged onto the battlefield of the (Trans)Gender War, that adults have been fighting in the name of children that they may or may not even have; and where a topic like this could be (and most likely is) the subject countless doctoral dissertations and media studies articles, often facts are left out of the discussion when examining the subjective nature of “behavioral studies,” or the need for a persecuted minority to identify with and idolize a media personality… even an animated one.
Here are three cases of retro-cartoon characters that have found lives as gay icons (in either a positive or negative sense), and a look at whether or not the truth was dragged out of the closet with them:
