Why I love the queerness of Bugs Bunny | Little White Lies

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Why I love the queer­ness of Bugs Bunny

05 May 2023

Words by Esmé Holden

Stylised pink cat-like creature with wings perched on a decorative frame against a blue and turquoise background.
Stylised pink cat-like creature with wings perched on a decorative frame against a blue and turquoise background.
Looney Tunes’ icon­ic rab­bit hero might not have been con­sid­ered a queer icon dur­ing his hey day, but with hind­sight he takes on a new meaning.

Even though he wouldn’t have been thought of as such at the height of his fame, Bugs Bun­ny was, for a long time, the most famous gen­der-non­con­form­ing char­ac­ter in the world. Even today he still ranks among them, but despite the count­less times he’s cross-dressed or kissed anoth­er man on the lips, it’s not so easy to talk about Bugs as a queer icon.

In fact, it’s hard to say any­thing defin­i­tive about the Looney Tunes (or its inter­change­able sis­ter series Mer­rie Melodies), as the shorts were ani­mat­ed over many years by direc­tors of strong and diver­gent points of view. These cre­atives weren’t nec­es­sar­i­ly in close con­tact, and they cer­tain­ly weren’t inter­est­ed in con­ti­nu­ity beyond the broad­est strokes of a char­ac­ter. They had a shared atti­tude, but it was one of irony and insincerity.

After the release of Snow White it became obvi­ous that no one could keep up with Dis­ney on their terms, so the Warn­er Bros. car­toon stu­dio set them­selves against them. While Dis­ney tried to give their char­ac­ters and sto­ries emo­tion­al weight, the Looney Tunes often end­ed by break­ing what­ev­er thin log­ic they’d estab­lished – like in Falling Hare (1943, Robert Clam­pett) where a nose-div­ing plane stops just before smash­ing into the ground because it ran out of gas” – as if to laugh at any­one who would take a car­toon seri­ous­ly. It’s that con­tempt for con­ven­tion (and the defence of irony mean­ing that every­thing was just a gag) that allowed Bugs to show so much queer­ness in such unac­com­mo­dat­ing times.

Most major Looney Tunes char­ac­ters have cross-dressed since the series is direct­ly influ­enced by vaude­ville, where it’s a major comedic trope, but few took to it as quick­ly as Bugs. In his third appear­ance, Hare-Um Scare-Um (1939, Ben Hard­away & Cal Dal­ton) – before he had a name, only a per­son­al­i­ty copied from the recent­ly suc­cess­ful Daffy Duck – he dress­es as a female dog to trick a hunter’s pet. But, to some extent, the joke is at Bugs’ expense: the cos­tume is ill-fit­ting, it looks quite bizarre and even a lit­tle scary.

The idea was refined a few years lat­er, after Bugs’ offi­cial’ debut in A Wild Hare (1940, Tex Avery) but before Mel Blanc had total­ly set­tled on a voice, in Elmer’s Pet Rab­bit (1941, Chuck Jones). When Bugs dances with his own­er and pri­ma­ry neme­sis Elmer Fudd, flut­ter­ing his eye­lash­es and speak­ing in a Kather­ine Hep­burn-esque voice, we are invit­ed to enjoy – and maybe even iden­ti­fy with – his chaot­ic and joy­ful per­for­mance of femininity.

Gen­der expres­sion isn’t pre­sent­ed like this with any oth­er char­ac­ter in the series: when Daffy pulls down his feath­ers like a dress in The Wise Quack­ing Duck (1943, Clam­pett) he looks sil­ly and wacky, and when a preda­to­ry wolf dress­es in female sheep’s cloth­ing in I Got Plen­ty of Mut­ton (1944, Frank Tash­lin) he’s ani­mat­ed to look as grotesque and aber­rant as pos­si­ble putting on lip­stick. But once Bugs is both act­ing and dress­ing fem­i­nine at the same time, short­ly after Elmer’s Pet Rab­bit, he looks good; his styl­ish out­fits cling tight­ly to his curves.

It’s no sur­prise that in a famous scene from Wayne’s World (1992) Garth admits to being attract­ed to him, Wayne seems to agree, as his defen­sive laugh tries a lit­tle too hard to hide. Even when Bugs is caught and his ene­mies realise that it’s him in those out­fits, they are removed entire­ly rather than bro­ken. The image isn’t shat­tered, atten­tion isn’t drawn to its con­struc­tion and arti­fice, like it is for Wile E. Coy­ote in Going! Going! Gosh (1952, Jones), who lays defeat­ed with one breast out of place.

Animated characters of a rabbit and young boy in a forest setting with mountains in the background.

The heart of this dif­fer­ence goes back to Elmer’s Pet Rab­bit, when a bowl of veg­eta­bles is dropped into Bugs’ hutch and he screams: What do you think I am? A rab­bit?”. Bugs is lim­i­nal, he exists between species as he does between gen­ders (that’s why a suit on him feels as much like drag’ as a dress). This is canon­ised in What’s Up, Doc? (1950, Robert McKim­son) when he tells his Hol­ly­wood back­sto­ry to a jour­nal­ist: he always knew that he was dif­fer­ent, he says, he was a rab­bit born into a human world”. He comes des­per­ate­ly close to explic­it­ly describ­ing such a fun­da­men­tal­ly queer expe­ri­ence – that feel­ing of being an out­sider to the straight world. But what makes Bugs excit­ing and empow­er­ing is that he turns his lack of belong­ing into a strength; cross­ing between the bound­aries of gen­der gives him not only per­son­al plea­sure, but also a unique power.

When Bugs kiss­es his adver­saries, oth­er men, on the lips (which, in more het­ero-nor­ma­tive times would have been asso­ci­at­ed with cross-dress­ing) or when he allures them with a tight fit­ting dress, he isn’t attack­ing their sex­u­al­i­ty, he’s expand­ing it. He reveals to them that their desires are big­ger than their ideas, that the bound­aries of attrac­tion, and the bound­aries of gen­der, are arbi­trar­i­ly drawn; in Rab­bit of Seville (1950, Jones) Bugs doesn’t snap Elmer’s gun in half, he ties it into a knot.

These aren’t sim­ply tricks, only per­for­mances for the sake of best­ing some­one, because in To Hare is Human (1956, Jones) and Back­woods Bun­ny (1959, McKim­son) Bugs dress­es fem­i­nine­ly in the pri­va­cy of his own home, only for him­self. Yet the tac­tic does work par­tic­u­lar­ly well to fool not just those as fool­ish as Elmer, but the kind of stuffy patri­ar­chal elit­ists that would be most invest­ed in uphold­ing the stan­dards of gen­der. Like the pompous opera singer in Long-Haired Hare (1949, Jones) or the mur­der­ous depart­ment store man­ag­er / taxi­der­mist in Hare Con­di­tioned (1945, Jones).

As strong and use­ful as these queer res­o­nances are, they should be looked at in con­text, because the very spir­it of trans­gres­sion and sense of dis­re­gard that allowed them also led to some of the ugli­est and most offen­sive shorts of the era when those tar­get­ed were not the peo­ple in posi­tions of pow­er, but were instead those fur­thest below. Some of these shorts, which tend­ed to tar­get Black, Asian or Native Amer­i­can peo­ple, were com­mis­sioned by the US gov­ern­ment for the war effort, but many weren’t. The series as a whole can’t be tak­en into the mod­ern day with­out some seri­ous dis­claimers, and there’s a case to be made that it doesn’t deserve to.

But the val­ue in doing so can be seen as ear­ly as 2003 in Joe Dante’s Looney Tunes: Back in Action, when a stu­dio exec­u­tive warns Bugs that the cross-dress­ing thing” was fun­ny in the past, but today is dis­turb­ing”. Now that Bugs’ queer­ness nec­es­sar­i­ly con­nects to real, vis­i­ble queer peo­ple, it is new­ly threat­en­ing to those in pow­er, and so new­ly pow­er­ful against them.

In Rab­bit Sea­son­ing (1952, Jones) Bugs pulls a women’s sweater over his head. At the time it might have seemed a strange in-between moment, a space where a joke should have been, but now it shows clear­ly the process of gen­der expres­sion; it shows it as an act, as some­thing you can do. This isn’t just a coin­ci­dence or pro­jec­tion, even though Chuck Jones denied the con­nec­tion, in a 1996 inter­view with Mark Thomp­son and Bri­an Phelps where he said that it was just fun­ny” and that no one even knew the term” for trans­gen­der people.

Queer­ness exist­ed long before there were words to describe it, and whether through con­tem­po­rary queer art or a group of nom­i­nal­ly straight cis men mak­ing car­toons in the mid-twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry, will always find a way out. It will always be there, because we have always been there, and always will be.

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