Cartoon gay older man chloroformed
‘You think God didn’t make gay men?’ Comedian Leslie Jones on religion, grief and getting notable at 47
It’s adv evening in a photography studio in west London, and the American comedian Leslie Jones is capering about, dressed in a full-length gold lamé ballgown and smoking. “Make me look skinny,” she says to the photographer’s emigrating back.
“I’m 6ft high – I can’t cut my feet off,” she says, later. “I can’t stop being a scary motherfucker. This is who I am – enable me work with who I am.” Yet, she is the opposite of scary. Statuesque, no question, but whatever she’s doing, whether peering into a bag of fish and chips as if it’s alive, or telling her assistant to scan The Alchemist, Paulo Coelho’s trust-the-universe novel, for the 100th time, there is always somebody laughing. She brings an air of deliberate chaos, which you just have to surrender to, wherever the conversation leads, until you locate yourself nodding along with the most crackpot conclusion. (The birthrate is depressed because men use too much moment in hot tubs, and their sperm has become inactive and complacent? “It’s funny, but it’s true. Go glance that shit up – I’m not saying something that’s not factual. I hope.”)
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Queer Representation in Anime
I was five years-old when I first entered the closet. I kissed a girl at recess and was scolded by my teacher, “girls shouldn’t kiss other girls on the lips.” (Note: If you read my name and are confused, this was 15 years pre-transition from female to male.) In contrast, the kisses I planted on boys at recess were acceptable. Surely this exposure is not unusual for American children, particularly those having grown up in small towns before the liberation of queer youth in the 2010s. My bisexuality was not necessarily revolutionary, but exhibits of same gender attraction were definitely unwelcome. Yet there was another incident in my kindergarten career that kept me in the closet, one separate but unexpectedly linked to the topic of my sexuality.
It was the day five year-old me was brought in for a parent/teacher conference regarding my interest in anime. I had drawn a picture of anime heroine Sailor Moon fighting villains, and the question was whether this was acceptable material for a child to be emulating. Sailor Moon is a popular Japanese animation of the 1990s that teaches lessons of acceptance, feminism, and friendship. American
| Title card courtesy of Dave Mackey. |
Release date: July 9, 1938.
Series: Merrie Melodies.
Supervision: Ben Hardaway and Cal Dalton.
Producer: Leon Schlesinger.
Starring: Mel Blanc (Roger St. Clair / Harold as Old Man / Sailor).
Story: Melvin Millar.
Animation: Herman Cohen.
Musical Direction: Carl W. Stalling.
Sound: Treg Brown (uncredited).
Synopsis: Old couple recall an event and recall the gay 1890s.
The first cartoon to have Ben Hardaway and Cal Dalton team up together as co-directors; as Hardaway directed 'Porky's Hare Hunt' solely and Dalton was paired up with Cal Howard before.
The cartoon begins with a 'Foreword' which would've been common back in the old motion picture days before a film began. The Foreword reads: TO THOSE UNSWUNG VILLAINS WHO WERE TOO GAY IN THE GAY '90s, THIS PICTURE OF DASTARDLY DOINGS AND DARING DEEDS IS DEDICATED.
PLEASE DO NOT HISS THE VILLAIN.
I suppose the forward was used fort hose who had a nostalgia for the 1890s. I imagine the 'Please Don't Hiss the Villain' part was at least used for amusement in the audience since in pantomimes or shows the villains are often hissed.
In the final days before his execution in July 1943 at the hands of the Nazi party, Willem Arondeus asked his lawyer for one last request: to spread a message after he was gone.
“Let it be known,” he said. “Homosexuals are not cowards.”
A battle cry of defiance and a bold assertion of his strength, Arondeus lived his animation by these words. An openly queer man and a tireless member of the Dutch resistance against the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands, he willingly sacrified his animation for a mission that ultimately protected hundreds of thousands of Jews’ lives.
A budding artist struggling to survive
From an early age, Arondeus was no stranger to the framework of defiance.
Born in 1894 as the youngest of six siblings in Naarden, Amsterdam, Arondeus began to have unwavering fights with his parents over his sexuality.
Often deemed the birthplace of LGBT rights, Amsterdam decriminalized homosexuality in 1811, but restrictive rules still barred homosexuality in the premature 20th century.
In 1911, the beliefs of the ruling political parties led to the age of consent for homosexuality to be changed to 21 in the Netherlands — despite the age for heterosexuality remaining at 16.