The lovable "Wascally Wabbit" is a trickster famous for his blasé, unruffled personality and Brooklyn accent. The documentary evaluates films and television shows that have both hurt the trans community and spurred progress, while also presenting critiques, and praise, of specific pieces examples of representation.
One of those critiques is in regard to the "man-in-dress" jokes that were once a staple of entertainment.
This announcement, while unexpected, give new and clearer meaning to many of the on-screen exchanges between the smart-aleck “wacky wabbit” and his put-upon nemesis, Elmer Fudd.
Bugs Bunny was in love with his male rival, Steven Blanc says.
The author of “Bugs and Elmer: A Forbidden Love,” stunned fans at the Academy of Motion Pictures annual Warner Brothers Looney Tunes Night, when he answered one young reader’s question about Bugs by saying that he was gay and had been in love with Elmer Fudd for years.
‘”You have to remember that this was Hollywood of the Golden Age, even before Rock Hudson.
Some were dismayed, others indifferent, but most were supportive.
” ‘BUGS BUNNY IS GAY’ is quite a headline to stumble upon on a Friday evening, and it’s certainly not what I expected,” added Looney Tunes fan Charlie Johnson, of Trenton, New Jersey. So when asking for his autograph, the “bobby soxer” puts a bomb in his hands.
And these queer acts have continued through Bugs’ decades-long spotlight in the media. In fact, according to the Guinness Book of World Records, he’s the ninth most-portrayed film personality in the world.
While wearing women’s clothing was often a way for Bugs to get out of a sticky situation, his unabashed gender-bending also became part of his personality.
Bugs' character was a positive representation of drag culture and queer people as a whole. Most often, the costumes were a tool in the constant game of cat and mouse (or rabbit) between Bugs and Elmer Fudd, the hunter always on his tail. It doesn't become you at all! However, Bugs is different. Many of the trans people interviewed in Disclosure spoke of their disdain for that kind of representation.
Who could forget when he planted a big kiss on basketball star Michael Jordan in “Space Jam” to prove that he was “real” and not just a figment of Jordan’s imagination? But while live action stuck to these “family-friendly” standards, animation became a field for increased experimentation.
As Melanie Kohnen, an associate professor of rhetoric and media studies, told Insider, “People actually found ways of inserting queerness into cartoons and stretched the boundaries of the Production Code because animation in itself is a medium that already lends itself to surrealness or strange situations.”
Crucially, Bugs was aware of the fact that as a woman, he would be underestimated, and no one would expect his conniving plans.
These characters — from a mermaid to a cancan dancer to a Viking — were not making fun of femininity, but in fact, showing how it could be a source of power to get what you wanted. While these depictions have luckily become less common in a time of greater representation and cultural sensitivity, depictions of gender and sexuality are often still sticky.
With all this talk about what is and what isn’t appropriate for children to see, now is an opportune time for a brief compendium of Bugs Bunny in drag.
Chuck Jones, one of the creators of the “Wascally Wabbit” admitted in the ‘90s that he always imagined Bugs as a “transexual” (a word that we of course don’t use anymore, but was the language he had for trans folks back then).
Look no further than the debate over the “de-sexified” Lola Bunny in the 2021 film “Space Jam 2: A New Legacy.” But during an era when politicians are gaining points by scaring parents into believing the media is influencing their children to pursue “divergent lifestyles,” there’s something liberatory, and clearly political, in holding a beloved character up as a queer icon.
However, when Bugs Bunny and his history of cross-dressing were presented, no one had a negative word to say. Interestingly enough, Bugs became sexually liberated during an era when the 1930 Hays Code banned “sex perversion or any inference to it” and self-censorship abounded after the establishment of the Federal Communications Commission and the first set of commercial TV regulations.
Especially in an era with next to no queer role models, it’s clear why a young person would attach themselves to a figure whose gender fluidity goes behind strict binary confines or who is overtly depicted as part of a queer couple, even if it is with their worst enemy.
