So, I heard an interesting question earlier tonight. I was at a sort of informal question and answer session over at Venerable University here in Liberal Icebox. The person being questioned was a famous trans academic, and one of the students asked her who her queer heroes were growing up. She spoke about the characters on the show Bewitched, the student asking the question talked about Tim Curry in Rocky Horror, and I tried to think of what characters that were important to me growing up might have also been queer heroes.
Now, it took a little thinking on my part. Sadly, cartoons and comics from the 80's and 90's had a sad vacancy of strong trans characters.I mean, I was always a huge fan of the Transformers growing up, but... can you really say that those giant alien robots were queer? No.
But then I remembered my favorite cartoon from the 90's, Gargoyles. For those of you who missed it, it was absolutely amazing. In my opinion, it is the greatest animated work ever to come out of Disney that did not have a theatrical release. The show follows a group of six gargoyles, creatures of legend that live by night and turn to stone during the day. These six gargoyles have been trapped in stone for a thousand ye... you know what? It'll be easier if you just watch the opening credits: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ygrEVnrg3Ic.
These six gargoyles, they believe themselves to be the last of their species. Other than the whole turning to stone in the day thing, they aren't particularly magical. They eat, they drink, they get old, they don't come back when they die.
The show plays on a lot of tropes. First you have the fish out of water story, the story of the characters sometimes clumsily interacting with a world a thousand year ahead of them. Surprisingly, the show moves past this bit pretty quickly in the first episode or two the gargoyles show some amazement at the concept of television or robots, but they soon settle in.
The real themes of the show rest in the otherness of the gargoyles. The protagonist, the leader of the gargoyles, is named Goliath. Voiced by Keith David, Goliath is a strong, thought leader, rarely above kicking large quantities of ass. Through out the show he demonstrates a lack of trust in humanity and in the world built by humans. Above all else, Goliath is committed to the ideal of protecting his home. Early in the show, Goliath's concept of home moves from his ancestral castle to the whole of Manhattan island. He is the embodiment of protective morality.
The six sleeping gargoyles are awaken by the show's antagonist, David Xanatos. Xanatos is a brilliant billionaire industrialist. He employees Machiavellian ploys to arrange the world as he sees fit. Weirdly for a purported children's show, Xanatos is not entirely unsympathetic. Xanatos is the apotheosis white male capitalism. In an attempt to break the spell the keeps the gargoyles in their stone sleep, he has their entire castle moved from the coast of Scotland to the top of his Manhattan skyscraper. He lives, both literally and figuratively, at the top of the economic world. Though not entirely amoral, his schemes rarely leave room for the good of anyone but himself and his interests. Originally he claims to have woken the gargoyles for their sake, but he soon makes it clear that they are nothing more than tools to some great to objective to him.
Now, let's look at the conflict between Goliath and Xanatos. It means something to name the good guy Goliath and the bad guy David. This naming convention not only subverts the Biblical narrative, but also the hero/monster dynamic. Xanatos is in many ways the perfect hero. He is a smart, strong, handsome doer of deed. To combat a creature with the gargoyles' strength, he builds himself a robotic suit of armor. It turns out that he, through a time traveling adventure, is wholly responsible for his own massive wealth. He is, in many ways, a superman, the ultimate version of white, heterosexual normativity.
Goliath, on the other hand, is a monster. He is a giant, horned, blue, winged thing in a loin cloth. In public, Goliath receives horrified screams even from those he saves. His one truly positive relationship with a human is with Elisa Maza, the beautiful New York city police detective who comes to investigate one of the gargoyles early fights after being awaken in New York. The relationship between Elisa and Goliath develops almost parallel to the standard Disney romance. Not only are both partners strong, independent characters, the tension at the possibility of romance is exacerbated by the fact of the difference in species of the two. Goliath is a rejection of he version of normativism that Xanatos represents.
But even then, with both David and Goliath holding onto many traits of their Biblical counter parts, Goliath remains the hero and Xanatos remains the villain. Why?
The thrust of the show is that despite everything, Goliath's simple, unstoppable morality, his commitment to serving the people people of his adopted city, is superior to Xanatos' complex, self-serving amorality. This bends the message of the show in a very queer direction. It says that it doesn't matter what we are, what sort of horns or halos are growing out of our heads, but rather what choices we make, what sort of people we decide to be. All the benefits of the world of capitalism, says the show, can't buy goodness.
More later
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