“Happy & Gay” is a queer “revisionist history” animation film. Stylistically, it’s built on the 1930’s b & w studio cartoon musical, much like the early “Betty Boop” or “Flip the Frog” cartoons with the “rubber hose” arms and legs, dancing and musical numbers, and weirdly transforming shapes and characters. The story follows two couples, one lesbian and one gay, who go out together for a night on the town. They find bigotry, violence, relief and happiness in the secret nightclub, joy and love; then a police raid, an angry Church, a gay (is he?) Satan, and a transvestite God.

Conceptually, “revisionist history” relates to the project’s goal to (re)create a positive (while still frisky and fun) historical placement and recognition of gays and lesbians as lead characters within the form of the 1930’s animated Hollywood cartoon form. The early 1930’s saw the creation of the Hollywood Hays Code and the Catholic-led Legion of Decency, both of which policed the “moral content” of Hollywood films. These groups oversaw the forced modification of an authentic gay and lesbian presence in Hollywood studio films. I wish to have “Happy & Gay” considered as a film document that should have existed, but could not at the time it references.

This kind of censorship is founded in bigoted and racist attitudes. Because of this, the film also responds to how racism was an issue in representations of the “Other,” such as Jews, Blacks, and some immigrants to the US. The film places symbolic representations of these kinds of characters, first to act as a foil for the commentary on the “pansies and bull-dykes,” and secondly to place this film in a fully historical, authentic context. Censorship of another kind then took place. Early cartoons that had racist representations, such as “little black Sambo” or the Jewish “Shylock,” were pulled out of circulation when social consciousness began to grow, around the late 1960’s. However, representations of gays (no lesbians, because they “didn’t exist”) were not considered derogatory, and were ignored in this social critique.