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The advent of family-fare television brought us kindler, gentler, yet perhaps even more overtly “gay” on-screen scoundrels. My all time favorite remains Jonathan Harris’s Dr. Zachary Smith of Lost in Space (1965-68), renowned for his ability to hurl queenly, albeit erudite, insults (“You bumbling bucket of bolts!” “You pusillanimous pipsqueak!” etc.) To this day, the Dr. Smith Internet insult library is the most popular of all Lost in Space memorial fan sites.

Oddly, in the show’s first season, Smith is a calculated, evil, pistol-packing spy who uses a robot as his henchman to terrorize everyone. In the next season, he's a whiny, sniveling wuss who's afraid of his own shadow as he bickers with the robot about doing his chores (perhaps he came out of the closet over the summer break).

Additional “gay-ish” TV sitcom troublemakers include Kurt Kasnar’s soft & sleazy Alexander B. Fitzhugh in Land of the Giants; Charles Nelson Reilly as sissy, zany Claymore Gregg in The Ghost and Ms. Muir; and Paul Lynde as bitchy, bitter Uncle Arthur in Bewitched. I am tempted to include the voice of the Pontiac Trans-Am in Knight Rider, but hey, he was one of the good guys.

From the land of cartoons, 101 Dalmatians’ (1961) drag queen villainess Cruella Deville was surely a caricature of Tallulah Bankhead, who herself made a career out of (over) acting like a drag queen. And as any queer who’s felt the snub of not being invited to a family affair knows, the vengeful and malevolent Queen Maleficent in Sleeping Beauty (1959) was just being her bitchy tranny self. The same goes for the vain Wicked Queen from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937). She truly understood the value of constant mirror work.

More recently, Disney seems to be letting a certain joyless, politically correct, right wing-brand of “family values” lead the way in casting its animated villains. Which brings us, finally, to The Lion King (1994), whose villain is the treacherous (and obviously gay) lion Uncle Scar. Scar’s upper-class, British fop voice was provided by Jeremy Irons (certainly no stranger to being hired to portray queer characters).

Unlike classic Disney buffoon type bad guys, Scar is sinister, cunning, given to making acid remarks and even kills in a graphic, cold-hearted manner. Scar takes over the lion kingdom and forms an alliance with sniveling, miscreant hyenas. During their reign of terror, all of Nature suffers (no doubt due in part to Disney writers playing up to the phony myths about hyenas being unnatural, depraved hermaphrodites because the females of the species have genitalia just like the males, and of equal size).

Perhaps because it’s a cartoon for impressionable children, or because its subject matter is supposedly morality-free Nature, or because the issue of social tolerance is more important now than ever, but I found this film truly insulting to me as both a gay person and as a human animal of planet Earth.

Now where is Cruella when we really need her?

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