The Rise And Fall of Queer Cartoons

A little while back, conservatives discovered the existence of cartoons, but only their existence. What they do not know, and perhaps can’t know, is that for a brief moment cartoons got really good, and really gay, and now they are dying. Now, I’ll be using the term ‘cartoons’ here, but when I do I’ll be referring to animated content released commercially for children and early teenagers in English-speaking countries. The term definitely excludes many things that are obviously cartoons: The Simpsons , Neon Genesis Evangelion , Arcane, Scavengers Reign , even Bluey since its core audience is too young. It’s cartoons as in ‘Saturday morning cartoon’: thirty minutes long if you count commercials, narrative-based, usually with other concerns like a toy line, with an audience who are older than toddlers but younger than teenagers. On September 29th of 2025, the X account LibsofTikTok, run by former real estate agent Chaya Raichik, discovered the Netflix show Dead End Paranormal Park , which had been cancelled in 2023 after two seasons. In a short clip, the show’s lead character Barney talks about how working at a haunted amusement park allows him to be himself rather than just the one trans kid at his school. Having seen the show, Barney’s gender is mentioned at most a handful of times, the word ‘trans’ might only appear in the clip that Raichik excerpted. A day later, Raichik posted a video sourced from Instagram in which a man with a British accent films his TV playing the Netflix show Jurassic Park: Camp Cretaceous , a teen-centric sidequel to the film Jurassic World in which a group of teenagers try to survive on Isla Nublar while Chris Pratt is riding motorcycles and the like. In the clip, the character Yasmina confesses that she’s fallen for the character Sammy-they are both female. The adult watching the cartoon whines ‘lord have mercy.’ The final season of this show aired in 2022. Elon Musk encouraged his followers to ‘ Cancel Netflix for the health of your kids ’ shortly after Raichik shared the clips above. Culture war content isn’t exactly uncommon on Musk’s account, though it is often submerged by his genuinely side-splitting comedy and cutting-edge memes, but what are rare are references to children, childcare or fatherhood. Musk is the world’s foremost pronatalist: he believes that the world is dangerously underpopulated and that we should be ‘teach(ing) fear of childlessness’, and yet it doesn’t seem to interest him. You already know what he is doing personally to solve this problem , but something he never does is talk about his own experiences as a father. As Joyce Carol Oates has pointed out, despite posting on average , he never talks about anything remotely human: ‘pride in a friend’s or relative’s accomplishment; condolences for someone who has died; pleasure in sports; acclaim for a favorite team; references to history’. More important than any of that: somebody with an estimated fourteen children never talks about them. Obviously security and privacy concerns...

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