Producer – Lorelei Pepi

In Distribution

Happy & Gay is a completely original revisionist history cartoon animation film being done to authentically replicate the style of the 1930s B&W rubber hose animation cartoon musical, much like the early “Betty Boop” or “Bosko” cartoons.

Lorelei Pepi is the creator and director of the film. Brian Carpenter, a Cambridge filmmaker and musician, has created the completely original ragtime jazz musical score, performed by the Beat Circus Vaudeville Orchestra. The use of the term “revisionist history” relates to the projects’ goal to (re)create a positive, albeit risque, historical placement and recognition of gays and lesbians as an option for main characters as well as positive roles within the art form of the early animated cartoon and Hollywood cinema. Up to and through this time period there were either purposeful exclusion or degrading stereotypes of gays and lesbians, influenced by the Motion Picture Decency Act of 1930.

This new cartoon features “our gang,” two male and female couples that go out for a night on the town to the Pansy Land nightclub, which hosts a hot evening of dancing and singing, as well as an unwanted police raid. They escape and accidentally seek refuge in a nearby church, where the Bishop and congregation recoil in horror as they discover the nature of the gang, and aim a few damnations set to a catchy jazz rhythm. Both Satan and God have cameos, putting in their two-cents on the matter. After all is said and done, the gang is left unscathed but with the warning that there’s more where all of this came from. But that’s another story.