queer identity to mere fantasy,48 as well as the fact that his homoerotic desire is impossible due to Mr. Burns’s age, appearance, and demeanour.49 This argument cheapens the consistency and diversity of Smithers’s homosexuality, however, seeing as he lives within a queer subculture and shows signs of homoerotic connections with men other than Burns. Further, the show’s producers announced in 2015 that he is indeed coming out,50 refuting any argument that Smithers’s queerness could only be a “fantasy.” As a show thriving on its ability to be topical, and emerging in the wake of The Simpsons success, South Park featured a closeted-queer figure from the show’s start during the “gay vogue” of the 1990s. The show centres around four boys, whose teacher, Mr. Garrison, embodies and explodes the stereotype of the closeted gay man. While remaining explicitly in the closet for the show’s first three seasons, Garrison often uses his alter-ego hand-puppet Mr. Hat (later, Mr. Twig) to communicate his closeted feelings. In the 1998 episode, “Summer Sucks,” Mr. Garrison explains how Mr. Hat fantasizes about Green Bay Packers quarterback, Brett Favre.51 The show subverts the offensive stereotype of queer (or closeted-queer) subjects coming from a history of sexual abuse by presenting Garrison as a queer subject scarred by a lack of childhood trauma. In the 2000 episode, “World Wide Recorder Concert,” Garrison confronts his father for never molesting him as a child.52 At one point, the school’s guidance counselor, Mr. Mackey, confronts Garrison’s father about the lack of abuse, stating “he thinks you didn’t molest him because of some flaw in his looks or personality.”53 Throughout the show, both characters and audiences alike were well aware of Garrison’s closeted position. In the fourth season, when Garrison finally does come out of the closet,
neither characters nor audiences react with any surprise. Indeed, in the 2000 episode, “Fourth Grade,” Garrison lives in a cave and confronts his “gay self.”54 When he returns to South Park to confess he’s gay, his fellow teachers merely state “oh, you finally admit it” and joke that “we don’t hire gay people.”55 Upon coming out of the closet, Mr. Garrison becomes an explicit representation of a variety of queer acts and identities. Garrison engages in purposefully-subversive queer acts as a means of personal gain. Indeed, Garrison’s first major homosexual partner is Mr. Slave, a cliché leather-clad gay man, whom he engages with in a master-slave sexual relationship. Mr. Slave accompanies Mr. Garrison to be his “teacher’s ass” in the 2002 episode, “The Death Camp of Tolerance,” in which Mr. Garrison inserts a gerbil into Mr. Slave’s asshole in front of the students, with the intention of getting fired for being gay.56 In her 2007 book, Terrorist Assemblages, queer theorist Jasbir Puar briefly explores South Park’s negotiation of Garrison and Slave’s sado-masochistic relationship, noting how Garrison uses “sexual performativity to escalate discomfort and elicit disgust from his fourth-grade students.”57 Puar explores how Mr. Slave functions as a tool for Garrison’s exploitation of queerness for cultural capital, stating “Mr. Slave personifies the raw materials extracted and imported for Mr. Garrison’s regenerating usage and ultimate gain.”58 Garrison later crosses boundaries of gender as well as sexuality, transitioning to a woman, becoming Mrs. Garrison in the 2005 episode, “Mr. Garrison’s Fancy New Vagina.”59 She seeks, at first, to live life as a straight woman by continuing her relationship with Mr. Slave. But, when Mr. Slave rejects her for being a woman, she begins a series of lesbian romances, despite reacting negatively at first to a woman confessing attraction towards her.60 Eventually, though, Garrison transitions back to being a man in the 2008 episode “Eek! A Penis!”61 Garrison is thus a character embodying a wide array of subversive gendered and sexual identities throughout the course of the show, and by presenting this extreme example of gender fluidity, South Park not only presents multiple queer subjectivities, but also pushes the limits of the animated queer closet. If the 1990s “gay vogue” brought out explicitly-closeted queer subjectivities, then the 2000s and 2010s only continued to widen the range of queer visibility and readings within American animation. Like South Park, many major animated shows and films have explored explicit representations of queerness. Indeed, children’s programs such as Steven Universe (2013) and Adventure Time (2010) both feature lesbian