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Why Saddam Is Gay: Masculinity Politics in South Park—Bigger, Longer, and Uncut

Within days of the capture of Saddam Hussein by U.S. forces, the event appeared on the television program “South Park,” on which the former Iraqi leader has long been a featured character. In the 1999 animated film musical South Park—Bigger, Longer, and Uncut, Saddam is Satan’s macho lover, using the devil to further his plot of world domination. In this essay I offer a reading of this lively and popular film that addresses the relationships among its cultural and gender politics and its generic form. While obviously defending liberal beliefs in free speech and sexual freedom, the film also dramatizes a number of paradoxes about American masculinity. It stages liberal truisms only to transform them, modeling a ludic libertarianism. Its ethics might be called Queer Lite: they are unempathically tolerant, polymorphously perverse, ambiguously gay affirmative, and disruptive of heteronormativity but also misogynistic, classist, and ethnocentric. Typically a genre that moves toward heterosexual union, here, I argue, the musical film stages implacable contradictions in American culture of the 1990s between male dominance and gay liberation, extended childhood and the absence of innocence, free speech and media hegemony, and liberal humanism and U.S. imperialism. The gay Saddam Hussein operates centrally here as the abjected figure whose ridicule leaves open the possibility of more positive homosexualities and masculinities. The film has received little serious critical attention, though reviews in mainstream sources like Time and The New Yorker were largely favorable (“Cinema: Surprise,” “Talk”). These reviews focused on the theme of free speech. Championing the boys who fight for free speech against their repressive parents, the film apparently corroborates liberal pieties while annoying conservatives. Christianity Today says the film is “desperate to disgust and alienate viewers” (Mathewes-Green) and the Christian ChildCare Action Project Ministry reports it is “INCREDIBLY dangerous,” an “extraordinarily vulgar, vile, and repugnant movie” that has earned their most unacceptable rating for “potential for destructive influence” (ChildCare). On the liberal side, Barry Fagin claims that “South Park is loaded with moral content, teaching . . . that it is good to mock celebrities, ridiculous beliefs, and hypocrisy,” and Stephanie Zacharek approves this “movie about freedom of speech and of expression, about courage in the face of oppression.” To facilitate a more nuanced analysis focused on the film’s gender politics, I turn to three varied cultural theorists. I refer to Rick Altman’s cinematic typologies to place the film generically. Congruent with its ideological contradictions are those within the film’s form—its sophisticated intertextuality vying with its traditional musical score and simplified cartoon visuals. Altman’s categories also help define the changing configurations of