Queer from the Horse’s Mouth

Abstract

This chapter focuses on two mid-century American screen equines who possess the power of speech: Francis, a patriotic U.S. Army mule serving during WWII, and Mr. Ed, a palomino horse living in the suburbanizing postwar San Fernando Valley. Contextualizing Arthur Lubin’s wildly popular Francis films (1950–1956) and Mr. Ed television series (1961–1966) within the tradition of talking horses in literary classics such as The Iliad and Gulliver’s Travels—and also in relation to mid-twentieth-century American debates around gender—the chapter argues that Francis and Mr. Ed’s ventriloquial voices not only serve as vehicles for a critique of traditional masculinity, but also channel some startlingly queer and post-human interspecies alternatives to human heteronormativity.