The new Paramount+ reboot of the children’s TV series Rugrats now includes a single queer mom, voiced by a queer actor!
Phil and Lil’s mom Betty in the original Rugrats was married to a man named Howard. In the new Paramount+ Rugrats series, however, she’s “an openly gay woman,” and single, voiced by queer actor Natalie Morales, reports the AV Club. Betty likes to play football, owns a coffee shop, and slings cappuccinos as she keeps an eye on her toddler twins. She seems to have a caring but realistic view of parenting—when she’s informed that the twins are playing with mud, she responds, “After the morning I had with them, be thankful it’s mud.”
When another character at one point mentions being afraid to face one’s past, she comments, “I do have that one ex-girlfriend who still kind of scares me.” I love this–it’s a way to indicate a character’s sexual orientation even when they’re single, as an offhand comment that isn’t the point of the episode. (Other screenwriters and authors should take note of this sort of dialog as a way to indicate bisexual parents, too, who are even rarer than lesbian and gay parents in kids’ media. Not that all exes need to be scary; just that mentioning them can indicate something about a person’s sexual orientation.)
Morales told AV Club, “Betty is a single mom with her own business who has twins and still has time to hang out with her friends and her community, and I think it’s just so great because examples of living your life happily and healthily as an out queer person is just such a beacon for young queer people who may not have examples of that.” I’d add that many older queer people don’t have examples of that, either. A queer parent with a healthy work-family-life balance is a precious role model indeed.