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On November 8, 2018, Disney's CEO Bob Iger announced Disney's latest world conquering venture, Disney Plus. A digital streaming service, dubbed a "Netflix killer" by many in the media, that would make almost all of Disney's content streamable in one place.

[The DVD cover of Song of the South appears.] Not you, we don't talk about you!

Big draws to the service were announcements of original series focusing on Disney's Marvel and Star Wars brands, with Falcon and the Winter Soldier, WandaVision, Loki, and The Mandalorian being revealed, though only The Mandalorian had a planned release date anytime soon. Alongside the Disney owned brands would live content from companies the mouse had recently acquired, namely 20th Century Fox. The fraught buyout of Fox had played out in entertainment reporting for months with most of the Internet being in favor of the potential ever growing monopoly, since it would mean Marvel's X-Men and Fantastic 4 would be under the watchful eye of Kevin Feige at Disney.

But along with the mutants, Disney acquired hundreds of other properties from Fox including, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, which they've duly ignored ever since, and the film rights to the novel Simon vs. the Homo Sapien^{[sic: Sapiens]} Agenda by Becky Albertali, a young adult novel about a teenage gay romance that had been adapted into a hit film earlier that year. Unlike Rocky Horror, Disney saw potential with Love, Simon's family-friendly representation of gay teens and announced a sequel streaming series as one of its main hooks to Disney Plus.

You see, Disney fully intended their streaming service to compete with Netflix, the dominant force in the streaming game, since it became a thing, and something Netflix had become well known for was their LGBT inclusive content. Whether it was original shows like Orange is the New Black Sense8, She-Ra and the Princesses of Power, and Grace and Frankie, or their extensive library of queer films, Netflix had pretty much cornered the LGBT streaming market. And Disney wanted a piece of it. According to The Hollywood Reporter, Disney has a massive amount of data pointing toward them being incredibly popular among the LGBT community. And so, they wanted to play into that by creating Love, Victor.

The company pushed Disney Plus's annual subscription early on, locking audiences into a full year's worth of membership before the vast majority of their original content had even begun production, and one of its big selling points was the diversity representation of Love, Victor. According to market research, approximately 3.5 million initial subscribers to Disney Plus were LGBT. Obviously, Love, Victor wasn't the sole reason reason for these people subscribing, but I'm willing to bet that it certainly helped boost those numbers.

Disney Plus went live in November of 2019, with The Mandalorian being their only major draw. Casting and production news surrounding Love, Victor had regularly trended on social media, and the upcoming series was considered Disney's next safe bet after The Mandalorian ran its course.

But then, in February of 2020, things changed. Disney announced that Love, Victor would not be appearing on Disney Plus, despite selling people on it from the very beginning. Instead, it would stream on the also Disney-owned Hulu, a service with half as many subscribers, and one not available almost anywhere outside the United States.

Their reasoning? Deadline reported that executives at Disney thought Love, Victor wasn't family friendly enough for the brand. I wonder what wasn't family friendly enough about it...?

One needs to ask, what would it have meant for a generation of queer kids to see a show representing them on a Disney platform? You don't get much more mainstream than Disney. That might have given hope to queer kids who are held down by their homophobic or transphobic families or communities.

And while many queer youth avoided Love, Simon in theaters for fear of being spotted seeing a gay movie, this TV sequel could have allowed them to take in a cute gay teen comedy from the comfort of their own laptop or phone. A possibility made all the more likely with how popular Love, Simon has been on streaming.

With Disney Plus in almost 50 million households by the time Love, Victor was released this June, that would have been a gigantic potential audience. But Hulu isn't in as nearly many homes. It isn't nearly as mainstream. Disney had the opportunity to say to those gay kids, "your stories are as good as anyone else's," but now, by shafting it over to Hulu, the Mouse has unequivocably^{[sic: unequivocally]} said, "you don't belong here."

According to Hulu, Love, Victor was its most binged show of 2020, which is pretty impressive considering how we've all been locked up with little more to do than stream TV shows. So not only did Disney segregate the queer audience to a smaller platform, but it missed out on a hit series, something the service is in desperate need of, with data showing that aside from The Mandalorian, none of Disney Plus's original content has been a hit.

When Disney made the announcement that Love, Victor was being sent to Hulu, I was... frustrated, but not shocked. I was frustrated that even in 2020, queer people aren't considered family friendly enough for Disney. But I wasn't shocked... because Disney has an out-and-proud history of using and abusing the LGBT community for its own means. In order to talk about that, we'll need to discuss Disney's prolific history of queer coding villains, straight-washing heroes, and pandering to the LGBT community just to ignore us once they have our money.

Gay culture has always held the Disney oeuvre in high regard, but why exactly? To say that Disney was queer coding in the early days would be a bit disingenuous. I hardly believe that good ol' Uncle Walt, hater of all things subversive, would insert queer coded messages into his early animated films, although six hairy men in one twink living together is a bit suspect.

But queer readings of Disney films are possible and quite well known. Really, it all comes down to fantasy.

Queer culture (particularly gay male culture) has long held a fascination with fantasy. The close association of gay men to the world of fantasy has attributed^{[sic: contributed]} to some of the most common insults for gay men in Western culture: "fairy," "queen" and "princess." While elaborating on what constitutes a gay sensibility, Michael Bronski, LGBT historian, stresses the importance of imagination:

"Imagination is especially threatening to a culture that repressively and rigidly defines gender roles . . . because it can provide an alternative Vision to the real world."

Therefore, fantasy contains a possible critique of dominant heteronormative culture, as well as allowing for a proxy^{[sic: ???]} to exist, one of the reasons young fantasy fans have been expected to grow out of the genre for decades. With LGBT people living every day as an alternative to dominant culture, ties to fantasy seem inevitable.

Although not necessarily evoking a world of gender fluidity, fantasy is often described as a method of escape from the trials and tribulations of everyday reality. Living in a society that has outlawed homosexual desire, categorized it as a medical disease, labeled it as a sin against God and allowed (and often encouraged) violent acts against LGBT people, queer culture has unsurprisingly embraced the potential for escape that fantasy and fairy tales provide.

Heroes or heroines rise above their stations -rewarded for all their hardship and vilification by finding Prince Charming and/or being crowned as royalty. Others leave their drab and shabby existence and find a fascinating other world in which anything is possible.

This second scenario is the basis for one of the key texts of queer culture, the film version of The Wizard of Oz from 1939. In the narrative, an underappreciated adolescent girl in the barren Midwest is whisked away to a fabulous land filled with color and spectacle where she finds friends who value her more than her biological family seems to.

Funnily enough, Walt Disney fought hard to get the film rights to The Wizard of Oz but failed. He would rarely let the rights to something he wanted slip through his fingers ever again.

Another narrative strand in Disney's films that would have a great appeal to the queer community is the tale of the outsider. Throughout the studio's history, Disney has consistently returned to the stories about characters who don't "fit in" to society. Unlike the heroines of L. Frank Baum's Oz, these characters do not find another world to escape to and must confront their ostracization. Rebuffed by the gatekeepers of what is normal and decent, these rejects eventually find acceptance and happiness by discovering a use for those aspects of themselves that were originally thought to be deficient or abnormal. Hans Christian Anderson, now recognized as gay himself, provided what is probably the archetypal version of the story, "The Ugly Duckling," which was adapted by Disney twice - in 1930 and again in 1939.

There are two early Disney shorts about outsiders, though, that are more easily read as specifically gay texts and delightfully affirming of otherness. The first of these is the Oscar-winning short Ferdinand the Bull from 1937. The cartoon tells the story of a young bull who is content to spend his life "just sitting quietly and smelling the flowers" rather than going after other more conventionally masculine pursuits. While Ferdinand has never shown having romantic interest in another bull, the character's quiet affection for flowers associates him with images of gay men in American culture at the time. You see, in the 1920s and 30s, gay men were frequently referred to as "pansies" or "buttercups."

Interestingly the short never seems to suggest that Ferdinand is somehow depraved or deserving of contempt for his desires. Although his mother wants to know why he doesn't want to run and leap and butt heads like the other young bulls, she accepts her son's lifestyle without much second thought. Ferdinand is never shown racked with guilt over his implied homosexuality or worried about what others may think of him. On the contrary, the cartoon continually shows close-ups of him batting his long eyelashes and sighing slowly and contentedly. Neither the narrator nor the visual design of the film ever judge Ferdinand as somehow wrong. Rather, there's a bemused acceptance of Ferdinand's attitude.

This delight and acceptance of an effeminate male recurs in The Reluctant Dragon in 1941. If anything, the effeminacy of the titular Reluctant Dragon is even more pronounced than Ferdinand's. Like the bull, the dragon sports long emotive eyelashes and contains not an aggressive bone in his body, with the dragon prancing and pirouetting throughout the story. Yet, unlike the bull, the dragon has a voice.

A high-pitched masculine voice with the accent of an English Dandy. In fact, the dragon's long black fluffy ears often droop around the sides of his face in an approximation of Oscar Wilde. Rather than fight battles with knights, this dragon wants to play music, hold high tea and write poetry. At one point, the dragon is specifically referred to as a "punk poet," at a time when the common slang definition for "punk" was "homosexual male." (This phrase is repeated about five times in one fifteen second period of the short.) One of his poems, "Ode to an Upside-Down Cake," is filled with double entendre about sexual reversal:

"Sweet little upside down cake, cares and woes — you got ’em
Poor little upside-down cake, your top is on your bottom.
Alas, little upside-down cake, your troubles never stop.
Because, little upside-down cake, your bottom’s on your top!"

A young boy who fancies himself an expert on knights and dragons warns the dragon that a knight has been hired by the town. thinking that the dragon is as ferocious as the legends tell, but both the boy and the dragon are surprised to find that the knight, Sir Giles, is as much a tea lover and poetry writer as the dragon is. The cartoon introduces both figures similarly - caught taking baths by the boy, and their figures contrasting sharply with the manly heroic illustrations contained in the boy's book.

Sir Giles and the dragon agree to stage a mock battle in order to please the town. The battle consists of hiding in caves or in smoke and dust - where the two have tea and, at one point, waltz with each other, while yelping and howling for the benefit of the audience.

There is no mistaking how the film makes fun of the dragon's mincing manner and prissy pretensions. Yet, the film also makes it quite clear that the dragon does not believe in fighting, and the film doesn't specifically make fun of him for that. Made just before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, many in the United States were also trying to keep from fighting and, consequently, would not quickly dismiss the dragon strongly held beliefs. Just as in Ferdinand the Bull, The Reluctant Dragon presents an easily read gay character under the guise of fantasy and shows characters accepting him as he is.

These fantasies of acceptance earned Walt Disney a lot of praise in the early days of animation, showing children that it's okay to be a little different. But children weren't the only people partaking in these fantasies.

Queer adults come to fantasy with a knowledge that children, for the most part, don't have. At the same time that gay individuals revel in the affirmations and opened possibilities that fantasy creates, there is also an awareness and acceptance of the impossibility of fantasy - as well as the absurdity of it all. Cassandra Amesley’s concept of "double reading," although written in regard to media fandom in general, also applies to a queer subject position. Amseley writes that a reader can:

"maintain and understand two divergent points of view at once, and use them to inform each other. In this way identification and distinction may occur simultaneously."

There's an irony in the existence of queer fantasy - a simultaneous indulgence in and distancing from the work being engaged in. A queer person can sit through Snow White and dream about being taken away from their drab life to a castle on a hill, but they can also enjoy the absurdity of Snow White's grotesquely warbling contralto. Michael Bronski sees such a double reading in J.M. Barrie's Peter Pan. While conventionally thought of as a children's story, Bronski describes it as, "a deeply disturbing meditation on the impossible desire for flight, not so much a fantasy of escape as it is a clear eyed exposure of escape's impossibility." The original 1904 play ends with Peter alone, and Barrie adds to the stage directions,

"It has something to do with the riddle of his being. If he could get the hang of the thing his cry might become 'To live would be an awfully big adventure1' but he can never quite get the hang of it, and so no one is as gay as he."

Fantasy often walks hand in hand with camp, one of the cornerstones of queer culture. Susan Sontag declared in her influential article "Notes on Camp" that camp was

"a way of looking at things . . . a quality discoverable in objects and the behaviour of persons."

Most importantly for this discussion, Sontag observes that camp is, essentially, roleplaying, taking on the appearance of something that you're not and amping up that depiction to an 11. Camp, by focusing on the outward appearance of a role, implies that roles and in particular gender roles are superficial, a matter of style.

The fascination that many gay men have with Disney villains is precisely over how they theatrically perform their gender roles, to the point where the "naturalness" of their gender can be called into question, Although the vengeful Queen in Snow White and the evil sorceress Maleficent in Sleeping Beauty are obstensibly gendered female, they both wear clothing that completely covers almost every inch of their bodies, including cowls or hoods that cover their heads. Only their hands and face are exposed, leaving the rest of the body cloaked. Their faces both have highly defined features (etched cheekbones, thin sharp noses strongly set jaws) in contrast to the softer designs of the heroines, and they also seem to have access to makeup, especially mascara and eyeshadow. Although Cruella de Vil in 101 Dalmatians is not clothed like these two characters, her facial design fits perfectly into this description. In other words, these villainesses are drag queens.

Maleficent moves with grand sweeps of her cape and long-flowing gown, and strikes magnificent diva-like poses. It should also be mentioned that all her movements and poses are timed to the highly emotive melodies of Tchaikovsky's version of Sleeping Beauty - a gay composer himself. She also gets a number of well-placed pithy lines of dialogue. She makes a stunning entrance into the celebration of Aurora's birth, then regards the royal pageant as if it were a kiki.

— she observes coldly. —

— she says, pausing to notice the three "good fairies." —

Sleeping Beauty's Maleficent actively Works to spoil two generations of heterosexual coupling. The film begins with the convention of a book opening to announce "Once upon a time . . ." During this overtly narrated introduction, strong emphasis is placed on procreation, particularly on the king and queen's difficulties in having a child. The story proper begins with the countrywide celebration of the birth of the princess Aurora. When Maleficent arrives, she is informed quite bluntly, —

Maleficent retaliates in the the most dramatic way possible by placing a death sentence on the child to be fulfilled on her sixteenth birthday. In this way, she attempts to take away the procreative success of the king and queen and kill the princess just at the moment when she herself would be about to explore heterosexual courtship.

Elsewhere in Disney canon, Cruella de Vil is not only a fashion icon who serves Safari realness every single day [dramatic campy pop], but she similarly sweeps into every scene like a grand dame making a stage entrance for an enthusiastic crowd. Constantly carrying an absurdly long cigarette holder, she uses it repeatedly to further overemphasize every gesture and inflection. No movement or line of dialogue is subtle or underplayed. Instead, every damn moment is played to the cheap seats. Whether trying to write out a check for the Dalmatian puppies or driving her roadster down a mountain road, Cruella overdoes everything. All these inflections seem to be attempts by the character to show show her astounding chic and cultured femininity. Yet, in her attempt to be the epitome of feminine glamour, she consistently and quite hilariously points out the concept of gender-as-roleplaying.

Cruella is also a single woman who has a fascination with Anita. They were friends in the past, or at least Cruella believed them to be friends, but they seem to have had a falling out, or at least a distancing when Anita went and found herself a man. A man Cruella truly loathes. One could argue that her desire for a Dalmation spotted coat doesn't really arrive until she comes to the conclusion that Anita will likely not be in her life anymore. Something to remember her by, or a way of punishing her?

This is barely subtext of course, and I wouldn't claim that the writers intended a lesbian reading of the two women, but it's easy enough to superimpose such context on top of the more blatant messaging of the film.

A feminist reading of the Disney classic, and of much of early Disney Princess canon as a whole, can be quite disturbing, The Evil Queen, the Queen of Hearts, and Maleficent in particular: older single women who have an obsession with a much younger girl. This was a common view of lesbians at the time in mainstream culture - older women who had never managed to find a man, and so were trying to foist their sapphic perversions onto young, innocent women.

These Disney villains wanting to kill the girls in question is easily explainable too, since most families would consider their daughters dead to them if they did turn out to be lesbians. "What fate could possibly be worse than losing your daughter in such a way?" Surely death would be preferable, at least then you'd get sympathy from the other people in your suburb instead of leering looks from other families at the grocery store. "It must be her parents' fault she turned out that way" is far worse than, "I'm sorry for your loss."

I know this sounds extreme, and God knows it is, but that wasn't an uncommon opinion of families in the 50s and 60s. Lesbians actually had it much harder than men when it came to family dynamics because if you had a gay son who was single, well, he was just a bachelor, not finished playing the field. You could come up with an excuse for him not having met the right girl yet, you could hide it. But a daughter, single, at 30? Something was obviously wrong with her, so what excuse could you give? Nothing socially acceptable for sure.

And so single older women became the go-to for villains in the Golden Age of Disney movies. They could easily adapted Swan Lake and had a truly menacing male villain, but that lingered in development hell and never got made by Disney. The Swan Princess from 1994 was actually made by New Line Cinema, even though a lot of people attribute it to Disney. Same goes for Fox's Anastasia in 1997.

Though I guess Anastasia technically is owned by Disney now. Huh... Anyway, back to the gays.

The foppishness of Honest John the fox and Figaro the cat in Pinocchio make them easily read as a gay couple. Also in Pinocchio there's the storyline of young boys being abducted by an older man to be used in shocking ways.

Captain Hook, the villain of Peter Pan, was a classic case of the sissy stereotype so prevalent in movies at the time. Hook attempts to hide his deviant villainy behind the refined airs commonly associated with the English dandy. Hook speaks and moves floridly, as if every action was high melodrama. He also dresses the part of a dandy: introduced holding two cigars and a long gold cigarette holder, he wears a lavender blouse with ruffles. Later, as he prepares for battle, his companion Smee helps him don a purplish plumed hat and provides Hook with a lavender handkerchief to stuff into his shirt sleeve. Though cutthroat, the pirates under Hook's command are not above singing about the pleasures of being a pirate while dancing and waving tiny pirate flags and wiggling their hips in precision like chorus girls.

Smee is constantly at Hook's side, and although Hook is the maniacal master of the relationship Smee is obviously the emotional rock that keeps hook balanced. Whenever Hook encounters the crocodile that took his hand, he wails for Smee like a true queen. While Hook battles with Peter, Smee loads up the lifeboat in anticipation of defeat. In a most revelatory scene, Smee advises Hook to hoist anchor and head to sea.

And he doesn't want any part of that.

Both Honest John and Captain Hook are represented as using their cultured dandyism to hide their evil intentions, and both are focused on young boys. Similarly, Shere Khan in The Jungle Book also moves and speaks in an overcivilized manner, yet again with the intention of luring a young boy away from safety. Voiced with exceptional archness by English actor George Sanders, Shere Khan is introduced stalking a young deer, and when he's interrupted, he merely mutters, —

His prospects brighten, though, when he overhears of a young man cub who is wandering alone in the jungle. He whispers to himself, —

— and vows to arrange a rendezvous with the boy. As he searches through the jungle, he plays the total gentleman - although Kaa the snake bitterly points out, —

It looks like Shere Khan isn't as good at playing it straight as he thinks.

Unlike Honest John and Captain Hook, though, Shere Khan does exude serious menace. He is not an underling for a more threatening villain (as Honest John was), and although witty, he's never portrayed as a buffoon (as Hook invariably was.) Rather, even the most whimsical of the tiger's lines contain an underlying threat. By the time of his death in 1966, Walt Disney had already had discussions with the FBI about the possibility of making "educational" films to warn children about the danger of the quote "homosexual pedophile." While it's impossible to draw a direct connection between these meetings and the sudden serious villainy of Shere Khan, it is easy to see how a Disney villain suddenly becoming actually scary and Walt's animosity toward the queer community might have had some connection. The LGBT community was no longer a silly subgroup to be vilified and made fun of; we were becoming a louder voice in the growing fight for civil rights, which frightened conservatives like Walt. Though he wouldn't live to see it, the Stonewall riots took place only two years after the release of The Jungle Book.

Before his death, Walt seemed mostly unaware of the queer employees who worked under him. There were always people at Disney who self-identified as gay. Yet, society at large made most of these people hide their sexual orientation from others. Things were no less secretive during the first half of the century on the Disney lot than anywhere else, and with just cause. An anecdote from the production of Fantasia describes the general attitude towards homosexuality during this time. Animator Art Babbitt recalled,

"I started taking piano lessons. After the film opened, Walt heard about it, and in the presence of maybe fifty people at a story meeting, he said, 'I understand you're studying the piano.' I said 'Yeah, that's true.' He said, 'Well, what the hell's the matter with you; are you some kind of faggot?'"

["Faggot" is written on screen but bleeped out in the audio.]

Actors weren't immune to Walt's homophobia either. Tommy Kirk began as a juvenile actor in some of Disney's TV shows and films - playing one of "The Hardy Boys" on The Mickey Mouse Club and then starring in Old Yeller and The Shaggy Dog. The inordinate success of both films made Kirk a hot commodity at the studio. Kirk himself remembers Walt Disney's introducing the youngster to Hedda Hopper as his good luck kid. When the 1960s started, Kirk had become the most promising male actor under contract to the studio and was often paired with the studio's reigning female star Anette Funicello.

Kirk's promising future ended quickly, though.

"I was 18,"

Kirk recalled to an interviewer in the 1990s. It was around this time that Kirk seemed to recall accepting that he was gay. Yet, for a young and easily recognized actor during the early 1960s, there were very few avenues to explore this part of his personality, without adverse attention anyway.

"I was young, and I had money, [he recounted.] I started fooling around and I got involved with a boy. We saw each other maybe three times . . . once at a public pool in Burbank. The boy's parents found out and went to see Walt at the studio."

Kirk was summoned to the studio to speak directly with Disney. While Kirk tried to stammer out an explanation, he was informed that his contract had been terminated. No criminal charges were placed on Kirk, and the firing (much less the reasons for the firing) was never discussed in the press. Such a lack of reaction seems to suggest that the studio [air quotes] "dealt" with both the parents of the other boy as well as the press to keep the story "under wraps." When Kirk returned to the Walt Disney Studio in 1984 as a part of the Mickey Mouse Club reunion, he discovered that his reputation still preceded him. According to Kirk, an employee from Disney's publicity department told him,

"If I had my way, all you people would be buried in the same grave."

After Walt's death, the Disney Company seemed rudderless. The new leadership couldn't seem to produce the kind of magic Walt had at his prime or even in his waning years. That would change, though, in the 1980s with the introduction of the new executive team of Michael Eisner, Frank Wells, and Jeffrey Katzenberg.

One of their first ventures was to take Disney into a more adult realm by creating subsidiaries like Hollywood Pictures and Touchtone Entertainment. Down and Out in Beverly Hills was the first R-rated film Disney ever released. Bette Midler swears throughout the film and screams so loudly during an orgasm that everyone in the entire household hears. Also included are scenes of Midler's husband (played by Richard Dreyfuss) and their house guest (Nick Nolte) having sex with the Latina maid of the house, and there are overt hints that the son of the family is gay. Older Disney executives gritted their teeth, but the film went on to make 62 million dollars in 1986. That's 148 million today. Following in the film's footsteps, Ruthless People was another raunchy comedy with Bette Midler that went on to take in 71.6 million dollars.

Thomas Pasatieri, an openly gay composer and orchestrator who arranged scores for some of Disney's films at the time, described the music department as so gay-friendly that when one straight artist was let go from a project, he threatened to sue the studio for sexual discrimination... against heterosexuals. But being hired and being appreciated were two different things. At a time when all the studios and major tech companies began offering domestic partnership benefits to their LGBT employees, gay Disney employees began calling for the same thing. While at a charity event, an Apple executive cornered Michael Eisner in order to discuss domestic partner benefits and why Disney was lagging behind. Eisner reportedly stated that it would simply cost too much money since he figured about 40 percent of Disney's workforce was LGBT.

Disney did have one employee who was out and who they couldn't convince to go back into the closet, though: lyricist Howard Ashman, the man who created the award-winning soundtracks for The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast and Aladdin. Reportedly, Disney executives were frustrated with Ashman being so publicly out, but his growing clout made it impossible to do anything about it.

But sadly, in March of 1991, Ashman passed away from complications related to AIDS. Later that year, Beauty and the Beast would go on to become a box office sensation and become the first animated movie to ever be nominated for Best Picture. Its main competition for Best Picture was seen to be The Silence of the Lambs, which was being protested against by the LGBT community for its portrayal of psychopath Buffalo Bill.

Disney saw an opening to win over the gay community and made a giant donation to the Aid for AIDS Foundation. The seemingly altruistic act was later confirmed to be nothing more than a PR stunt, as the money had come out of Beauty and the Beast's award campaign budget. Disney saw it as nothing more than a "for your consideration" ad. When the Oscars rolled around, Disney lost Best Picture to The Silence of the Lambs, and when Howard Ashman's partner Bill Lauch took to the stage to accept the Oscar for Best Song on his late partner's behalf, Disney executives reportedly fumed.

Disney's animosity toward the queer community wasn't just all behind the scenes, though. It still managed to make it onto the big screen, beginning immediately with the first film of the Disney Renaissance, The Little Mermaid.

The film's source material was obviously written by noted gay writer Hans Christian Anderson, so there's an immediate queer reading of the text available, but Disney went further than that by carrying on their tradition of having an older female villain who is predatory toward a young girl. But to add a special twist, Ursula was actually modeled after drag legend Divine. Though despite rumors, Disney never entertained the thought of offering the part to Divine and always intended on casting a female voice talent. Recent calls for the live action Ursula to be played by a drag queen were roundly ignored.

Disney also never intended Ursula to sing in the film. But Howard Ashman thought otherwise, forcing Disney to accept the now iconic villain song "Poor Unfortunate Souls." In the number, Ursula uses various methods to convince Ariel to sell her soul, from looking sorry and saintlike to shimmying madly in excitement. In its use of vocalist Pat Carroll's ability to slide up and down the musical register, from shrieks to baritones, "Poor Unfortunate Souls" is an unmistakable sendup of the campy female impersonation numbers of underground queer films in the early days of Hollywood.

I was shocked to learn that a queer reading of Beauty and the Beast was actually pretty well documented in popular culture at the time of its release. Not just comparing Gaston to the gay muscle queens that had become so well known in large urban centers, mostly because it was believed that high muscle mass would help you fight off the effects of HIV, but the Beast himself became an AIDS allegory in the mainstream press, with Dan Rather writing an article in the LA Times that read,

"Think of the spell as AIDS, with the same arbitrary and harshly abbreviated limitations on time, and you feel the Beast's loneliness and desperation a little more deeply. He's just a guy trying as hard as he can to find a little meaning, a little love, a little beauty while he's still got a little life left. The visual contrast made between the deteriorated form of the Beast and the painting of him as a beautiful young man possibly sets up a stereotypical opposition between ugliness and beauty reminiscent of Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray... but in this context the ugliness/beauty dyad also supports a tension, crucial to the film's AIDS allegory, between the issue of having health and not having it."

Certainly, the lyrics written for "The Mob Song," in which the villagers set out to attack the Beast, add to this method of the interpretation. In the song, the villagers clearly state, "We don't like what we don't understand, in fact, it scares us," and thus they must save their families and their lives by killing the Beast. The quotation reverberates strongly as a parallel to AIDS panic that many individuals, as well as religious and political groups, expressed during the spread of the disease.

To Disney's credit, "the Mob Song" taps into the demonization of people with AIDS, but its placement in the film definitely sides with the demonized rather than the lynchers. Whether this was Ashman's own coded messaging that flew under Disney's radar or was sanctioned by the Mouse, it's still worth noting. As queer scholar Harry Benshof notes,

"recent critical essays in the mass media have demonstrated how the representational codes and narrative tropes of the monster movie . . . have been grafted onto much television and newspaper coverage of AIDS."

The Beast has given the life span of a magical rose to find a cure to his curse (someone to love that will love him in return), and although missing the deadline means only that he'll remain a beast permanently, the narrative contrives to have him at the brink of death just as the last petal falls from the flower. This messaging was adopted by many people hospitalized with the disease at the time. Those who knew they were near death would ask for a pink rose to sit on their bedside, a beautiful ticking clock counting down to when they, too, would be lost forever.

[James reads this part in a quite emotional, almost tearful voice.]

Lesbian and gay employees of the theme parks remarked on how many of their friends with AIDS desired to visit Disneyland and Walt Disney World one last time. Also, many AIDS quilt panels include Disney imagery - mouse ears, Disney song lyrics and the like. Some panels commemorate Disney employees lost, while some paid tribute to a fan's devotion to the studio's products. Such dedication to a magical brand that used their suffering to win Oscars.

With Howard Ashman gone, many at Disney worried that the magic might have been lost.

But executives steamrolled ahead with their next big animated film, Aladdin. With some of the songs for the film having been completed by Ashman before his death, they felt secure in its prospects. Gay employees especially were excited because Ashman had managed to insert even more of his camp sensibilities into Aladdin than either Mermaid or Beast, especially when it came to the Genie, played by lifelong queer ally Robin Williams.

Just as critics noticed that some aspects of these new Disney animated features were for savvier audiences, they wondered

"What will children make of a film whose main character - the Genie himself - has such obvious parental appeal? They [won't] . . . know precisely what Mr. Williams is evoking."

While Robin Williams' impromptu recording sessions did a lot of the heavy lifting for the final character of the Genie, Ashman's songs for him had been written long before Williams was even signed, and the character that Ashman creates through his lyrics definitely portrays an overblown, larger than life, gay-tinged figure. The genie first appears in a huge production number centered around him telling Aladdin, —

Throughout the song, the Genie zips from one metaphor to another with endless enthusiasm, sprinkling his speech with phrases like "true dish."

Later, as Aladdin enters the palace disguised as Prince Ali, the Genie promotes him shamelessly by pointing out —

— and describing how he “got all dolled up and dropped by.”

While these examples tend to promote reading the Genie as a gay male, the character's manic nature often spills beyond this simple category, epitomizing what is truly a queer figure. While casting Williams makes the Genie ostensibly male, "he" rapidly shifts into a number of caricatures of famous people (William F. Buckley, Groucho Marx, Ethel Merman, Jack Nicholson and Arsenio Hall amongst others) and even gets in drag... multiple times (a flight attendant, a harem girl, a cheerleader.) He displays overt male heterosexuality one second as Arnold Schwarzenegger, then a caricature of homosexuality in the next second as a swishy tailor measuring Aladdin for his Prince Ali outfit. Everything is overemphasized (the Hirschfield-inspired drawings, the hyperkinetic voice of Williams) and it's paced lightning fast. The overabundance of transformation flaunts the instability of identity in the viewer's face, hilariously critiquing theories of essentialism in the process. It is all just another costume for the Genie to put on and discard.

Acknowledging the queerer nature of the Genie, though, it is much easier to appreciate him from a gay male perspective, particularly in his relationship with Aladdin. As mentioned, at one point the Genie transforms into a prissy gay tailor mincing as he advises snippily, —

During one emotional high point in the narrative, the Genie tells Aladdin, —

The final tearful clinch at the end of the film is not between Aladdin and the princess, Jasmine, but between Aladdin and the Genie.

The gay male aspects of Aladdin go much further than just the presence of the Genie, though. Animator Andreas Deja has admitted to drawing Jafar to be specifically a gay character, flipping the script on the older single woman praying on a young girl to the even more toxic image of an older gay man praying on a teenage boy. This was right around the time that the public at large became aware of NAMBLA, or the North American Man/Boy Love Association, [uncomfortably chuckling] so the timing was a bit problematic. The group actually used images from Aladdin in their messaging at the time, a bold move considering how litigious Disney can be. It's not shocking though, what with both the Genie and Jafar being obsessed with how Aladdin looks.

In fact, the studio itself worked endlessly to create a visually pleasing body and face for Aladdin, something that ended up creating the first animated crush for a lot of young gay boys out there. Disney's animators were accustomed to creating beautiful female figures (large eyes, small waists, pleasing soft curves). Yet, the animation Department also had a history of less success creating visually pleasing male characters, especially during Walt's tenure. Except for Prince Phillip, who doesn't love Prince Phillip? With Aladdin then, Disney's animators were faced with creating an objectified male body. Most critics agree that the various princes accompanying princesses seem "wooden" and are usually absent from the screen due to their lack of appeal. In fact, until Aladdin, only Peter Pan had been successful in presenting a male figure that came close to the appeal of Snow White or her counterparts. Well, maybe Robin Hood.

With Ashman's involvement in Aladdin being cut short by his death, certain concepts he held for the project ended up dropped or modified by the studio. One major change was the elimination of the character of Aladdin's mother, for whom Ashman had written the song, "Proud of Your Boy," declaring her love for her son no matter how he lives his life. This ode to maternal love attempted to tell Aladdin not to be ashamed of himself or want to be someone else just to make people accept him. Its message isn't exactly subtle, so of course Disney cut it. Although Aladdin became an orphan in the final version of the film (would it be a Disney movie if there weren't orphans), his self-hatred and desire to become someone else still figure strongly into the narrative. He pretends to be Prince Ali in order to find a new life in which he is welcomed and adored by society instead of being called down to the lowest, a street rat. Aladdin must learn to accept himself for who he is before the narrative can reach its conventional happy ending.

Some producers of Aladdin^who? have claimed the queer coding in the film was entirely accidental, and in fact it's so subtle that a lot of people don't pick it up. But with Ashman's involvement writing the songs and helping to develop the story after being diagnosed with AIDS, knowing it might be his last project, I'm willing to bet that the coding is there on purpose.

In Disney's next animated feature, we wouldn't get a sea drag queen, an AIDS allegory, or a campy Genie. Instead, we got accidental gay parents and yet another queer coded villain. But before then, Disney accidentally produced an iconic entry into the queer cinematic canon with Hocus Pocus. No gay coding here, though I always hoped Thackery Binks was gay, just three campy witches that would go on to inspire generations upon generations of drag queens.

Now... to the lions.

Though we may not remember it, The Lion King was pretty controversial upon release. Disney's return to the main stage of animation in the early 90s with The Little Mermaid had pissed off a lot of feminists, who were aghast that Disney made a movie in which the female lead literally has her voice stolen from her.

To fix this, they made Belle a very proactive, intelligent character in Beauty and the Beast. Then they received a huge amount of backlash from Arab Americans after the release of Aladdin for some...

[On screen, lyrics to "Arabian Nights" are shown: "Where they cut off your ear / If they don't like your face / It's barbaric, but hey, it's home."]

...less than sensitive lyrical choices. And having an all-white voice cast.

To fix this, they made sure to hire actors of color to voice characters in The Lion King, but, again, they ran into problems. Robert Guillaume was cast as Rafiki, who was immediately deemed an Uncle Tom character, while Whoopi Goldberg and Cheech Marin were cast as bumbling villains. Simba is White, Scar is White, Timon and Pumbaa are White. With the exception of James Earl Jones as Mufasa, most of the lead characters were voiced by White actors, something that did not please Disney's African American fans.

[On screen: Screenshot of an obscure Medium article titled "Racism in The Lion King"]

But with all the talk of race, many people missed the queer messaging in the film.

With songs by Elton John and an ad campaign that included cartoon characters saying that the film was "to die for," a term that was just making its way out of the ballroom culture and into the mainstream, there seemed to be plenty for gay audiences to enjoy. Contrary to the complaints of non-visibility by women, Arab Americans, and African Americans, gay animals could be found quite easily in the film - gay male animals voiced by White actors. The adviser to the lion king is a fussy and pompous bird named Zazu, who seems to be modeled after queer actor Clifton Webb. Timon and Pumbaa, a meerkat and a warthog that Simba befriends after he is banished from his pride, can easily be read as a gay couple. They live happily together, reving in their marginalization from the rest of jungle society, and look disapprovingly at Simba's budding heterosexual romance. Voiced by out actor Nathan Lane, Timon has the personality of a New York drag queen: all patter and shtick, and ready to burst into a showtune at the drop of a hat, while Pumbaa depends on Timon constantly.

The most obvious queer figure in the film though, of course, is the villain, Scar, voiced by Jeremy Irons, who portrays a physically weak scoundrel who makes up for his lack of sheer strength with catty remarks and insidious plotting. The character swishes about and shows disdain at the concept of a heterosexual family as he plots to take the throne for himself. When Scar refers to Simba as a "hairball," Mufasa warns, —

Later, when Simba laughs and tells Scar, —

While Disney's villains have routinely veered toward camp, the signifiers that seem to ally Scar with homosexuality have an added dose of menace. After the viewer enjoys his dry gay wit in the opening sections of the film, he sings a musical number that becomes an animated version of the Nurmberg rallies, with Scar at the podium as hyena henchmen goosestep in perfect cadence before him. The color scheme turns monochromatic during this section, furthering the similarities to the Leni Riefenstahl Nazi propaganda of The Triumph of the Will. Unlike other Disney villains, Scar actually kills someone (even the evil Queen in Snow White didn't manage to do that.) His reign over the kingdom seems to directly cause drought, pestilence and the general destruction of the ecosystem. It is only with the restoration of Simba to the throne that the land comes back to life, in a dissolve that makes the change seem miraculously immediate.

Scar's unforgivable sin seems to be his refusal to support the heterosexual patriarchy that Simba and his father represent. This social system is canonized during the film's opening number, "The Circle of Life." While Scar actively defies the social order celebrated in this number, the other gay figures help the young straight lion and are not seen as monsters mainly because they view him as the rightful ruler of the land. Zazu, Timon and Pumbaa all aid Simba in his quest to reestablish his claim to the throne, endorsing his divine right.

This would fit directly into how establishment liberals in corporate America like the queers to behave. "Fit into the already established social roles and everything will be okay." Pete Buttigeeg got to run for president because he was essentially a straight man with a husband (suburban home, two dogs, no children yet, but surely they'll be on their way by 2024), fitting into exactly what heteronormative society expects.

But Scar doesn't fit that mold, refuses to fit into that mold, and so he's looked down upon by the other lions, basically excommunicated from the pride. And since he doesn't fit the mold, he's portrayed as a Nazi, Hitler himself in fact, with all the mincing mannerisms that Hitler has been mocked for over the years. While The Lion King became a massive hit, Disney had to add gay men to the list of people unhappy with their product

John E. Harris wrote about his feelings on Scar's betrayal for the Christopher Street periodical:

"On a deep level the lion King^{[sic: The Lion King]} dramatizes the danger of 'single affected males' to any society... implying that they have the power to destroy an entire civilization. This is of course the message that Pat Robertson and Pat Buchanan routinely sign-off on in order to scapegoat homosexuals for such heterosexual problems as abortion, single mothers, and the high divorce rate."

Harris also noted in his review the possible racist implications of the hyenas, an aspect that Todd Hayward analyzed in great deal^{[sic: detail]} for an article in the West Hollywood gay 'zine Planet Homo. Unlike the film, which conceives of race, gender and sexuality as mutually exclusive concepts, Hayward links the negative racial and gender connotations with issues of sexuality, writing:

"Disney's moral hierarchy has implications which are damaging to all of us who lie outside the 'mainstream.'"

Hayward's analysis explicitly displays how queer activism and... theory counters concepts of the "gay consumer" with the recognition that not all homosexuals are white upscale men with the money or inclination to support Disney's product.

"Readers may be asking themselves, 'But if you substitute Disney’s simplicity with relativity, and if you make good characters physically indistinguishable from bad characters, or if you do away with all of The Lion King’s polarizations of good and evil, then everyone in the theatre has to come to his or her own conclusions about the film’s content.' To objections of this nature, I respond with a resounding, 'Good!' Films that set up neat systems of good and evil — do’s and don’ts — are part of the pervasive simplemindedness that posits heterosexuality and queerdom as irreconcilable opposites which cannot co-exist respectfully."

Disney continued their trend of coding villains queer with the release of 1996's Pocahontas, a film where every Native male is portrayed as traditionally masculine, two-spirit people do not exist, and the villain is a flouncy rotund man who wears pink velvet, little bows in his hair, and has a devoted male companion.

On TV, ABC, a network owned by Disney, used the coming out episode of Ellen as a way to spike viewership during the May sweeps period. To heighten ratings during this period, the network extended Diane Sawyer's interview with Ellen on PrimeTime Live over two nights. During the episode, Disney advertised many of its big summer movies, as well as promoted other ABC shows. Furthermore, within the show itself, Disney found a way to do some product placement. When Ellen's therapist asks her what she's going to do now that she's come out as a lesbian, Ellen parodies Disney's famous ad campaign and announces, —

Yet, the network refused to allow the Human Rights Campaign, an LGBT rights organization, to buy time for a public service advertisement during the episode. When Ellen's ratings dropped after coming out, ABC swiftly canceled the show.

During the 1990s, Disney's parks also tried profiting from their LGBT fans by creating Gay Night, a one-night-a-year event at the parks where LGBT folks would be the main guest. It was a big hit, and threatened boycotts against the company never seemed to materialize. Initially, the revenue was all to be donated to the Aid for AIDS Foundation, but by 1995, donations to the charity had dried up. Disney was keeping all of the profits for themselves.

In 1997, Disney committed their first act of straight-washing with the release of Hercules. Based very loosely on the Greek myth of Heracles, the film overtly ignored the hero's well-known bisexuality (as well as his uxoricidal mood swings) and once again codes the villain gay, this time making Hades, the Lord of the Underworld (one of the few Olympian gods not to have taken a male lover) into yet another mincing older man. Like Scar, with intentions of usurping the throne of power from his heteronormative brother.

Hades's only relationship with a woman in the film is with Herc's love interest Meg, for whom he fills the role of Stanford Blatch to her Cary Bradshaw.

All of the other overtly gay sections of Greek myth and the Heracles myth itself are completely ignored, of course (as it is with almost all incarnations of the hero's stories in modern media). Not that anyone expected anything different from Disney. Queer audiences never really expected anything from the Mouse at this point. Even the interesting coding inserted by Howard Ashman had dried up since his death.

So it was a pleasant surprise when in 1998, Mulan hit theaters. These lyrics from the song "Reflection" say it all:

Disney's Mulan is, however unintentionally, a queer narrative that explores both gender identity and sexual orientation. It is not, as it is often simplistically described, a story about a disempowered woman who becomes empowered by masculinity. It is a story about a young person who doesn't fit the rigid constructs of womanhood or manhood, and who must instead carve her own path.

Mulan's gender journey over the course of the movie feels very familiar to many trans and nonbinary people. First, in "Honor to Us All," the village women attempt to sculpt Mulan into an ideal woman - more specifically, an ideal wife. Mulan fails the test of womanhood when her meeting with the Matchmaker goes horribly awry. As Mulan acknowledges this failure in "Reflection," she poses a question that most trans people know intimately: "When will my reflection show who I am inside?"

Many trans men in particular feel a kinship with Mulan, as the character prepares to convince everyone they're a man - practicing their swagger, affecting their voice to a lower register, and scrambling to settle on a boy name. In "I'll Make a Man Out of You," Mulan-as-Ping progressively works their way toward achieving manhood, which is defined by catching fish, carrying heavy things, and, of course... wielding a big stick. They later fail the test of manhood when they, or she, is revealed as a woman - or, rather, as someone who is not a man. Ultimately, Mulan is able to defeat the bad guys by playing on their misperception of her gender. Through a queer lens, the message of Disney's Mulan is something many people learned as they come into their trans or non-binary identity: By rejecting society's limited ideals of womanhood and manhood, you can become your more authentic self.

Then there's Li Shang, the handsome young general who falls for both Ping and Mulan, and who has been meme-ified as a bisexual icon. And so in the upcoming live action adaptation of Mulan the songs have been removed, so no "Reflection" or "I'll Make a Man Out of You," and Li Shang has been removed entirely. Wouldn't want anyone queerin' up a possible billion dollar hit, now would we?

Disney went into a prolonged slump with the birth of the new millennium. Only the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise seemed to be keeping the studio afloat. And even then, when the first film was in production, it was giving executives heart problems. The dailies coming in of Johnny Depp playing Jack Sparrow as at least questioningly queer put Michael Eisner under so much stress he literally had a heart attack.

In an interview after the film's release, Depp said,

"It trickled back to me that Michael Eisner went on some sort of bent about how 'Goddammit, Johnny Depp's ruining the film! What is that thing? Is it drunk, is it gay?'

'What the f**k are you doing?' he'd asked. When they asked me if it- he was gay, I said: 'Didn't you know all my characters are gay?' I really expected to be fired but I wasn't for some reason."

The film and its sequels went on to be big hits for the studio... for the most part. The new blood of 1980s Disney had all left the company by the time the Pirates sequels started coming out. Jeffrey Katzenberg left the company to start DreamWorks with Steven Spielberg and David Geffen, Michael Eisner stepped down in a swirl of controversy, and Frank Wells died in a helicopter crash. In 2005, Bob Iger took over the position of CEO at Disney.

The company was under new management for the first time in twenty years. Iger was well known in political circles as a progressive on social issues and had spearheaded multiple initiatives while working under Michael Eisner to increase the rights of LGBT employees at Disney, and to empower LGBT Disney fans.

Under his stewardship Disney switched from the once-a-year Gay Night at Disney parks to the full Gay Days event, rebranding the occasion into a more family-friendly affair with the intention of helping bring LGBT families into the mainstream.

He was vocally opposed to George W. Bush's crusade to ban gay marriage and donated to the Obama for President campaign in 2008 under the caveat that Obama not defend the Defense of Marriage Act or "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" if he were to make it into office. Obama agreed, leading to both homophobic laws being overturned.

Queer Disney stans were excited for Iger's takeover of the company. Having such a vocal supporter of LGBT rights as the head of a company like Disney could only mean good things. When Iger went on a spending spree buying up properties such as Marvel and Star Wars, gay fans got excited to see if queer characters would make their way into those franchises. As we know from the last video, they did not. [record scratch]

Iger has been a benign CEO as far as LGBT representation goes. While he hasn't allowed major characters to come out as LGBT, putting his foot down when Taiko Watiti planned for Valkyrie to be a lesbian in Thor: Ragnarok, he has allowed smaller queer characters to appear, such as the lodge owners in Frozen, LeFou in the Beauty and the Beast remake, Specter in Onward, and a quick lesbian kiss in Star Wars: Episode IX.

One could argue that he could have been vetoing all LGBT representation like Disney CEOs before him, that he could be actively opposing us... but I say that's a pretty pathetically low bar.

Disney is the preeminent media provider right now, with Pixar, Star Wars, Marvel, Fox, and their own original properties, it could be argued that they're growing a media monopoly. One I've contributed to myself. I was one of the people arguing for Disney to buy up Fox so that we could finally get some good X-Men and Fantastic 4 movies that weren't Logan. Also that they buy up Sony Pictures so that Spider-Man can stay in the MCU.

But now that Disney does own Fox, I have to wonder, when they make their X-Men movie, will Iceman be straight again? He came out of the closet in the comics a few years ago with a really touching storyline. Will Disney do away with that for a liveaction Iceman? Or will they simply... keep him on the bench so they don't have to deal with it at all?

Now that Disney owns The Rocky Horror Picture Show, what will become of that? Will it continue to run as a midnight movie event, or will Disney pull the film prints that are in circulation? They're certainly controlling over their copyrighted content, so I can imagine they wouldn't be too pleased with theaters showing the film without their say so.

An odd ray of hope in Disney, then, is Kevin Feige, the mastermind behind the MCU. He's threatened to quit before, not over pay raises, but over control of characters. Disney gave in to his demands, and only once has stepped into to override his decision, that being Valkyrie's queerness. Even with their attempted straight-washing, the coding is still... so obvious it can barely be called coding.

His contract is once again coming up for renewal, and it looks like Valkyrie will indeed be looking for her queen in Thor: Love and Thunder. A lesbian lead character in a potentially billion dollar movie will make Disney execs quake in their Gucci loafers, but worrying over that might be worth keeping the Golden Goose that is Kevin Feige.

The Young Avengers featuring Marvel's premier gay couple, Wiccan and Hulkling, is reportedly in development, either as a Disney Plus show or as a feature film. Hulkling being the king of space and Wiccan being the center point for all existence in the Marvel universe makes them pretty much the ultimate superhero power couple.

And Brie Larsson has been very blunt in her opinion the Captain Marvel should have a girlfriend in her sequel, while Tom Holland will use any opportunity to let reporters know that he thinks his Spider-Man needs a boyfriend.

So is it possible for Disney, via Marvel Studios, to become the main source for LGBT representation in Hollywood, all because of one producer they're terrified to lose? It's a distinct possibility.

Though the gay representation in Avengers: Endgame was much maligned by LGBT audiences, it was an interesting experiment. The scene is small and easily removable, but Marvel refused to cut it for the film's release in countries like China, Russia, and... places in the Middle East, calling the bluff of those countries' censorship guidelines. And since theater owners didn't want to lose out on a Marvel movie, the scene stayed in. Effectively, a positive test run to see if Feige and Marvel could indeed get away with having queer characters in Marvel movies, even in countries where homosexuality may be punishable by death.

But Marvel is the outlier at Disney. No producer at Disney has the power and influence that Kevin Feige does, and even he hasn't managed to have an out queer main character in a film yet, though we're apparently getting one with The Eternals, if that ever gets released.

The House of Mouse continues, though, to profit from its LGBT fan base while starving us for representation, so that we'll be satisfied by the scraps they see fit to toss us. A queer ascended extra, or a blink-and-you miss-it moment does not make up for everything Disney has done.

It's a well-known fact among industry professionals that Mulan was altered so drastically from its original animated form specifically to appeal to the Chinese box office, which is why any hint at bi or trans representation has been removed from the film, even the coding, at least according to the people I know who have seen the movie.^who And their Jungle Cruise movie has an implied gay character that the test audiences found so offensive that the movie saw massive delays in order to re-shoot giant sections of the film.

At the Disney parks, it's not uncommon to see rainbow-laced Disney shirts, hats, Mickey ears, pins, bracelets, and notebooks, all kinds of merchandise. They are more than willing to sell us all sorts of stuff, except a ticket to a movie with actual representation.

They will happily take our money and slyly wink when we ask if Elsa is a lesbian. They'll sell us a movie ticket and shrug "Who knows?" when we ask if Poe and Finn will kiss. They'll sign you up for a year's membership to Disney Plus, and then move Love, Victor to Hulu.

Disney is a company like any other: they go where the profits are, and they are drawn to those profits like a shark to blood. The thing is, the LGBT community has been feeding them with no demand for something in return.

They queerbait Stucky, Finnpoe, and Elsa. We still give them our money.

They make a huge deal out of an "exclusively gay moment," just to give us two seconds of two men dancing. And we still give them our money.

They remove even the gay coding from their remakes. And we still give them our money.

Is Disney the worst company in the world? No, of course not, it's not like they're fracking when people leave the parks.

I've loved Disney for as long as I can remember. The first movie I saw in theaters was Aladdin. My first crushes were Aladdin and Hercules. I knew for sure that I was 100% gay because I saw Tarzan swinging around half naked and thought, "yep, that's what I want."

Disney isn't Chick-fil-A or Hobby Lobby, it's not a hateful company. And it's not a company most people can easily drop from their lives, Disney is a part of the culture now. Hell, they've created a big chunk of the culture that we live in.

So I'm not saying you need to stop seeing Disney movies, but I do think we need to send Disney a very strong message. Either give us representation or don't. Stop the baiting. Stop the "maybe"'s and the "who knows?" and the "someday"'s. And stop promising us representation and then taking it away.

This video began as a quick angry rant after Disney tried blocking my last video from going up. But it evolved into something else entirely. I started looking into the history of queerness in Disney movies and found a lot more than I was expecting.

And I shouldn't be surprised, because of course it's there! There's queerness everywhere because we are everywhere. We're storytellers and artists, craftsmen and animators, composers, lyricists, executives and producers. We help run the Disney parks, and we're in costume at those parks. So of course we've found our way into the history of Disney. As employees and fans, we represent Disney every single day...

And it's about damn time Disney starts representing us.