Every year during Pride Month it’s customary to see companies and businesses engage in a practice that’s come to be known as “rainbow capitalism”, in which they show solidarity in small and usually disingenuous ways in an effort to appeal to LGBTQ consumers. Every year the conversation is had as to whether this is a good or bad thing. On the one hand, it further shows how acceptance of the queer community is becoming more and more mainstream: homophobia, biphobia, and even transphobia (as disturbingly powerful as it still is in a lot of countries) do not sell. But on the other hand these are cynical corporations that have done tangibly very little for the queer community and their support is largely performative in service of that aforementioned mainstreaming of LGBTQ culture.
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| Alex Hirsch in his Tartan Chamber |
One such corporation is the most powerful Hollywood studio and ever-expanding media conglomerate, the Walt Disney Company. Like clockwork at the start of the month, their official Twitter page posted a rainbow icon with cute Disney characters on it. Attached was the message: “There’s room for everyone under the rainbow. Happy #PrideMonth!”. This was pretty quickly picked up on though by Alex Hirsch, creator of the Disney series Gravity Falls, who re-tweeted it with a sarcastic quip on the hypocrisy of such a statement. Hirsch has in the past commented on how Disney forbade his staff from including LGBTQ subject matter during the four years Gravity Falls was on the air, and has alluded to the fact they still work to censor queer content across their brand. Dana Terrace, creator of The Owl House, another series on which Hirsch is a producer and voice actor, had to fight to include even a modicum of bisexual representation –and it might honestly be the best Disney has yet done. Their track record in this area is extremely poor.
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| The Owl House |
Disney does trail behind a lot of the rest of western pop culture rather substantively on this issue. For a company with the scope and the subsidiaries that it has, with their hands in so many intellectual properties, it’s actually embarrassing that across it all they’ve never done more than dip a toe in on LGBTQ content. And in most cases it’s a toe so inconspicuous that it could easily be obscured, retracted, or not even noticed. Many cite international markets, and especially China –pointing the blame there and framing it as Disney being stuck in a corner. Disney is not though; the exclusion is entirely their choice. Some countries do have certain content restrictions when it comes to movies and will cut offending material in international releases for domestic audiences or just ban a films’ release outright. China does this and theirs is one of the worlds’ biggest box offices. But Disney doesn’t have to cater to them. At this stage a ban on a Disney movie from China is not going to hurt Disney even a little. They can afford the occasional flop, they can afford the feeble boycott campaigns of Christian groups and right-wing reactionaries that nobody takes seriously anyways, and they can afford to take risks –but as I’ve detailed previously, they don’t want to.
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| Truly, a Man of the People |
It’s understandable. Disney is very conservative, no matter what your unhinged relative has to say about the “left-wing media” and the “Hollywood elite”. Disney has always skewed right politically, since the days of dear old Union-busting HUAC-testifying Uncle Walt himself. The company’s brand is all about safety and comfort and nostalgia, and it’s always struggled to move with the times. Forget the fact that their first animated movie revolving around an African-American character didn’t hit until 2009, but there were barely any black characters at all through their movies before then. During the Civil Rights era, we saw a lot of media properties strive to reflect the times more acutely through the incorporation of black characters -Franklin in Peanuts for example, Black Panther in Marvel Comics, Uhura in Star Trek, etc. -to say nothing of all the mainstream Hollywood movies that started to take race seriously, from adult dramas like In the Heat of the Night to more family-friendly fare like Sounder. Disney however, in its desire for political neutrality, consciously chose not to deal with this issue by ignoring it and black people in general. Even today the company’s relationship to the racism in its history is poor -generally they pretend that the crows from Dumbo, or the slave in Fantasia, or Song of the South never happened.
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| "Da-da-da-da-daaaa" |
And while there’s not a ton of overt homophobia in their history (there has been plenty of queer-coding though, especially in their villains), their hesitance to feature prominent LGBTQ representation derives from that same commitment to inoffensive political neutrality in their brand. And for Disney, “neutrality” has always meant avoidance. Some will react with the argument that as a family-friendly company whose content is meant to appeal primarily to kids, that LGBTQ characters and subjects are incompatible with that. And yet they would have no objections to the ten decades’ worth of heteronormative romances and stories deemed appropriate for children. Arguments like those tied to antiquated notions of family values don’t hold water anymore and Disney knows it. They can see the calls for representation, how other companies and media for all ages are surpassing them in that regard, and how out-of-touch they’re perceived as being. Given Disney’s size and influence and wealth of power they can’t just ignore the gays anymore -and they’re savvy enough to see the cultural dial has shifted. But they can’t reconcile the need to respond to that with the image of Disney they must maintain -an image that they care about being palatable to bigots.
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| Josh Gad as LeFou in Beauty and the Beast -the bad one |
That’s where all the half-assed measures come in. It may have started with Finding Dory in 2016 -or rather the response to it, when people on the internet noticed a background couple that appeared to be lesbian. They probably weren’t, but Disney rolled with it and soon enough were boasting that LeFou in the upcoming remake of Beauty and the Beast was going to be their first gay character -only for said gayness to be no more apparent than in the original animated film. In one shot at the end of the movie he’s seen dancing with another man and that’s it as far as outing him. The outcry and boycott against the film from small pockets of homophobes was ultimately for nothing -their children would have never noticed. LeFou’s gayness was completely inessential and extremely easy to cut out of the film entirely, and many in the LGBTQ community felt it didn’t count. But this would be the standard going forward for Disney. And each time they would declare their “first openly gay character” because of the attention it would get. They’d also insert LGBTQ reference into movies from subsidiaries in extremely minuscule ways: the gay man played by the straight director in the support group at the start of Avengers: Endgame, the lesbian couple kissing in the background at the end of The Rise of Skywalker. Again, non-heterosexuality that is easy to miss, segregated and non-threatening.
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| Onward's Lesbian Cyclops |
Yet Disney still wants the credit for inclusion, so every few films they try another baby step. Onward was the first time an animated movie under their umbrella directly alluded to homosexuality in a minor cop character making a single remark about her wife. This of course coming seven years after Laika did the same thing in ParaNorman -and with a more major character (Laika has since moved on to clear metaphors for transness and gender nonconformity), and it is still a part of the film that is in no way significant and can be dubbed out quite easily for a foreign market. The most recent effortless gesture came from Cruella, which features a designer played by John McCrea, who assists Cruella in her designs and her schemes, and who is quite obviously gay in his composure and personality. But his sexuality is never brought up directly, he’s never seen with another man -and while the gayness in his part can’t be cut as easily, Disney has plausible deniability of it. You can’t prove that he is not heterosexual.
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| Let It Go |
Because of this, some characters who you can’t prove aren’t homosexual but very much seem like it have become beacons for Disney fans in lieu of the company’s lack of representation. The “Give Elsa a Girlfriend” social media campaign is a particularly memorable case of fans expressing their desire that Elsa, whose story in the film Frozen has a lot of queer allegory to it, be made openly gay in the Disney canon. Disney probably doesn’t mind this kind of thought, as well as the same-sex shipping that goes on in their fandoms, because it makes them look more conscientious without having to effect any progressive choices. And yet they’ll conveniently ignore such calls to action. Frozen II featured exactly zero confirmation of Elsa’s sexuality, but did come with a bit of additional queerbaiting –something Disney has become quite adept in. It’s the same thing they did with the characters of Finn and Poe in their Star Wars trilogy (despite Finn at least being clearly attracted to women) after fans picked up on some subtext in their relationship in The Force Awakens –Rise of Skywalker as with so many things was particularly guilty of this.
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| Just two good buddies riding a bike through the sky |
Recently, Anthony Mackie found himself in a brief controversy for disparaging fans shipping his and Sebastian Stans’ Marvel characters when they’re meant to simply be a close male friendship. And I sympathize, that’s something that ought to be portrayed more often –but it’s because of such a lack of sufficient gay representation in the MCU and Disney media in general that fans choose to gravitate towards these kind of pairings and put queer labels on them. Pixar’s most recent film Luca is also about a close male friendship, but it’s being read as gay for this same reason (and also admittedly there are some pretty gay connotations all throughout). On the other end of the spectrum, Raya and the Last Dragon depicts some notable sexual chemistry between the title character and her chief villain that doesn’t quite feel like queerbaiting, but is awfully close. Kelly Marie Tran, the voice of Raya, has confirmed she believes the character to be gay, but Disney has made no such statement.
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| When he gives you that look... |
These are the areas where Disney is the most comfortable. It makes them look like they are receptive to representation without going too far as to alienate the insecure straights. And it frees them from having to handle LGBTQ characters and stories that the Disney higher-ups are uncomfortable with and uneducated on. Indeed if the table scraps that they have put out are any indication, any unambiguous queer subject matter that makes it through may well be clumsy or awkward. The constraints of the Disney brand can only allow for so much, which is why Disney needs to rethink its’ brand and evolve it. For as attractive as it is, it can be a pretty toxic brand anyways. They need to be less scared of certain kinds of stories and subject matter, less squirrelly when it comes to their past failings, and more open to new kinds of creators with new kinds of visions. And they need to be brave enough to embrace representation wholeheartedly without worrying about “the South” or “China” -which it bears repeating, are not problems for Disney in this moment in time!
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| Take a guess who's the gay one -The Jungle Cruise |
Disney is known for not taking risks though, it’s known for being slow on the uptake in its’ need to sustain that specific image Walt worked hard to cultivate -an image that was always designed for straight cis middle-class white Americans. There’s a small ray of optimism though in that it looks like the socio-political climate of the last few years has accelerated their desire to get on-side with LGBTQ activism (at least in the public eye), motivated by the optics of doing so in a world where LGBTQ-exclusion is becoming less and less widely tolerated, and the consequent profit swell greater representation means for them is more critical. Hence the time they’ve put into gestures like the one on Twitter, and how much they try to drum up support for each new “first gay character in a Disney film”. The next will supposedly be in theme park ride-based adventure film The Jungle Cruise where the gay character will be played by straight comedian Jack Whitehall. The Marvel wing seems to be moving a bit better and faster. Their Eternals movie slated for later this year is set to feature an openly gay character on that superhero team; Taika Waititi has also stated that in his next Thor movie, Tessa Thompsons’ Valkyrie will be confirmed bisexual. And even as I’m writing this, just days ago Marvel’s Loki series revealed its’ title character to be bi as well. It remains to be seen if any of these will follow through. Outing Loki is fine, but we should see that bisexuality actually represented and not just paid lip-service. Let him go on a date with Star-Lord or something.
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| Bisexual Power -Tessa Thompson as Valkyrie |
Even if these are the real thing though, it isn’t enough, especially for 2021. Simply acknowledging that LGBTQ people exist is not something Disney should be celebrated for. And in fact Disney will forever be behind the times until they put LGBTQ characters, stories, and creatives front and centre –and not in a one-and-done kind of fashion that seems to be their preference on the animation front. It’s not going to happen in the near future, Disney still has a vested interest in appealing to homophobes and transphobes who do still make up a chunk of the consumer base they are unwilling to let go of (and it should be noted that none of their scraps or gestures have applied to the trans community, or non-binary folks, two-spirit, ace, or intersex individuals, none of whom have ever so much as been alluded to by a Disney product).
The Walt Disney Company is not a friend to the queer community. They probably never will be honestly. But it is important that they elevate the LGBTQ movement regardless –it’s a responsibility that comes with being one of the most powerful media entities in the world. And we have to keep encouraging them to do better. Eventually they may reach that point where we don’t have to. But until then, for every pride ad and social media posturing Disney puts out, let’s remember to be critical and vocal –like Alex Hirsch. Because they haven’t come close to earning the rainbow yet.
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| Taste the Rainbow Disney! |
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