Tinker Belles and Evil Queens: The Walt Disney Company From the Inside Out Read Online Free PDF Page A

meant for Disney’s output to be read queerly. I had never felt the need to prove intent by the Walt Disney Company; as long as evidence showed that homosexual audiences were understanding Disney through a “gay sensibility,” then a relationship existed whether Disney approved of it or not. As time has gone on, specific events have shown that Disney is cognizant of the presence of lesbians and gay men within their employee roster and within their potential customer base. Yet, this does not mean that I now have proof of Disney’s “gay agenda.” Rather, this analysis shows how business in-I N T RO D U C T I O N
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    terests have worked to make Disney acknowledge that homosexuality simply exists.
    Lastly, there was the indication from the worries about possible outings that such a study would create a retaliation against Disney, which would then scale back its acknowledgement of homosexuals.
    Years have passed, though, and (to put it mildly) this is now like asking to shut the barn door after the horse has escaped. Furthermore, such trepidation is predicated by the fact that lesbians and gay men “had a good thing going” with Disney, an assessment with which I do not wholeheartedly agree. Since this development is directly tied to corporate plans for more profit and power, homosexuals have as much to be guarded about as Christian conservatives who have decried Disney’s shift. As this work hopes to show, the “homosexual community” may gain some concrete benefits from such explicit acknowledgement, but there is a trade-off for such acknowledgement, in which capitalism increasingly works to control how homosexuality is conceived and addressed. If nothing else, the reluctance that some expressed to me about tackling this topic brought to light how important it was to drag this relationship “out of the closet” in order to point out the advantages and disadvantages of reading Disney queerly.
    PA RT I
    WITH WALT
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    Mickey’s Monastery
    Sexuality and the “Disney Mystique”
    TO A S S E RT T H AT there is a construction of sexuality in Disneyana might seem to be stating the obvious since sexuality pervades all areas of culture. But to many, the Walt Disney Company has long stood as a safe haven from the “rampant” sexuality that can be found in most popular culture. In 1995, a letter to the studio from a coalition of Florida lawmakers described how
    For more than 50 years Walt Disney Company has represented all that is good and pure and wholesome in our nation. Families flocked to Walt Disney World and Disneyland because they knew that Walt Disney respected and nurtured the traditional American family and its strong moral values. Disney could always be counted on to provide parents and children alike with family-friendly, good-natured entertainment.1
    Like these politicians, many consumers both in the past and present continue to value the studio precisely because they feel that Disney films, TV shows, theme parks and merchandise do not display sexuality (or, by implication, other forms of decadence or corruption).
    Consumers did not create this vision of the Walt Disney Com-
    pany of their own volition. The company has historically fostered this image, representing itself as an upstanding moral organization, committed to providing children with characters and narratives that would not unduly expose them to sex or violence. This carefully crafted “mystique” of asexuality so pervades the popular conception of the Walt Disney Company that as early as the 1930s, some in Hollywood had nicknamed the studio “Mickey’s Monastery,” in honor of the studio’s biggest “star.” The few kisses that get shown on screen 3
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    M I C K E Y ’ S M O N A S T E RY
    between consenting adults in Disney cartoons are always chaste and short, with closed dry mouths (and often with plenty of comic support around to divert attention). There is never any indication that romance could lead to anything else but riding off