Tinker Belles and Evil Queens: The Walt Disney Company From the Inside Out (19 page)

As mentioned earlier, the more aggressive, threatening nature of the overcultured Shere Khan in
The Jungle Book
displays a shift in conception. Homosexuality in the late 1960s and into the 1970s was a much different way of life than it had been in the 1930s. As more and more lesbians and gay men came out of the shadows and closets, making their

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presence known, the subject of homosexuality became more common in American culture. Thus, it would be easier for anyone, not just a small group of homosexuals “in the know” to see “pansy” or “butch female”

images as representations of homosexuality. Whereas Jet in the “Annette” series
might
be lesbian, depending on who was watching, it would be easier for anyone to think that the female field hockey coaches in
Freaky Friday
were lesbian. This increasing public awareness of homosexuality in America since the late 1960s, and the increasing activism amongst homosexuals that brought this awareness, would affect not only what Disney texts chose to portray but also eventually
how
they were made by the company.

PA RT I I

SINCE WALT

3

Finding a Place in the Kingdom

Homosexuality at Disney during the Eisner Era

I N A U G U S T O F 1992, a number of employees convened at the com-missary of the Walt Disney studio in Burbank. Many who attended that first meeting remembered later the pervasive nervousness and uncer-tainty. A number of them knew others that had decided not to attend because they felt that it was some sort of a trap and that all those who attended would be put on a list and eventually fired. Some attendees said that they showed up mainly to “see what would happen,” because they were so surprised to see a meeting like this occurring at Disney. The meeting was the first held for and, most importantly,
by
homosexual employees of the Walt Disney Company. The result of the discussions at that first gathering was a new employee group named LEsbian And Gay United Employees, or LEAGUE for short.

LEAGUE was the first lesbian/gay/bisexual employees group to form at any major Hollywood studio, a landmark achievement considering the “wholesome” and “family-oriented” image of the company almost since its inception. Obviously, the work force and the day-to-day atmosphere of the company had changed immensely from the days when the studio was referred to as “Mickey’s Monastery.” Many of those changes occurred not just within the Walt Disney Company but within the entire social framework of the United States. Yet, specific economic and business events within the history of the company after Walt’s death also helped spur such changes.

This chapter will analyze how LEAGUE conceives of itself and how it works within the corporation, as well as how these conceptions affect the group’s ability to materially change the lives of its members and other lesbians and gay men.

In order to fully comprehend the issues raised by LEAGUE’s existence, one must examine two linked historical developments. Firstly, 93

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measurable shifts in the discourse about homosexuality occurred between Walt’s death and the formation of LEAGUE. During the same time period, the Walt Disney Company itself went through a tremen-dous upheaval. Both of these developments created a specific environment and outlook that affected how LEAGUE could negotiate a place for itself, what form it would take within the corporate structure, as well as how sexualities would be conceived and addressed.

STONEWALL AND BEYOND: HOMOSEXUALITY

SINCE THE 1960S

Without doubt, LEAGUE would never have come about had not the gay rights movement gained momentum in the late 1960s. Having previously tried methods of appeasement and “working within the rules,”

now gay rights activists took their cues from the radical protests of groups like the Black Panthers and the National Organization of Women. Instead of marching peaceably in a circle while wearing “respectable” clothes, these groups had organized confrontational demonstrations aimed at jolting the complacency of those who would deny them their rights. The Black Panthers began training their members how to handle weapons; women burned bras in Atlantic City just before the 1968 Miss America pageant. Most historians point to the riots that occurred in Greenwich Village in June 1969 outside the Stonewall Inn as the impetus for a new radical gay rights movement. Instead of allowing themselves to be arrested in yet another bar raid by the New York police, patrons of this Mafia-controlled gay bar fought back, instituting demonstrations that lasted for three nights. Allen Ginsberg would say, upon viewing the area during the riots, “They’ve lost that wounded look that fags all had ten years ago.”1 Word of this local incident rapidly spread to homosexual communities throughout the country, even though mainstream newspapers barely reported on the incident. Soon, a number of groups, like the Gay Liberation Front and the Gay Activists Alliance, coalesced (mainly on college campuses such as the University of California at Berkeley and Harvard) to organize political demonstrations for gay rights.

Foremost, they saw “coming out” as the most basic and important political action an individual could make. By overtly announcing one’s self-identification as a homosexual, the rest of society would begin to F I N D I N G A P L AC E I N T H E K I N G D O M

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see 1) how many homosexuals are actually within the community and 2) that homosexuality encompasses a diverse realm of individuals and not only the stereotypical versions of feminine men and masculine women. (Ironically, this attempt to shift preconceptions of what “being homosexual” meant often worked to favor certain images and disparage others—an issue to be discussed in detail further on in this chapter.) One of the most popular methods of gaining attention was an anniversary celebration of the Stonewall riots. By the end of the 1970s, the end of June had become “Gay Pride Week,” and most large cities witnessed annual “pride parades” attended by thousands of lesbians and gay men.

Gay activists also organized highly visible confrontations to make their presence known to the larger society. “Kiss-ins” were held at restaurants that refused to serve gay customers; lesbian and gay couples made sure the media were present when they attempted to apply for marriage licenses; a protester broke onto the set of CBS News during one of Walter Cronkite’s live broadcasts. “Zapping,” as it was labeled by gay activists, became quite prevalent during the early and mid-1970s, as lesbians crashed the National Organization of Women (who were attempting to distance themselves from lesbianism) and gay men and women shouted down “experts on homosexuality” at conventions of the American Psychiatric Association (which had labeled homosexuality as a mental disorder until the protests helped overturn that decision in 1973).2 The goal of these actions was to destigmatize sexualities that fell outside the dominant hetero paradigm and celebrate the wealth of sexual possibilities.

Unfortunately, the coalitions engendered by the initial euphoria of the post-Stonewall moment—drag queens, middle-class gay men, lesbian-feminists and bisexuals (to name a few) all working together—did not last. While the term “gay” had earlier encompassed both men and women, the overemphasis in much of the movement on men’s issues resulted in lesbian culture disassociating itself from “gay.” By the end of the 1970s, “gay” meant predominantly “homosexual male.” In fact,

“lesbian separatism” became widespread as lesbians detached from gay male society and (as much as possible) the patriarchal system itself. The drag queens and racial/ethnic minorities that had initiated most of the fighting at the Stonewall Inn in 1969 soon found themselves both shunted aside in various activist organizations in favor of white and conventionally masculine homosexual men and denounced by many lesbian-feminists for “parodying womanhood.”3 Just as the 96

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free-wheeling sexual experimentation of the ’60s counterculture and the “sexual revolution” began to ebb, the now “liberated” gay community’s diversity seemed to wane rather than prosper. For example, most urban gay areas were soon overrun by mustached, cowboy-booted, masculine men, a style aptly labeled “the clone look.” One gay man remembered, “I got back from India in 1974, having been gone a couple of years. . . . I was twenty-one, and I had long hair and a full beard, and I couldn’t get laid. People told me I was cute but that I’d better shave and get a haircut. Everyone looked like the Marlboro Man.”4 Abetted by advertisers marketing to a newly perceived “gay market” (a topic to be analyzed more fully in chapter 5), “the clone look” encapsulated how definitions of being “gay” ironically narrowed instead of expanded in the age of “gay liberation.”

The discovery of the AIDS virus during the 1980s signaled an end to the “sexual revolution” of the ’60s and ’70s and forced (for a while at least) a reevaluation of these developments. The hypermasculine image of the “clone” disappeared as gay men saw how many “clones” had become early casualties to the crisis. The refusal of the government under President Ronald Reagan to even acknowledge AIDS (much less pave the way to fund research and treatment) brought individuals together in a shared cause. Lesbians joined with gay men in the fight against AIDS. “Safe-sex” organizations attempted to reach out beyond the largely middle-class white populations of gay men in the “gay ghettos”

to the African-American, Latino and Asian-American communities.

Radical gay rights activist groups such as ACT UP and Queer Nation gathered members from a number of diverse communities and demanded attention by breaking into press conferences, government offices and medical labs. Making sure that the media was present for these actions, the activists gained much publicity.

While ACT UP worked specifically to countermand negligent attention to AIDS, Queer Nation was founded to confront the dominant heterosexual society’s attitudes towards non-straight sexualities. To accomplish this, Queer Nation organized protests, sit-ins and actions in which chanting, banner-waving groups descended on “straight bas-tions” such as suburban malls. Both groups, though, also attempted to

“wake up” homosexuals as well, encouraging them to take action instead of remaining complacent. While not at the forefront of their concerns, most ACT UP and Queer Nation members also began fashioning new images of homosexuality that angrily rejected “normal” gender F I N D I N G A P L AC E I N T H E K I N G D O M

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conventions. Participants (both men and women) sported hair that was bleached or dyed in unique colors, and some shaved their heads; men pierced their ears, and soon both men and women were piercing other body parts as well; fashions ranged from punk to drag to leather and everywhere in-between. Queer Nation focused directly on welcoming the panopoly of individuals who did not identify as heterosexual. As Frank Browning described one Queer Nation meeting he attended in 1991, “Women have become steadily more vocal, and real effort is made to reserve time for Asisans, blacks, and Latinos to speak. . . . [This] is part of the Queer Nation commitment to creating a collective ‘safe space,’ a queer town meeting where the whole array of queer people will feel ‘empowered’ to speak.”5 Similar to the immediate post-Stonewall radical activism, Queer Nation and ACT UP worked to broaden instead of close down the possibilities for sexual identity.

In attempting to challenge dominant society’s attitudes towards non-heterosexuals, it was probably inevitable that queer activists would eventually focus on Hollywood. Unlike the golden era of the ’30s and ’40s, Hollywood films since “gay liberation” provided a semiregu-lar stream of identifiable lesbian and gay characters. As Vito Russo and a number of other critics were quick to point out, though, the predominant image of a homosexual in movies made after the “sexual revolution” was that of a deranged psychopath. From
The Detective
(1968) to
Freebie and the Bean
(1973) to
Looking for Mr. Goodbar
(1978) to
Cruising
(1979) to
Windows
(1980), homosexuals were twisted maniacs who usually met grisly ends as punishment for their demented deeds. When
Silence of the Lambs
(1991) revealed that a gruesome serial killer was a transvestite and when
Basic Instinct
(1992) told a tale of a murderous lesbian, gay rights groups took to the streets in protest. As a sign of Hollywood’s understanding of sexuality, various industry statements argued that neither of these films had homosexual villains: a transvestite was different from a gay man, and the female killer in
Basic Instinct
was bisexual. These statements attempted to place the maniacal tendencies on even further marginalized sexual identities, rather than recognizing the oppressions shared by all non-straight sexualities.

Queer activists by and large didn’t buy the arguments and planned a “full court press” on Hollywood. Although most of the protests by such groups as Queer Nation and GLAAD (Gay and Lesbian

Alliance Against Defamation) dealt with how gay men and lesbians (and others) were portrayed in films and television, activists also focused on 98

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discrimination within the workplace. For example, actor Brad Davis, who died of complications due to AIDS, left an angry letter to be published posthumously that condemned the way the industry dealt with actors who had the virus. The proven ability of these organizations to get noticed by the news media made the entertainment industry quite nervous. When rumors went around Hollywood that gay activists would storm the Academy Awards in 1991, a
Daily Variety
headline announced “Academy Asks Gay Orgs for Restraint.”6

In response to the increased and ongoing pressure from the publicity generated by these actions, studio heads attempted to control the damage being done. In 1991, Barry Diller, then head of 20th Century-Fox, and Sid Sheinberg, CEO at Universal, announced the formation of Hollywood Supports, an organization devoted to dealing with both AIDS discrimination and homophobia within the entertainment industry. Soon, other powerful figures in the industry, such as producer Steve Tisch and superagent Michael Ovitz, were also involved in Hollywood Supports. Amongst its primary short term goals was to encourage the inclusion of sexual orientation in studio nondiscrimination employment policies and to promote domestic-partner benefits for homosexual couples unable to legally marry. Richard Jennings, executive director of the organization, told
Out
magazine in 1994, “We’ve held over 800 AIDS