Tinker Belles and Evil Queens: The Walt Disney Company From the Inside Out (22 page)

The University responded that they did not run announcements for employee self-help groups. Nielsen pointed out that the
Newsreel
ran announcements for an employee Weight Watchers group, which could be easily labeled a self-help group. Next, the University argued that they did not print notices that were of a “sexual nature.” The implication of this argument was that the company viewed this new employee group as a “sex club,” with club members putting down plastic tarp in meeting rooms for events and then cleaning up afterwards! After these repeated attempts and failures, Nielsen wrote a letter directly to Michael Eisner about the situation and asked for permission to form the group and run an announcement in the
Newsreel.
According to Nielsen,

“Within twenty-four hours of writing my letter, Eisner told Sandy Litvak [then vice-president of the law and human resources department]

to run the announcement in the
Newsreel.
”30

After the group first met in August of 1992, LEAGUE quickly decided that its primary goal was to win domestic-partner benefits. In 110

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1992, Universal was the only studio to offer such benefits. LEAGUE

members heard a number of reasons why Disney was reticent to move in this area. There were worries about the extra cost to the company, about the studio’s legal standing in acknowledging domestic partnerships, about employees falsely claiming to have partners just to get friends health insurance and mostly worries about the bad publicity that granting such benefits would spark amongst conservative “family values” media groups. LEAGUE responded to these reservations by putting together “The ABCs of Domestic Partner Benefits,” a report that attempted to answer all questions, both the perceptive and the asinine, in a manner that would put the studio at ease. Copies of this report were sent to Michael Eisner, Sandy Litvak and anyone else who could sway opinion within the company. LEAGUE members seemed to always assume that it was just a matter of time before these benefits would be granted. Jeffrey Katzenberg’s involvement with AIDS charities as well as Hollywood Supports (partly as a result of his friendship with Howard Ashman) furthered a relative wealth of assistance and understanding from the studio towards employees suffering from AIDS, including extended sick leave and insurance coverage. With this in mind, the outlook for partner benefits seemed encouraging.

This is not to say that after finally getting approval to exist LEAGUE never encountered further friction from the company. After LEAGUE was formed, the company declared a formal policy on employee groups, ending the $200 start-up fund and restricting use by these groups of the Disney name or logo. Although the company insisted that the formation of a lesbian/gay employee group had no bearing on this new policy, its timing somewhat undercut this assertion.

Nielsen stated, “I felt Disney was saying: ‘O.K., if this is going to happen, we want to say how and [we want it to happen] as quietly as possible.”31 Nielsen’s assertion, as well as Litvak’s continuous supervision of LEAGUE in the ensuing year, exemplifies institutional attempts to control and regulate discourse on sexuality. Another example of such regulation occurred when thirty members of LEAGUE traveled to the District of Columbia in April 1993 to participate in the March on Washington, arguably the largest gay rights event ever held in the United States. Traveling with them was a parade banner announcing themselves as “part of the family at the Walt Disney Company.” The studio’s legal department immediately told LEAGUE that this violated the restrictions on use of the Disney name and insisted that the name be taken 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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off an already printed banner. The group solved the problem by covering up the words “Walt Disney” with computer paper that had the word “THAT” printed on it. The banner, which now read “part of the family at THAT company,” was carried in the march by LEAGUE members wearing mouse-ear beanies and carrying Mickey Mouse balloons.

This same altered banner would march in a number of gay pride parades over the next year.

Slowly, though, tensions eased, and the studio seemed to relax some of its militant watch over the group. The company discovered that various religious or conservative groups, such as the American Family Association (AFA), did not seem to initially notice or care about the creation of this employees group. By 1994, LEAGUE was allowed to use the banner in parades without the word “that” plastered over the name

“Walt Disney.” Journal articles in both the gay and mainstream press about LEAGUE were published, although the studio did not allow any photos that included Disney iconography (citing that it might somehow imply the company’s endorsement of homosexuality).

The relative ease with which the Disney studio became accustomed to having a lesbian and gay employees group was reached mainly by the personality of the employees group. When Sass Nielsen first broached the subject of such a group, many LEAGUE members felt that the studio pictured the organization as radical and politically insurgent.

Jeff Kurti described Nielsen’s approach as “too political or militant.”32

According to Garrett Hicks, Nielsen’s letter to Eisner included veiled threats of litigation against the studio, which alerted the ever vigilant legal department of the company.33 In an age when queer activists threatened to interrupt the Oscar ceremony and attempted to interfere with the filming of
Basic Instinct
on location in San Francisco, it is quite possible that many regarded the new group as an invasion of ACT UP

or Queer Nation from within.

To prevent that possibility, the company guidelines on employee clubs were slightly altered in 1993, adding a phrase stating that clubs were social groups and explicitly
not
political in nature. For a short while, LEAGUE (as well as ALLIANCE, the gay/lesbian employees group at Disney World, which for some reason had been notified of this change before LEAGUE was) worried about the implications of this change. Garrett Hicks described the concern thusly: “What’s considered political? You know, by our very nature, we are political because we are a gay and lesbian employee group and our issues and our 112

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concerns are a socially political issue. So does that mean we can’t exist anymore?”34 LEAGUE was quickly assured of their right to exist, but informed that the group could not specifically endorse a political plat-form or certain candidates in an attempt to squelch any possible moves by LEAGUE (or other groups) to protest or call for boycotts.

The studio’s legal department and public relations team were not the only ones worried about the possible ties that LEAGUE could have to radical queer activism. Almost from the beginning, LEAGUE had to confront this issue inside its own ranks. Nielsen had been involved with radical rights groups, and this worried some lesbian and gay employees who did not desire to picket or boycott Disney’s treatment or representation of homosexuals. A few who attended the first meeting found Nielsen’s aggressive stance to be the opposite of what they were looking for. Instead of a social group that would help lesbians and gay men meet each other in order to support each other as employees, they found that Nielsen pictured the group as political, one that would work to make issues of sexuality a larger concern to the studio and the company at large. These employees didn’t want to rock the boat and preferred to uphold a “respectable” image of homosexuality. When carrying the LEAGUE banner in parades, members tended to wear T-shirts and jeans or shorts instead of dressing in drag or leather or topless (realizing this might have had a hand in the company’s eventual decision to let the banner use the Disney name). When the Disney-owned local television station KCAL began airing conservative funnyman Rush Limbaugh’s syndicated show, many LEAGUE members were bothered when co-president Hicks voiced a protest in an interview to the
Los Angeles Times.
Those bothered by the interview seemed to feel that Hicks had gone outside of the prescribed company policy for registering complaints (i.e., writing an internal company letter to those in charge).

LEAGUE members themselves worried that even forming a group

was perceived as too “in your face” by some employees—and not just heterosexuals. It is quite possible that many potential members of LEAGUE never attended a meeting precisely because they perceived the group as “too out.” Those who became actively involved with LEAGUE quickly hypothesized that a large number of the lesbian and gay employees at Disney were still “closeted” about their sexuality and hence worried about the repercussions of even attending a LEAGUE

meeting. To quell these worries, LEAGUE immediately agreed to keep their mailing list confidential, with only the officers expected to ac-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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knowledge their relationship to the group. The idea, as Jeff Kurti stated, was to create “a ‘safe zone’ for networking. . . . We knew there was a higher gay and lesbian work force, but we had to open the lines of communication to find a mission and purpose.”35

Even being an openly lesbian or gay employee didn’t necessarily mean you agreed with an activist agenda. Tina Shafer, who worked for Disney’s corporate environmental policy department and became an eventual co-chair of LEAGUE, acknowledged, “I was afraid to go for a while because I worried it would jeopardize my relationship with my managers who had never appeared to have a problem with my sexuality.”36 There was just cause for this concern. Nielsen recounted that her career at the studio suffered after the formation of LEAGUE, due largely (in her opinion) to her efforts, and she was laid off about a year and a half later.

When Nielsen stepped down as chair after six months, LEAGUE

quickly lost some of its radical edge—much to the pleasure of the company as well as many homosexual employees. Although the group’s main goal was to win domestic-partner benefits for its employees, an

“assimilationist” (rather than a “confrontational”) philosophy became dominant. While the Workplace Issues Committee went through the channels that the company dictated it should go through, LEAGUE

meetings became lunches with guest speakers—a chance for employees to meet lesbian and gay authors, filmmakers and politicians who couldn’t believe they had been asked to speak at Disney about their sexuality. Social gatherings were held throughout the year, culminating in each year’s march in the Los Angeles Gay Pride Parade. Reflective of the present philosophy of the group, Robert L. Williams, one of 1997’s co-chairs of LEAGUE, told
Out
magazine that he considered “An employee support group’s ultimate goal . . . is not to exist. We had problems of visibility and equality. Those were rectified. Now it’s a process of normalization and maintenance.”37

In attempting to quell company anxieties, the group often has ended up helping reinforce conventions of sexual identity rather than breaking them down. In fact, such accomodations often seem to affect how the organization as a whole conceives of sexuality in general.

While LEAGUE is notable for acknowledging the existence of lesbian and gay employees within Disney’s ranks, the group often helps reinforce boundaries of sexuality rather than helping dismantle them. For example, in the push for domestic-partner benefits, there was constant 114

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discussion as to whether benefits would only be available to homosexual couples (who are legally barred from marriage) or could extend to heterosexual couples who live together outside of marriage. Instead of seeing a shared cause with non-married long-term heterosexual couples, LEAGUE decided to conceptualize domestic partners as lesbians and gay men who
would marry
but were unable to by law.38 Rather than challenging the importance of the institution of marriage (as many antagonists to domestic partner benefits argue will result from such programs), such a definition implicitly reaffirms the sanctity and desirabil-ity of marriage.

Also, LEAGUE’s active membership weighs heavily towards

white, middle-class men. Attendance at LEAGUE’s meetings emphasized this fact, with women and non-Anglo employees always in the minority (and sometimes not present at all). This is not to say that the officers of the group were unaware of this condition, or unconcerned.

When Hicks was co-chair, he maintained that the group was trying to make the organization seem more diverse and welcoming, appealing quite forthrightly in their monthly newsletter to those employees who were not represented at the meetings. Yet, active female members of LEAGUE often expressed privately the opinion that the group sometimes felt like a “boys’ club.” Although supposedly a large number of women attended the first meeting, within three months Women of LEAGUE was established. While not breaking off from LEAGUE, this

“sub-group” would hold luncheon or dinner gatherings on a regular basis to create a space that was more comfortable for lesbian employees.

In dividing LEAGUE into male and female counterparts, the organization seemed to implicitly agree to hegemonic definitions of gender. This was made abundantly clear when a male-to-female transgendered employee decided to start coming to meetings. This employee, whom I will call “Bobbie,” came to the group because of harassment she had received. Although the Walt Disney Company officially does not permit discrimination according to sexual orientation, Bobbie’s superiors seemingly felt justified in harassing her because of her “indetermi-nate” state while she was pre-op. They refused to let Bobbie use the women’s restroom and insisted that co-workers refer to Bobbie by her male name. While Bobbie came to LEAGUE looking for advice and support, the group often mirrored much of the confusion that Bobbie’s superiors had expressed. Members of Women of LEAGUE felt uncomfortable having a “man” come to their meetings. Members sympathized F I N D I N G A P L AC E I N T H E K I N G D O M