Tinker Belles and Evil Queens: The Walt Disney Company From the Inside Out (32 page)

This is not the only moment that usually provokes unwanted

laughter in viewers. Twice in the film, after “swing kids” have been beaten bloody, they respond mock-heroically by singing “It Ain’t Got a Thing If It Ain’t Got That Swing,” complete with the accompanying

“do-wop-do-wop-do-wop.” These moments seem to not recognize the inanity of the supposed political resistance and are so deliriously inflated that most viewers cannot help but laugh. After describing one of these scenes, Maslin writes “That can’t have been easy to play straight.”

The main characters are committing suicide and being beaten and arrested for listening to music. Although historically based, the momentous seriousness of the piece seems widely out of proportion to the cause being championed. The only way to begin to justify such bom-bastic tragedy is by not “playing it straight” and instead reading the film from a homosexual viewpoint.

Reading the casting of “poster boys” in these films through a gay sensibility became manifest once again when the film
Tombstone
(1993) cast Jason Priestly (who became famous on TV’s
Beverly Hills 90210
) as

“Sister Boy.”
New York Times
reviewer Stephen Holden does not hint

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around when he describes
Tombstone
as “up-to-date in its political consciousness . . . it even includes one Old West homosexual, a character nicknamed ‘Sister Boy.’”61 Although a peripheral character in this retelling of the “Gunfight at OK Corral,” Sister Boy is manifestly homosexual. He is introduced when the town gathers to watch a traveling theatrical troupe. As Priestly enters, wearing a tailored city suit, bowler and spectacles, one of the cowboys grabs for his behind while shouting,

“Hey, Sister Boy, gimmee some! Gimmee! Gimmee! Gimmee!” Curly Bill (Powers Boothe), one of the antagonists, stands up and defends Sister Boy, placing his arm around the fellow’s shoulder and asking Sister Boy to sit next to him. An actor named Romulus Fabian (Billy Zane) comes on stage in tights to recite the “St. Crispin’s Day Speech” from
Henry V
and Curly Bill immediately states that Fabian is “the prettiest man I ever saw.” After the first close-up of Fabian, to see the man’s beauty, the film cuts to an entranced close-up of Sister Boy saying, “I think he’s wonderful.” At the post-theatre celebration, Sister Boy asks Fabian to sit with him. When it is later revealed that Fabian has been killed during the feud between the Clantons and the Earps, Sister Boy gets a teary close-up, as well as a close-up of his hand clasping the dead Fabian’s hand.

While Holden’s review minces no words in his description of “Sister Boy,” he also hints at how this character’s presence colors much of the homosocial interaction occurring at the center of the film: “[Kevin]

Jarre’s dialogue is often anachronistic, combining a campy contemporary edge with a more realistic dialect.”62 Sister Boy is a “friend” of the Clanton gang, intimating that Curly Bill and others were not above sexual activity with the man, although plainly not considering themselves as “like him” (at this time in history the insertive “masculine” partner was not considered homosexual). Johnny Ringo (Michael Biehn) never specifically associates with Sister Boy, yet he carries the most homoerotic signifiers of those in the Clanton gang. While watching the theatrical troupe’s pantomime of the Faust legend, Curly Bill loudly states,

“I’d take the deal and then cross over and drill that old Devil in the ass.”

Then, leaning over to Ringo, Curly Bill asks with a leer, “How ’bout you, Ringo? What would you do?” Looking up at the box seats where Wyatt Earp (Kurt Russell) and Doc Holliday (Val Kilmer) sit, he replies

“I already did it.” Whether “it” refers to making a pact with the Devil or “drilling someone in the ass” is left for the individual viewer to intuit. Interestingly, directly after the cross-cut between close-ups of 168

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Fabian on the stage and Sister Boy sitting enraptured in the audience, the film presents a similar cross-cut between Ringo transfixed and Earp and Holliday as the figures attracting his gaze.

As portrayed by Kilmer, Doc Holliday is not above affectations in speech and body language that verge on dandyism (calling one fellow

“you madcap,” for example). As a consequence, the initial meeting between Doc and Ringo is charged with energy that could be easily read as sexual. At the post-theatre celebration, Ringo and Doc Holliday confront each other for the first time just after Sister Boy offers Fabian a seat. The two stare intensely at each other during the following exchange:

RINGO: You must be Doc Holliday.

DOC:
(with a minor cough)
That’s the rumor.

RINGO: You retired too?

DOC: Not me. I’m in my prime!

RINGO:
(smiling)
Yeah, you look it.

DOC: You must be Ringo.
(turning to a woman at his side)
Look darlin’, Johnny Ringo—the deadliest pistolier since Wild

Bill, they say. What do you say, darlin’, should I hate him?

WOMAN: You don’t even know him.

DOC: No, that’s true. But I don’t know. There’s something

about him—something around the eyes. I don’t know. He re-

minds me of . . . me!
(smiling)
No, I’m sure of it. I hate him!

As if this exchange wasn’t filled with enough innuendo, the conversation continues as the two speak “their own secret language.” Doc tosses off “in vino veritas” after Earp tries to excuse Doc’s drunkenness, but is stunned when Ringo answers him in Latin. The two trade barbs in Latin until it becomes obvious that the situation is going to lead to either gun-play or some heated sex (depending on how one is reading the scene) and then friends on both sides intervene. For the rest of the film, Doc and Ringo have a special vendetta against each other that seems to transcend the gang factions, yet is never completely explained. In its immediate juxtaposition to a scene with Sister Boy and Fabian, their initial meeting provides the most vivid example of the “campy edge” Holden seems to be referring to in his review—an edge that brings the homoerotic aspects of the Western genre closer to the surface than most mainstream Westerns have done.

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TOUCHSTONE TELEVISION AND TOASTER OVENS:

LESBIANISM ON THE AIR

Disney’s movement into more manifest representations of homosexuality has mainly focused on male characters. The young “boy toys” that populate films like
Dead Poets Society
and
Swing Kids
certainly are not going to catch much attention from lesbians. Similarly, Bette Midler’s homosexual fan base leans heavily towards the male section of the community (although, as stated, the presence of Lily Tomlin in
Big Business
might attract some of the females). Although the films of Howard Ashman celebrate a variety of difference, the musical theatre tradition from which these films consciously borrow is more strongly linked to gay-male culture than to lesbian culture.63 Some of this emphasis on gay men parallels general trends within the entertainment industry. As mass media present more images of homosexual individuals, gay male characters tend to dominate. The larger ratio of openly gay men to open lesbians in Disney’s employee group LEAGUE may also explain the predominance of address to gay men in Disney product. If a larger percentage of the homosexuals working for Disney are male, then it is understandable if reading Disney from a homosexual sensibility privileges a gay-male point of view.

This condition has existed long before the Eisner-Wells-Katzenberg regime. With mostly men working as animators, most of Disney’s initial stars were male characters—Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, Goofy, etc. While female partners existed for these characters, the men were still very much the center of attention, and often Minnie Mouse and Daisy Duck did not even appear. In fact, often the males lived and worked together (
Mickey’s Service Station
[1935],
Moving Day
[1936],
Clock Cleaners
[1937],
Lonesome Ghosts
[1938],
Mickey’s Trailer
[1938], the

“Mickey and the Beanstalk” sequence from
Fun and Fancy Free
[1947]).

These teamings, as well as the creation of male duos such as chipmunks Chip and Dale or the mice Jacques and Gus in
Cinderella,
also made (and still makes) a gay-male subject position in Disneyana much easier to find than a lesbian one.

Still, as chapter 2 points out, there are certain texts that lesbians could connect with in Disney’s past, even with this accent on male characters (Hayley Mills’s dual roles in
The Parent Trap,
“Jet” in
Annette,
the nannies of
Mary Poppins
and
Bedknobs and Broomsticks,
Jodie Foster’s character in
Freaky Friday
). Similarly, although the “new” Disney seems 170

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to attract the attention of gay men more than lesbians, certain texts do attract a lesbian reading. One of these texts has come to provide the strongest example of overt representation of homosexuality from the company, as well as the strongest example of mainstream attention to and validation of a homosexual reading strategy towards a Disney product.

Touchstone Television’s first successful series, running from 1985 to 1992 on NBC, was
The Golden Girls,
a situation comedy about four female senior citizens sharing a home together in Florida. A television equivalent to the work Eisner, Wells and Katzenberg were fashioning with their theatrical features,
The Golden Girls
was filled with risqué dialogue and situations, seeming to announce that the company could produce more than
The Wonderful World of Disney
or
The Mickey Mouse
Club.
64 Mimi White, in a discussion of
The Golden Girls
and other women-centered sitcoms, describes how

the female characters . . . are firmly established as heterosexual, . . . but at the same time, they validate women’s bonding as a form of social stability, a viable and attractive alternative to the traditional family, and even hint at the possibility of lesbian lifestyles—at least as far as possible within dominant ideology.65

Alex Doty describes how women-centered series since the 1970s “point toward lesbian readings through double entendres; oblique, displaced, or jokey references to lesbianism; or with ‘lesbian episodes.’”66 Gay men appear with some regularity on the show. A gay houseboy is part of the series pilot, and Blanche’s (Rue McClanahan) gay brother appears in two episodes of the show, once with a partner. The series’ explicit “lesbian episode” involved Jean (Lois Nettleton), an old friend of Dorothy’s (joke partially intended by the author if not the show’s creators), coming to visit after the death of her partner Pat. While Dorothy (Beatrice Arthur) and her mother Sofia (Estelle Getty) know Pat was female, they keep this fact from their other two housemates. Rose (Betty White) becomes fast friends with Jean, not realizing that Jean is starting to have

“feelings” for her until Dorothy finally spills the beans. The episode ends as Rose and Jean resolve the tension as friends.

As Doty points out, these episodes raise the spectre of homosexuality, only to “contain or deflect . . . the charge of lesbianism . . . the series has accumulated around its regular cast.”67 While the “lesbian episode”

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of
The Golden Girls
shows Dorothy and Sofia sleeping in bed together and Blanche (Rue McClanahan) feeling jealous that Jean is attracted to Rose instead of her, the episode views these moments as jokes that

“laugh off” any consideration of the main characters as lesbian, in effect innoculating them by presenting a “real” lesbian character in comparison. When Rose discovers Jean’s sexual orientation, the series is able to create a joke
and
deflect a lesbian taint on the regular cast at the same time:

ROSE: I don’t want to shock you, but Jean is—

DOROTHY: I know—Jean is gay.

ROSE: You know already? Well, what about Blanche?

DOROTHY: No, Blanche is not gay.

The series concluded its run with an episode devoted specifically to containing the character most easily read as lesbian. Dorothy, played by husky, aggressive, gravelly-voiced Beatrice Arthur, gets married and moves out of the bungalow for the final episode. By finding a male partner for Dorothy, the series attempts to keep any “lesbian reading” subtextual and marginal to the dominant mode of spectator positioning.

Similar to the covert reading strategies that Doty and others apply to
The Golden Girls,
a number of viewers began appreciating another situation comedy produced by Touchstone Television from a lesbian standpoint when it premiered in 1994. Many gay men and lesbians viewed Ellen Morgan, the main character in the series
Ellen,
as a closeted lesbian character almost from the very first episode. As Robert Dawidoff wrote in the
Los Angeles Times,
“My friends and I always recognized Ellen as in the closet: the way she dressed and interacted, her hilarious ineptitude in trying to meet conventional expectations for a single young woman.”68 Sporting short hair, always wearing slacks or jeans and even owning a book store, Ellen seemed to fit many of the conventions that signify lesbianism in contemporary American culture.

Furthermore, her often awkward body language and her manic desire to keep everyone happy, even if that meant refusing to say how she truly felt about a situation, seemed to indicate a woman fearful of expressing herself freely to others—i.e., closeted.

Throughout the first few seasons of the series, Ellen Morgan tried desperately to avoid being pressured into marriage by her mother.

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horribly and hysterically, as Ellen found something that made the prospective boyfriend unworthy. In one of the more pointed episodes, Ellen Morgan goes out on a date with an outrageously thoughtful and caring man. Although she appreciates his attention to her, the sparks do not fly. Yet, her parents and all of her friends and co-workers think he’s wonderful and she can never manipulate the situation to get him alone and break up with him. Throughout the episode, she is constantly “trying to tell him something,” but can’t get the words out. During the final credits, in what turns out to be a dream sequence, we see her at the wedding altar still protesting, “There’s something you’ve got to know . . .”69