Tinker Belles and Evil Queens: The Walt Disney Company From the Inside Out (37 page)

The obviousness of this address almost pushes the boundaries of the coded nature of “gay window advertising.”23

Beyond these instances, a number of other TV spots and trailers also evince “vibes.” The trailers for
Tough Guys
and
Off Beat
feature the

“gay” moments in the films prominently—the scenes in a gay bar in the former, the hug in the men’s shower in the latter. The trailer for
Three
Men and a Little Lady
not only shows the little girl asking why her three daddies aren’t married and all of them stammering in response, but constantly shows Tom Selleck’s character trying to escape the clutches of a sexually aggressive woman. At one point, the woman finds him hiding from her and she asks bluntly what he’s doing in the closet! A TV

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spot for
Big Business,
produced by New Wave Productions, entitled

“Man’s World,” perfectly points out the dual reading positions possible. Although ostensibly showing all the men that are romantically after Bette Midler and Lily Tomlin in the film, the ad features the gay couple, Chuck and Graham, more prominently than any other men—at one point displaying Chuck dropping his shirt and standing bare-chested.

The spot also shows a clip of Chuck complaining to Graham, “Look at us! We’re standing outside a
ladies’ room!
” For a straight viewer, this might play as a joke showing how desperate for female companionship these men are; for a gay viewer, this plays as a joke that they are standing outside the wrong restroom! Similarly, in a TV spot for
Tombstone
promoting all the male stars in the production, there is a shot of Jason Priestly as Sister Boy that did not remain in the final cut of the film. The shot shows Priestly’s character lying on a bed as a female prostitute slowly climbs from the foot of the bed towards him. I assume that this shot was chosen in an attempt to make it look like Priestly’s character was heterosexual, but, even before seeing the film and realizing who Sister Boy was, I saw the ad and, reading panic and anxiety in Priestly’s eyes as the woman crawled up over him, wondered just what was going on in that scene.

As is the point of “gay window advertising,” such readings are again based not on denotation but on connotation which, as Miller states, once raised, “tends to light everywhere.”24 As the years have gone on, though, Disney has ventured into more explicit address to gay audiences through marketing, as the advertisements for the special screening of
Aladdin
mentioned above reveal. Joseph Boone points out that “the Disney corporation legitimize[d] its participation in the event

. . . [by] being visually linked, on the publicity flyer, with the king of West coast gay porn.”25 On this ad, both the names of Disney and Sterling appear, and a large drawing of Aladdin with a “come-hither” smirk stares straight at the viewer. Another overt appeal to possible gay customers can be found in the number of interviews given by openly homosexual employees of Disney to various gay publications. In journals such as
The Advocate, Out
and
Frontiers,
reporters have done interviews with animator Andreas Deja, Hollywood Pictures executive Lauren Lloyd and animation executive Tom Schumacher. Of course, employees do not need company approval to be interviewed, but these journals do need permission from the Walt Disney Company to publish the film stills that often accompany the articles. Also, not so coincidentally, the 196

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interviews are usually published just as one of the studio’s films is about to be released to theatres. With the release of
Aladdin,
interviews with Deja appeared in both
The Advocate
and
Frontiers.
In these interviews, Deja “points proudly to . . . examples of gayish humor in
Aladdin,
” such as agreeing that “Jafar might be gay.”26 Tom Schumacher’s interview with
The Advocate
began by describing the supportive environment at Disney for gay and lesbian employees, “but more exciting to Schumacher . . . is this month’s theatrical launch of
The Lion King.
”27

Even with this more direct address, the studio can still keep from disturbing its family market. While these interviews and the Matt Sterling event are more directly geared towards a homosexual subject, all of these are presented in forums far from the eyes of mainstream heterosexual culture. The flyers for the Matt Sterling event were handed out within the gay community, not placed in the
Los Angeles Times.
Interviews with gay employees like Deja and Schumacher or ads for the

“Gay Nights” at the theme parks are only in gay newspapers and periodicals—publications that the public at large have neither access to nor (for the most part) knowledge of.

By the 1990s, Disney seemed to be growing gradually more comfortable with speaking openly to a gay market. Three months before Schumacher’s interview had appeared in
The Advocate,
the company allowed clips from
The Lion King
to be shown during Barbara Walters’ interview with Elton John (who had co-written the songs for the picture).

During this interview, John revised the assertion he had made earlier in his career that he was bisexual, now announcing that he was homosexual. Since this interview was broadcast just before or just after the annual Oscar ceremony (depending on the area of the country), millions of people now knew that an open homosexual had worked on a Disney animated feature. Possibly the most famous and overt instance of marketing a Disney film towards a gay audience involved Howard Ashman. As mentioned before, Ashman was posthumously posited by the studio’s publicity material for
Beauty and the Beast
as the guiding force of the project. Almost all of the articles written about the film spent much of their time mourning the loss of Ashman, and they all prominently displayed the fact that Ashman was a gay man who had died as a result of the AIDS virus. This coverage was not isolated to the gay press. Stories in
Premiere
magazine, reviews in the
Los Angeles Times,
the
New York Times, Variety
and
Newsweek
magazine, all mainstream publications, were part of the phenomenon.28 With such widespread visibil-YO U ’ V E N E V E R H A D A F R I E N D L I K E M E

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ity, it would be impossible
not
to see the place of a gay constitutency in the mass audience that
Beauty and the Beast
was appealing to.

Winning such explicit address from a major studio is quite stunning. Yet, such a celebratory reaction ignores how marketing strategies work to channel the homosexual individual into behavior and consciousness that benefits Disney’s profit margin more than the individual. A simple example would be the use of “window advertising,”

which keeps the gay consumer “in the closet,” since the aim of this marketing strategy is to not let the straight consumer know what’s going on. By employing this type of marketing, lesbian/gay audiences are told that they are appreciated ($7.50 is $7.50 no matter who shells it out for a ticket), but that they must stay off to one side and not jeopardize Disney’s larger public reputation. On a larger scale, reaching out to a gay market exemplifies Mandel’s concept of “late capitalism,” in which Frederic Jameson sees “a new and historically original penetration and colonization of Nature and the Unconscious.”29 By this, Jameson contends that capitalism now can isolate and commodify time, space and even psychic spaces or definitions of identity. As Bill Short writes:

“Many of us who wish to maintain a gay identity, actually buy that identity. . . . We are forced to prove we exist by projecting a gay image or lifestyle.”30 Consequently, when engaged in marketing to homosexuals, the Walt Disney Company—not the audience—attempts to define the identity of the gay community, defining it to suit its own needs.

Stuart Ewen speaks of modern industrial capitalism (and the advertising which supports it) as endowing the mass audience with an

“industrial democracy” in which the individual is made to believe that freedom and equality are defined as the ability to consume and acquire, effectively supplanting the desire for actual social reform.31

A dissatisfied individual is encouraged to create change not through protest and revolt, but through consumption, which only reinforces the established system which made the individual dissatisfied initially. “‘Advertising has stimulated more work,’ rejoiced the Ayer agency [in the 1920s]. Americans so valued labor-saving devices that they were ‘willing to work harder for them.’”32 For example, in the 1920s, ads celebrated women’s suffrage by promoting the liberating feeling of smoking cigarettes. With regard to the call for gay rights, the influx of corporate interest in the gay community encourages lesbians and gay men to show their pride and political commitment by buying a solid gold “AIDS ribbon,” a rainbow bumper sticker or a 198

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ticket to Disneyland’s Gay Night rather than protesting for domestic-partner benefits or national health care.

Much has been said about the “birth” of homosexuality, when the sexual act was no longer seen as an isolated incident, but an indication of a personality or a lifestyle. Most of what has been written has focused on the medical, religious and legal definitions of homosexual identity. It is also important to see how capitalism intersects with science, religion and the law (areas Foucault and others have analyzed) to shape the social discourse on homosexuality and how it attempts to inculcate that discourse into individual psyches who label themselves as gay men or lesbians through advertising. Finding examples of how capitalism attempts to regulate homosexual identity is not hard in the 1990s. In fact, many people were celebrating the early 1990s as “the Gay Moment,” in which lesbian and gay male culture seemed to be the “new thing,” the

“latest fad.” Tied into the increased presence of lesbian/gay issues on then presidential candidiate Bill Clinton’s agenda, and the growth of

“New Queer Cinema,” was a veritable onslaught of merchandise and cultural artifacts available for purchase to prove that one was either

“out and proud” or at least hip and accepting of someone else’s

“lifestyle.” Various gay organizations and businesses suddenly found major corporations willing to underwrite or sponsor community projects. Large conglomerates now took out advertisements in lesbian and gay publications. In 1995, the furniture franchise IKEA released a TV

spot in select areas of the United States, showing a gay male couple buying a dining room table. A mainstream fashion trend, eventually labeled

“lesbian chic,” started hitting the runways as well as fashion magazines like
Elle
and
Mirabella
and eventually places like J. Crew catalogues.33

Numerous mail-order catalogues emerged specifically aimed at gay consumers. Beyond the earlier established International Male catalogue, there appeared Undergear, Shocking Gray, M2M, Tzabaco, and a wealth of new glossy magazines for lesbians and gay men such as
Out,
Genre, Men’s Style
and for lesbians
Deneuve.
34 And in each of these magazines there were (and still are) pages and pages of ads encouraging readers to buy this new onslaught of “gay culture.”

Recent recognition by corporate America of the lesbian and gay community can be read as a step forward towards equality, using the power of the dollar to get a voice. But many others have expressed un-ease and worry over the implications of this “Gay Moment” in market-YO U ’ V E N E V E R H A D A F R I E N D L I K E M E

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ing. A letter from a “Ms. Beverly Hills” published in the Oct. 19, 1994

issue of the gay ’zine
Planet Homo
angrily announced: Pride(TM) is everywhere I look. We’ve been buying our Pride(TM) by the train load. We wear Pride(TM), we eat Pride(TM), sleep in Pride(TM), we drink Pride(TM), we have all those Pride(TM) festivals.

HELLO, HELLOOO . . . CHECK PLEASE! . . . I have a shocking news flash for you darlings: YOU CANNOT BUY, WEAR, EAT OR DRINK

PRIDE!!!35

As early as 1984, Michael Bronski was criticizing this development, claiming that a “gay identity” and a marketed “gay lifestyle” are not necessarily the same thing.36 While insightfully deconstructing the capitalist discourse of marketing a “gay lifestyle,” Bronski’s analysis assumes that a “gay identity” is somehow “truer” or “purer” than a marketed “lifestyle.” By exposing how identity is created by the economic discourse, Bronski unwittingly helps to naturalize the creation of gay identity by other social discourses. In recognizing the limitations placed upon the definition of homosexuality by advertising, one should point out that gay identity is becoming more obviously constructed, not that it is being constructed for the first time.

The growth of capitalism in Western culture has influenced the identity of homosexuals for over a hundred years, not just in this

“Gay Moment.” Jeffrey Weeks, in his work on nineteenth-century male prostitutes, states that “perhaps the only people who lived wholly in the [emerging homosexual] subculture were the relatively few ‘professionals.’”37 Whether in Weeks’ London or in the Bowery of New York City that George Chauncey describes, communities of male prostitutes were some of the earliest groupings of individuals who consciously based their identity on their same-sex desires.38 Before this point, evidence seems to show that most of Western society viewed homosexual acts as deviant behavior and not the indication of an entire personality type. The prostitution industry’s influence on the beginnings of modern gay identity is apparent. As Weeks describes, “by the 1870’s, any sort of homosexual transaction, whether or not money was involved, was described as ‘trade.’”39 Similarly tying sexual desire to “bodies for sale,” Gregory Woods points out that “one often hears of gay men whose first images of sexy men—

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