Tinker Belles and Evil Queens: The Walt Disney Company From the Inside Out (38 page)

their earliest masturbatory icons—were the men and boys in the underwear and swimwear sections of mail order catalogues.”40

John D’Emilio’s essay on “Capitalism and Gay Identity” describes a shift in the nineteenth century from a system of household production (in which the family grew its own food, made its own clothes, etc.) to a system of wage labor (in which individuals worked for money to buy food and clothes). “Only when individuals began to make their living through wage labor, instead of as parts of an interdependent family unit, was it possible for homosexual desire to coalesce into a personal identity.”41 As these individuals found each other and started developing a network of friendships, various artifacts—a green carnation, a red tie, certain other accessories of clothing—served to alert “members of the club” to each other’s status even if they had never met. In the urban environment of early twentieth-century America, these things were usually purchased rather than handmade.42 The attempt by many urban homosexual individuals at this time to create an “upper-class”

aura by buying “the right things” may have actually had a hand in the appropriation of the word “gay.” Many magazine and newspaper ads in the 1920s pointedly depicted the “gay life” of the upper class, and often such a description was used to advertise men’s products like Arrow shirts.43 It is quite possible that this attempt to affect a certain class status furthered the appropriation of the term “gay” as code for

“homosexual.”44

As places for homosexuals to find each other, to feel safe from the hatred of the rest of society, and to form a separate subculture and eventually a political consciousness, bars were (and possibly
are
) the lifeblood of homosexual communities. By the early 1960s, bars such as the Black Cat and the D’Oak Room in San Francisco were focal points for a growing gay activism as owners and customers fought the city and the police to maintain their right to exist.45 The Stonewall Riots of 1969

were focused around attempts by police to raid and close down the Greenwich Village bar. Bars may have been places for individuals to find others lesbians and gay men, but one had to keep buying rounds in order to stay there. Paris Poirier’s documentary
Last Call at Maud’s
(1992) shows how important one San Francisco bar was to the lesbian community, but it also shows how many of these women resultingly had to deal with alcoholism.

In the 1970s, lesbians and gay male activists began to discover a new weapon that they could use in the fight for “gay liberation.” As 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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part of their protest against a national homophobic campaign led by Anita Bryant, lesbians and gay men across the United States refused to buy Florida orange juice, which used Bryant as its spokesperson. When the boycott succeeded in Bryant’s dismissal, lesbians and gay men found that they wielded an economic strength that no one had previously considered. Corporations noticed that strength as well, which led eventually to the “Gay Moment” of the 1990s. Since bars have figured so highly in the history of twentieth-century gay culture, it is only logical that such companies as Seagram, Tanqueray, Cuervo, Miller Beer and Smirnoff led the way by taking ads out in gay publications or sponsoring events in gay communities. In fact, during the height of the “Gay Moment” in 1994, just in time for the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Stonewall Riots, “Pride” beer debuted, offering a way to display with every swig from the bottle that one was a proud (if inebriated) homosexual individual!

In 1993, Owen Frager and Ron Antman, two openly gay men working in advertising and marketing, started their own company devoted to courting the gay consumer. Ron/Owen and Partners, as the new company was named, stated in a promotional video their conviction that “the gay market was easily targeted and would respond to any company that treated it with respect.” Soon, they had such companies as Perrier, Calistoga, Simon & Schuster and Hiram Walker as clients.

Yet, their approach to these clients points out the limits of recent corporate embrace of the homosexual community. In the video, a narrator assures prospective clients that “you don’t need to march in a gay pride parade” to win gay business. As Gregory Woods theorizes, “the lesbian or gay consumer is welcome . . . to the extent that she or he subscribes (literally) to the values of capitalism.”46 This desire by Ron/Owen’s potential clients to avoid political activism and merely raid the homosexual’s pocketbook fits precisely into Ewen’s notion of “industrial democracy” and did not originate with the “Gay Moment.” Once the harassment of San Francisco’s gay bars abated in the late 1960s, bar owners felt no need to push for further civil rights and requested that activists cul-tivate a “respectable and established” image that precluded militancy.

As Foucault’s first volume of
The History of Sexuality
stresses, the prevailing hegemony is supported by “regulating sex through useful and public discourse.”47 In advertisers’ eyes, speaking to a homosexual customer can be considered useful discourse; speaking to a homosexual activist is not.

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Disney’s relationship with the gay community often mirrors this pattern. Deja, in his studio-sanctioned interviews, makes certain to assert that the work of the homoerotic artist Tom of Finland had no influence on his drawing of
Beauty and the Beast
’s beefy Gaston.48 In the interviews with Deja conducted just before the release of
Aladdin,
he is questioned about some of the jokes in the film, such as the “Genie-as-prissy-tailor” scene. When told that such humor could easily be read as stereotypical and insensitive towards gays, Deja instead “gives an enthusiastic thumbs-up as a reply.”49 This Disney-positive attitude is shared by Schumacher in his interview when the reporter for
The Advocate
questions him on “defecting to the enemy camp” by hiring renowned homophobe Mel Gibson as a voice for
Pocahontas.
50 During a season when ABC was running low in the ratings, the Disney-owned network used the coming-out episode of
Ellen
as a way to spike viewership during the May sweeps period. To heighten ratings during this period, the network extended Diane Sawyer’s interview with Ellen DeGeneres on
PrimeTime Live
over two nights. During the episode, Disney advertised many of its big summer movies, as well as promoted other ABC shows. Furthermore, within the show itself, Disney found a way to do some “product placement.” When Ellen Morgan’s therapist (played by Oprah Winfrey) asks her what she’s going to do now that she’s come out as a lesbian, Ellen parodies Disney’s famous ad campaign and announces “I’m going to Disneyland!” Yet, the network refused to allow the Human Rights Campaign (HRC), a homosexual rights organization, to buy time for a public service advertisement during the episode. ABC informed the HRC that the network held “a policy against issue ads.”51 Since ABC has had no trouble in the past airing ads about solving illiteracy, putting “Children First” or curing illegal drug use, this statement seems disingenuous. While ABC and Disney trumpeted the “issue” of Ellen Morgan’s lesbianism to boost ratings and profits, political statements were not welcome. Further, the network seemed to be antagonistic towards anyone else making a profit off lesbianism with
Ellen,
since the network not only turned down an ad by the HRC but also one by Olivia Cruises, a vacation company aimed at lesbians. Both organizations eventually bought ad time with local affil-iates in certain cities (Atlanta, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Washington, Phoenix, Detroit), but only viewers in these areas saw these TV spots.

Sometimes, “the gay market” is not as cooperative as companies often envision. As capitalism tries to regulate sexual identity, inevitably 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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some rebel against such strictures. In 1995, the lesbian and gay circles of Southern California by and large turned away from the annual “Gay Night” at Disneyland. While not a systemized boycott, word spread throughout the area that Odyssey Tours, who organized the event, was making only token donations of the proceeds to the Aid for AIDS charity—even though the publicity prominently described itself as a charity event. Conceiving of the “Gay Night” as a “con job” on lesbian and gay customers, attendance dropped precipitously. Yet, capitalism learns and adapts to such resistance, creating newer and more nuanced strategies instead of simply admitting defeat. The following year, Odyssey Tours decided not to donate proceeds to any charity and dropped mention of any such charity in their ads for the event. Because many somehow felt that the boycott had worked and made Odyssey more honest, attendance climbed for 1996’s Disneyland “Gay Night”—even though now Aid for AIDS was not even getting a token payment. Examples such as these point out that the relationship between homosexuality and capitalism is a constant interplay between autonomy and exploitation, and that gay community and culture have historically been supported by businesses for profit and not for the advancement of homosexual causes.

WHO’S INVITED TO THE BALL: HOMOSEXUAL

IDENTITY LIMITS IN DISNEY MARKETING

For the lesbian and gay community or subculture to be recognized as a target group by corporations, it had to display the ability to participate in “industrial democracy.” Representation in this theoretical consumer republic rests on the “one dollar, one vote” principle. Some people can cast far more votes than others; those whose income falls below the effective equivalent of “one dollar” in the marketplace are disenfranchised.

Unless a group is 1) identifiable, 2) accessible, 3) measurable and 4) profitable, it is not a viable target for marketing.52 In the past decade, advertisers have begun to see homosexuals as a population group that fits the four requirements: West Hollywood, the Castro district in San Francisco or Greenwich Village in New York City are identifiable gay communities;
The Advocate, Out, Curve
and a wide variety of free “rags” available at bars provide easy accessibility; market analysis such as that done by Walker and Struman Research, Inc. in 1977 and in 1980 of readers of
The
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Advocate
provides measurable data of gay and lesbian communities and lifestyles; and a concept of homosexual couples, each with careers but no children to support, provides theoretical profitability.

As Stabiner’s research into the beginnings of gay marketing in the early 1980s reveals, though, the boundaries of “the gay market” as defined by corporate interests are very narrow. “Seventy percent of [the 1980
Advocate
readership survey] . . . were between the ages of 20 and 40, and their annual median income in 1980 was $30,000 . . . 28 percent

. . . earned over $40,000 in 1980, while nationally, the number of men earning over $35,000 was only 6.9 percent.”53 Furthermore, she points out that “most people who talk about the ‘gay market’ make the implicit assumption that it is a male market.”54 The Ron/Owen video presentation of the 1990s updates this conception of the “gay market” but does not challenge its limited definition of gay identity. While asserting that the average homosexual now makes over $50,000 a year, the video shows almost exclusively white men—and nobody over thirty-five years old. It is this small percentage of young, white middle- or upper-middle-class men that marketing research finds identifiable, accessible, measurable and profitable. All those who define themselves as homosexual but do not fit these additional parameters are not considered or addressed (and there is no conception of such “queer” individuals as bisexuals or transgendered persons). The only other development over the past decade is the gradual address of a lesbian consumer, as Danae Clark describes in her article “Commodity Lesbianism.”55 Her analysis of “lesbian chic” and the various ads chosen to accompany her article show that this development only widens the circle of the “gay market”

to include young, white monied lesbians. The few women appearing in the Ron/Owen presentation fit this narrow conception of the lesbian consumer.

A number of factors work to keep many homosexual individuals outside of the income bracket discussed in the Ron/Owen presentation. Since women in general are still on average paid less than men for comparable work, lesbians must fight an uphill battle to reach this economic level and have a double set of hurdles before them when in a committed relationship. Since homosexual couples are not allowed to legally wed, they are not able to make use of the economic advantages (joint income tax filing, special tax breaks and incentives) given to people who are married. A more basic problem is the wealth of discrimination that often keeps homosexuals from finding decent em-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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ployment, or from being able to advance to higher positions within a company. The discussion in chapter 3 of the barriers placed before homosexual employees trying to move into management positions at Disneyland serves as only one example. For lesbians of color, such problems are tripled in the workplace. Since these people do not have that “one dollar,” advertisers pass over them and focus on the more lucrative homosexual population.

It is not surprising then, that when Disney targets homosexuals, it seems to be limited to white, middle- or upper-middle-class gay men, the subgroup within the homosexual population with the most disposable income. Those with a lesser ability to consume (lesbians dealing with a gender gap in wages, homosexuals of color) are seldom, if ever, addressed, for they are allegedly not as capable of participating in “industrial democracy.” The all-male casts of
Dead Poets Society, Newsies
and
Swing Kids
are predominantly, if not exclusively, white. As the analysis of
Aladdin
in chapter 4 describes, the film’s conception of Arabia seems influenced by Western homosexual fantasies of “the Orient.”

Ellen DeGeneres and the character she plays on
Ellen
fit quite perfectly into the upscale fashionable lesbian image that Clark describes. The company’s publishing arm, Hyperion, published a lightly comic manual/commentary by Jaffe Cohen, Danny McWilliams and Bob Smith in 1995 called
Growing Up Gay: From Left Out to Coming Out.
The authors labeled themselves “Funny Gay Males,” but the picture of proto-queer youth focuses on white middle-class suburbia and ignores any other social experience or racial/ethnic population.56