Tinker Belles and Evil Queens: The Walt Disney Company From the Inside Out (41 page)

Ironically, Disney’s next animated feature was a version of Victor Hugo’s
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
(1996), in which the villain Frollo is described as a man who “longed to purge the world of vice and sin,”

but significantly “saw corruption ev’rywhere except within.” He looks upon the hunchback Quasimodo as an “unholy demon.” Locking him up in the bell tower of Notre Dame, Frollo teaches Quasimodo to feel ashamed of his “wretchedness.” While Quasimodo is not expressly a homosexual character, his “abnormal” status, which forces him to remain “closeted,” certainly resonates with queerness—particularly when he climbs the balustrades and parapets of the cathedral while singing about his desire to live at least one day “Out There.” In the opening number, “The Bells of Notre Dame,” the picture explicitly compares the queerness of Quasimodo to the righteousness of Frollo, asking “Who is the monster and who is the man?”

Quasimodo’s “one day out there” is Disney’s first specific rendition of the medieval Carnivale or, as the number “Topsy Turvy Day” describes it, “the day we mock the prig and shock the priest.” The film’s narrative specifically pivots on which behavior is more Christian: punishing those who fall outside the accepted norms, or welcoming and celebrating the diversity of humankind. Whereas the former is plainly represented by Frollo, the latter is represented by Quasimodo and the gypsy girl Esmerelda, who bond over their shared status as “outcasts”

(she for her ethnicity, he for his physical appearance). When in the cathedral, Esmerelda offers a song to God, “God Help the Outcasts,”

and ponders “I thought we
all
were the children of God” while the more respectable parishioners pray for wealth, fame and glory. Similarly, while Quasimodo views Esmerelda as akin to “Heaven’s Light,” Frollo views the woman as “Hellfire.”

Frollo is not a simple stereotype of hatred and persecution though, and, in the stunning number “Hellfire,” Frollo is seen castigating him-218

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self for having the same feelings that he finds heinous in others. In the song, he plainly states his burning passion for Esmerelda, one of the most open displays of sexual desire within a Disney animated feature.

What makes this number even more remarkable is that Frollo’s hatred for Esmerelda is shown to stem from the fear of his own feelings. Instead of taking responsibility and learning to accept his emotions, Frollo feels he is “turning to sin” and feels he must punish the girl. “It’s not my fault, it’s not my blame,” he cries out, “It’s the gypsy girl, the witch, who sent this flame!” Frollo’s inculcation of certain fervent religious attitudes about sexuality has led him to consider his own desires as hor-rid. His shame so overwhelms him that, rather than accepting his emotions, he denies culpability and blames others.

While Frollo’s simultaneous lust for/loathing of Esmerelda is quite plainly heterosexual, his behavior mirrors conclusions from studies about homophobia. Research seems to support Gregory M. Herek’s contention that homophobia tends to spring from “unconscious conflicts about one’s own sexuality or gender identity” and that these feelings are then “attributed to lesbians and gay men through a process of projection.” Herek continues, “such a strategy permits people to externalize their conflicts and to control their own unacceptable urges by rejecting lesbians and gay men (who symbolize those urges) without consciously recognizing the urges as their own.”5 Frollo’s grim determination to punish Esmerelda stems from his attempt to deny that even he himself has “urges” that fall outside the rigid parameters of social acceptance.

Somehow, the “family-values” groups and Christian conservatives did not protest
Hunchback
’s manifest critique of religious zealotry aimed at demonizing social outcasts. But that didn’t mean that they weren’t searching through the Disney catalogue looking for proof that Disney was promoting some sort of “gay agenda.” Protesters pointed out that the Disney-owned Miramax distributed the British film
Priest
in 1995, which deals with a Catholic priest’s coming out. Similarly, they noted that Disney owned Hyperion Press which had published
Growing Up Gay.
Just as Touchstone Pictures was releasing the film
Powder
in late 1995, word spread that the director, Victor Salva, had once served time for engaging in sexual activity with a minor. With this information, many found new resonances in the film, which sympathetically focused on the specialness of a literally closeted teenage male (having been shut up in a cellar his entire childhood).

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This “homosexual” reading spread not so much within the les-

bian/gay community but within various conservative and fundamentalist communities. This remarkable development vastly changes the terms of the relationship between homosexuals, Disney and the larger society. Whereas certain lesbians and gay men in the past appreciated Disney differently than did the larger society (particularly those who were arrayed against their existence), now both sides were beginning to read Disney texts in similar fashions. By the mid-1990s, a battle for meaning over Disney increasingly ceased to exist. Homosexuals and Christian fundamentalists both agreed that “something queer was going on.” The difference initially seemed to be only that one group was happy about it and the other was horrified. Yet, in closely examining

“gay readings” by conservative protest groups, subtle and important distinctions in reading strategies emerge.
Priest
and
Growing Up Gay
were explicitly and avowedly concerned with homosexuality and could not be read in any other fashion. The announcement of Victor Salva’s arrest record also created clear-cut overt evidence of homosexuality for conservative groups. The entire
Ellen
controversy in 1996 and 1997 became another example of open homosexual representation that protestors could easily target.

These were not the only instances of “scandalous” readings of Disney; some went much more deeply into the texts. Rumors of subliminal sexual messages found in videotapes of Disney’s recent animated features began circulating. While these rumors weren’t specifically homosexual in nature, such accusations imagined Disney as a hotbed of vice and lewdness—an image that would obviously intersect with arguments that the company was trying to foster a “gay agenda.” Some saw a turret on the undersea castle sketched on the video box for
The Little
Mermaid
as an erect penis. Others claimed they could see the word “sex”

spelled out in a dust cloud in one scene from
The Lion King.
Still others swore they could hear someone whispering “All good teenagers, take off your clothes” on the soundtrack of the videos for
Aladdin.
In the laser disc of
Who Framed Roger Rabbit?,
someone noticed that one could freeze-frame on a certain section of the film which showed that voluptuous Jessica Rabbit wasn’t wearing any panties beneath her dress.

Again, it would seem that these close (
really
close) textual analyses are very similar to the lesbian/gay or “queer” readings discussed throughout this book—finding messages or meanings that might resonate for a sexually marginalized group. Closer examination of these 220

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readings reveals crucial differences between those protesting Disney and “queer” individuals, differences that were highlighted by a clever hoax perpetrated on the Internet in December of 1995. Just as the rumors of subliminal messages spread through various newsgroups, web pages and chat rooms, a mass e-mailing—claiming to be authored by Donald Wildmon—informed readers of the “obscene pornography disguised as ‘family entertainment’” hiding within Disney’s current release
Toy Story
:

The main characters, “Woody”—note sexual reference—and “Buzz”—

note drug reference—are owned by a child in a single-parent household in which the father is noticeably absent. “Woody” and “Buzz”

have equally disturbing toy friends, including a sex-obsessed talking potato, a sex-obsessed Bo Beep doll who cannot keep her hands (or lips) off “Woody,” and an Etch-a-Sketch whose “knobs” must be “adjusted” to produce results.6

As Karl Cohen’s research bears out, the announcement was a fake. The American Family Association publicly denied authoring the letter or calling for a boycott of the film. In analyzing the statement, the AFA pointed out various errors in the memo:

First, it gives the wrong website address for the AFA. It mentions an article about
Toy Story
in the December issue of the
AFA Journal,
but there was no December issue and the November/December combined issue did not discuss
Toy Story
. . . . In fact, the AFA has said positive things about the feature. The July 1996
AFA Journal
has an article about people going to good films at the box office, and it lists
Toy Story
as one of several films that “brought a broad audience of moral Americans back to local theaters.”7

Clearly, someone had observed the sex-phobic readings of Disney by Wildmon’s organization and other groups and expertly parodied the subliminal messages they were finding.

Many who read the original statement did not question its authenticity. A number of gay-rights groups quickly jumped on the memo as “an example of the irrational backlash against Disney” after its decision to grant domestic-partner benefits.8 The basically whole-sale acceptance of the announcement’s authorship makes it instruc-E P I L O G U E

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tive, for obviously the anonymous author understood how conservative groups were reading Disney. The easiest thing to note, and the main source of humor in the statement, is its overt obsession with sex.

All of the “authentic” subliminal readings are specifically focused on messages about sex—not sexual orientations, lesbian/gay cultures, etc., but sex. They do not point to, say, men wearing earrings or a comment about some female character going to Michigan this summer. Rather, they look for references to sexualized areas of the body or sex acts (and, in the case of
The Lion King,
the word “sex” itself).

Since the readings are done by individuals who stand outside of non-straight subcultures, their ignorance leads them to focus specifically on sex itself. Ironically, in their attempts to find evidence of the company’s new licentiousness, these individuals seem to be as obsessed with sex as those they are purportedly condemning!

These subliminal readings point out how the protestors are able to conceive of sexuality—as separate and easily marked off. Yet, as I’ve argued throughout, a
number
of discourses work to define sexual identity, and a conception of sexuality based solely on concrete sexual acts ignores the wealth of other factors involved. Fundamentalists seem to think that the hidden meaning in
The Little Mermaid
with which non-straight individuals might find resonance is the penis-turret; fundamentalists do not seem aware that non-straights could appreciate the implications of an outsider finding happiness with a forbidden love.

Similarly, these protestors seem unaware of the camp value of Disney in lesbian/gay culture. Conservative readings would rather focus on what we do than on how we feel. The protests over
Priest, Powder
and
Growing Up Gay
also factor here. While the texts or, in the case of
Powder,
the publicity surrounding the text, are obviously more overt than the supposed subliminal messages, their explicitness similarly allows conservative protest groups to mark a clear line between the approved and the disapproved.

What protestors seem to not acknowledge—and probably do not

want to acknowledge—are those readings of Disney that blur the boundaries of sexual identities. While going out of their way to convince people that the word “sex” has been secretly airbrushed into the night sky of
The Lion King,
there is no awareness that Timon and Pumbaa could be read as a gay couple. While swearing that someone on
Aladdin
’s soundtrack is trying to covertly urge young viewers to strip naked, there is no comment on the gender-bending of the Genie or his 222

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gay-tinged jokes, much less the deep emotional bond between the Genie and Aladdin. Am I, in response, claiming that the Genie and Aladdin are somewhere engaging in homosexual acts and that the protestors just haven’t caught on yet? Nothing of the sort. Rather, I am pointing out that, while the protestors are looking for clear-cut black-and-white moments (either overtly or subliminally), most non-straight individuals seem drawn to a more fluid idea of sexuality in Disney.

Conservatives seem to work under the assumption that, unless two buddies are seen kissing and groping each other in a Disney text, the two
must be
heterosexual. In contrast, non-straight consumers of Disney are less strict: Aladdin and the Genie may not be explicit gay lovers, but who’s to say where intense heterosexual male bonding ends and homosexual affection begins? This fluidity is precisely what is meant in the recent appropriation of the term “queer,” and precisely what conservative groups want to keep at bay through the rigid demarcation of categories.

Whatever the similarities and differences in how fundamentalists and non-straights were reading Disney, there was no question that both sides ended up sharing the same weapons for battle: dollars and cents.

On June 18, 1997, less than two months after Ellen DeGeneres and her character Ellen Morgan came out, the Southern Baptist Convention in Dallas voted that its 15.7 million followers (the largest Protestant denomination in the country) should “refrain from patronizing the Disney Co. and any of its related entities.”9 Lisa Kinney brought the convention to a standing ovation by vowing that the resolution “will affirm to the world that we love Jesus more than our entertainment.”10

Although the measure passed at the convention, many Southern Baptists not at the convention disagreed with the boycott. Bryan Chloe, a youth director at a Los Angeles church, declared that he “would be very surprised if the kids at church are not allowed to have any Disney products, wear their T-shirts, watch Disney videos and go to Disneyland during summer vacation.”11 In fact, when asked about rumblings of a boycott back in 1996, Ralph Reed, then executive director of the Christian Coalition, told the
Los Angeles Times,
“I’m taking my kids to Disneyland.”12