Tinker Belles and Evil Queens: The Walt Disney Company From the Inside Out (43 page)

Consequently, while a queer theorist (such as myself) can critique the capitalist imperative underlying the Lesbian/Gay Weekend at Disney World, a queer theorist can also acknowledge that those attending the weekend may (and probably do) span a wide range of sexual identities—a range far beyond the limits established by the official marketing of the event. One account of 1998’s Weekend describes, “Most Gay Days participants wear red T-shirts as a means of identifying each other

. . . and when all of that red found its way to Main Street to view the Magical Moments Parade, we were an overwhelming force. From any vantage point, a sea of red was the view and it was thrilling.”32 Although labeled as a “Lesbian/Gay” event, who’s to say what blend of identities were wearing those red T-shirts, cheering the pre-parade appearances by Cruella DeVil, TweedleDee and TweedleDum, and Suzy and Perla, the two girl mice from
Cinderella,
who came out holding hands? Although paying to participate, the gay men, lesbians, bisexuals, transgendered people and the many other queer individuals who were standing there on Disney World’s Main Street (or marching in the parade as Cast Members) had gathered together to share a communal experience, using Disney to celebrate their lives. The crowd may not have been “resisting” the reading strategy those at Disney had intended for them (to use Stuart Hall’s term). Yet, the estimated thousands that E P I L O G U E

229

were in the Magic Kingdom that day used this corporate space as an opportunity to make connections and bond together in a shared expression of their existence in the face of a still vibrant hatred and oppression.

While not being expressly political, that swath of red that encircled Main Street effectively announced to all in attendance, “We’re here, we’re queer . . . get used to it!”

Notes

NOTES TO THE INTRODUCTION

1. “Cheers n’ Jeers,”
TV Guide
38:28 (July 14, 1990): 31.

2. Joseph Boone, “Rubbing Aladdin’s Lamp,”
Negotiating Lesbian and Gay
Subjects,
Monica Dorenkamp and Richard Henke, eds. (New York: Routledge, 1995), 148. While my attendance was at a regular screening, Boone refers to a special screening benefiting Los Angeles’ AIDS charity, Project Angel Food.

3. B. Ruby Rich, “What’s a Good Gay Film?”
Out
60 (Nov. 1998): 58.

4. Wayne Koestenbaum,
The Queen’s Throat: Opera, Homosexuality and the
Mystery of Desire
(New York: Poseidon Press, 1993), 12.

5. Taken from the “alt.disney.criticism” Internet newsgroup in April of 1997, under the heading “DISNEY: A Homo-Show from Top to Bottom.”

6. Francis J. Haefner, Sr., “Southern Baptists Are Right in Their Disney Stand,”
Lancaster Sunday News,
unknown date or page (ca. Sept. 1997).

7. John Dart, “Southern Baptist Delegates OK Disney Boycott,”
Los Angeles Times
(June 19, 1997): A1.

8. Eddie Shapiro, “Gayety in the Magic Kingdom: Even the Wrath of Pat Couldn’t Stop the Fun,”
4Front Magazine
3:24 (Aug. 19, 1998): 13.

9. In 1993, when Congress began debating the “Gays-in-the-Military”

issue, the Springs of Life Ministry from Lancaster, California, created a video attempting to show the wretched and diseased lives of homosexuals that was then sent out to every single congressperson in order to convince them not to allow homosexuals to enter the armed forces. The video’s title: “The Gay Agenda.”

10. In 1933, Magnus Hirschfeld’s Institute for Sex Research had its research collection destroyed by the Nazis in its first major organized book burning. In 1954, the Kinsey Institute for Sex Research lost most of its funding after it published results that 37 percent of the American men surveyed had engaged in at least one homosexual act (See Alfred Kinsey, et al.,
Sexual Behavior in the Human
Male
[Philadelphia: W. B. Saunders, 1948]). In 1982, scholars traveling to Canada for an international gay history conference had to misrepresent the purpose of their visit to the country for fear of being refused entrance.

11. Ernest Mandel,
Late Capitalism,
trans. Joris De Bres (London: Verso, 231

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1978); Frederic Jameson, “Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,”
New Left Review
146 (July/August 1984): 53–92.

12. John D’Emilio, “Capitalism and Gay Identity,”
Powers of Desire: The Politics of Sexuality,
Ann Snitow, Christine Stansell and Sharon Thompson, eds.

(New York: Monthly Review Press, 1983), 100–113, and Michael Bronski,
Culture
Clash: The Making of Gay Sensibility
(Boston: South End Press, 1984) stand as some of the earlier attempts to analyze how economics affect notions of homosexuality and “gay culture.” More recently, authors such as Michelangelo Signorile,
Life Outside
(New York: HarperCollins, 1997) have begun to analyze and criticize the influence of capitalism on gay and lesbian identity.

13. During World War II, for example, psychologists were able to convince the U.S. Armed Forces that homosexuality was not a criminal problem but a medical one. Allan Berube,
Coming Out Under Fire: The History of Gay Men and
Women in World War II
(New York: Plume, 1991) provides an in-depth account of the examinations and attempted “cures” given to homosexual American soldiers during World War II.

More recently, scientists have been surveying the brain and DNA in order possibly to link certain brain centers or chromosomes that marked an individual as having the propensity to become homosexual. Articles in the popular press reporting these developments include: Natalie Angier, “Male Homosexuality May Be Linked to a Gene,”
New York Times
(July 18, 1993): E2; Thomas H.

Maugh II, “Study Strongly Links Genetics, Homosexuality,”
Los Angeles Times
(July 16, 1993): A1; Chandler Burr, “Genes vs. Hormones,”
New York Times
(Aug.

2, 1993): A15; and Curt Suplee, “Study Provides New Evidence of ‘Gay Gene,’”

Washington Post
(Oct. 31, 1995): A1.

14. On July 13, 1998, a number of conservative groups and fundamentalist Christian ministries started taking out full page ads in major newspapers such as the
New York Times,
the
Washington Post
and the
San Francisco Examiner
tout-ing that with help from groups such as Exodus International, homosexuals could be cured of their sexual orientation. See John Leland and Mark Miller,

“Can Gays ‘Convert’?”
Newsweek
132:7 (Aug. 17, 1998): 47–50.

15. George Chauncey, Jr.,
Gay New York
(New York: Basic Books, 1994).

16. Lillian Faderman,
Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers: A History of Lesbian Life
in Twentieth-Century America
(New York: Penguin, 1992).

17. Michel Foucault,
The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1, An Introduction,
trans.

Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), 101.

18. Ibid., 159.

19. Ibid., 106–107.

20. Alexander Doty,
Making Things Perfectly Queer: Interpreting Mass Culture
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), xv. Lisa Duggan,

“Making It Perfectly Queer,”
Socialist Review
(Apr. 1992): 11–31, provides a good N OT E S TO C H A P T E R 1

233

survey of the development of the term “queer” as it is used by activists and theorists in the late 1980s and 1990s.

21. Michel de Certeau,
The Practice of Everyday Life,
trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984); John Fiske,
Understanding Popular Culture
(Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1989); Henry Jenkins,
Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture
(New York: Routledge, 1992).

22. It must be noted here that, by melding Foucault’s notions of power and social discourse with economic analysis, I venture into slightly choppy theoretical waters. Foucault consistently and definitively distinguishes his ideas from Marxist and para-Marxist perspectives—particularly over the notion of power being localised within “the State.” “Nothing in society will be changed,” Foucault answered in an interview that asked about his opinion on Marxist thought, “if the mechanisms of power that function outside, below and alongside the State apparatuses, on a much more minute scale and everyday level are not also changed.” (“Body/Power,”
Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and
Other Writings, 1972–1977,
trans. Colin Gordon et al., Colin Gordon, ed.

[Brighton: Harvester Press, 1980], 60.) Foucault’s work often focuses on the variety of “specialized” discourses not specifically controlled by the State in the definition and control of sexuality. My work on Disney’s relationship with homosexual culture examines mass media discourse as one of the discourses Foucault describes as existing “alongside” the State in creating conceptions of sexuality and the body.

How Foucault and Marx may oppose or compliment each other are intriguing and important questions—but ones that go beyond the scope of this project (and assuredly require an entire book of their own). For the present discussion, I follow much more heavily a Foucauldian theoretical framework, but envision and employ a concept of an “economic discourse” that is not anymore aligned with “the State” than any of the other discourses that Foucault deconstructs (such as medical or legal discourse). I do not see the “economic discourse” as somehow more important or superceding other discourses—but believe that it must not be ignored either, especially when dealing with an organization focused on production, marketing and sales.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 1

1. Reps. Bob Brooks, Randy Ball, Jerry Burroughs, Marvin Couch, Jim Fuller, Stephen Wise, Carlos Lacasa, Ken Pruitt, Bob Starks, John Trasher, Mike Fassano, Mark Flanagan, Buddy Johnson and Sens. John Grant and Everett Kelly, “An Open Letter to Michael Eisner and the Walt Disney Board,” reprinted in
A League of Their Own
23 (Nov. 1995): 6. All the Florida lawmakers who signed (except Democrat Sen. Kelly) are Republican.

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N OT E S TO C H A P T E R 1

2. For example, in the introduction to their anthology,
From Mouse to Mermaid: The Politics of Film, Gender, and Culture
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), Elizabeth Bell, Lynda Haas and Laura Sells describe how “even our own students . . . are extremely resistant to critique of Disney film . . . complain[ing], ‘You’re reading too much into this film!’ and ‘You can’t say that about Walt Disney!’” (4).

3. Foucault,
History of Sexuality,
86.

4. Ibid., 107.

5. Ibid.

6. Judith Butler,
Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity
(New York: Routledge, 1990), 131. In this quote, Butler is discussing the theories of

“the body” posited by Mary Douglas,
Purity and Danger
(London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969).

7. Chauncey,
Gay New York,
similarly points out the importance of understanding “normal” society’s conceptions in order to more fully appreciate any

“subculture”: “The relationship between the gay subculture and the dominant culture was neither static nor passive: they did not merely coexist but constantly created and re-created themselves in relation to each other in a dynamic, interactive, and contested process” (25).

8. Russell Merritt,
Walt in Wonderland: The Silent Films of Walt Disney
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 18, 20.

9. Ibid., 18.

10. Mikhail Bakhtin,
Rabelais and His World,
trans. Helene Iswolski (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1968). Amongst those who have adapted Bakhtin’s work, the most notable is John Fiske, in such works as
Television Culture
(London: Methuen, 1987) and
Understanding Popular Culture
(Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1989).

11. Merritt, 25. The notion of “the cow” as sidekick applies at least to the bovine’s most important appearance in
The Mechanical Cow.

12. Ibid., 87.

13. Quoted in Leonard Maltin,
Of Mice and Magic: A History of American Animated Cartoons
(New York: Plume, 1987), 98.

14. Merritt, 74.

15. Donald Crafton,
Before Mickey: The Animated Film (1898–1928)
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 294.

16. Ibid., 292.

17.
Poor Papa
was eventually released after the Oswald character had been established through other cartoons.

18. Merritt points out that “if there is a simple thread or theme in these

[silent] years, it is an economic one—Disney’s determination to become a successful independent entrepreneur, beholden to no one” (15).

N OT E S TO C H A P T E R 1

235

19. Ollie Johnston and Frank Thomas,
The Disney Villain
(New York: Hyperion, 1993), 39.

20. Amongst the early Mickeys that were reworked Oswalds were
Mickey’s
Nightmare
(1932) (from
Poor Papa
),
The Karnival Kid
and
When the Cat’s Away.

21. Quoted in Russell Merritt and Karen Merritt, “Mythic Mouse,”
Griffithiana
34 (Dec. 1988): 58–71.

22. Richard Schickel,
The Disney Version
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 1968), 105.

23. Ibid., 106.

24. Henry James Forman,
Our Movie-Made Children
(New York: Macmillan Co., 1933), 51.

25. For example, one of the researchers, Dr. Edgar Dale, stated, “It is apparent that children will rarely secure from the films goals of the types that have animated men like Jenner, Lister, Pasteur, Jesus, Socrates, Grenfell, Edison, Moguchi and Lincoln” (47–48). Such comments occur regularly throughout the study. Among the faulty research methods was “emphasiz[ing] that participants were not expected to strain toward an exaggerated attention or an especial alertness” before testing viewer’s memories of films—not seeming to notice how such an instruction itself alters the viewing of a film. Research on how films affected children’s sleep was collated through the invention of a device called a “hypnograph” that counted periods of restlessness in a child’s sleep (somehow equating all moments of restlessness with the deleterious effects of cinema on the subject). The device was used on children kept at the Ohio Bureau of Juvenile Research, a halfway house for problem children or orphans about to be adopted. Again, researchers seemed not to notice how this cross-section might fail to ideally replicate the social experience of most children. As a side note, it is amazing to me that in the introduction to this work, which actively warns against the “wrong” subject matter being shown to young minds, Forman includes in a list of films that he finds laudable, the German lesbian film
Maedchen in Uniform
(32). My only guess is that Forman could not even conceive of female-female sexual acts and consequently did not see anything “immoral”