Are There Gay Characters in Disney's Animated Films? The Question Is Harder Than It Looks

As a company that promises to "bring joy to families around the world," Disney champions the safest values available — which is what most big companies do. Lately, though, that approach keeps running into "crises."

Editor's note: This is the third year in a row that QDaily has run a June LGBTQI Pride Month series. Last June the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 5–4 that same-sex marriage is legal nationwide. At the same time, more and more people began putting money into the "pink economy," betting on this group as a market, and showing off their own political correctness by voicing support for it... But this June, a gay bar in Orlando was the site of the largest mass shooting in American history. For the LGBTQI community, nothing is as bad as feared, or as good as hoped. This year we are trying to take a wider view. We will keep covering this community, but we will also look at gender more broadly — which is usually what shapes sexual orientation in the first place, and what produces an LGBTQI community at all. We will publish five pieces over Pride Month. This is the third.

Finding Dory is out, and to nobody's surprise its opening weekend took in more than $130 million, the biggest opening ever for an animated film.

What moviegoers are talking about most, though, isn't Dory the blue tang finding her parents. It's a pair of passers-by who are on screen for less than three seconds. One woman wears a dark purple coat and a crisp short haircut; her companion has shoulder-length hair and is dressed in athletic gear. They have been read as the first lesbian couple in a Pixar film.

Is that what they are? USA Today asked director Andrew Stanton, and got this: "They can be whoever they want to be. There's no right or wrong answer."

That scrupulously politically correct answer disappointed a lot of people. The Daily Beast published a piece that said: "After all that interpretation, it is ironic and sad that what appears on screen is so vague and so brief... When will the Mickey Mouse company stop being so conservative?"

Counting Finding Dory, this is the fourth episode of its kind for Disney in six months. Before it, fans called for Princess Elsa to get a girlfriend and for Captain America to get a boyfriend. In Zootopia, Judy the rabbit's neighbors were read as a gay couple. Disney, it seems, has become one target of the LGBT push for equal rights.

For LGBT people this is a natural choice. Disney is, after all, the biggest entertainment company in the world, and if it were willing to put LGBT characters in its films, that would be an enormous encouragement to the cause.

But Disney's official position has always been noncommittal. The company probably isn't homophobic — this March, when the state of Georgia was about to pass an anti-gay bill, Disney protested and said that if the bill passed it would stop shooting its films there. Yet whenever its own products are involved — films, comics, theme parks — what it actually does is nothing.

Every year on the first Saturday in June, more than a hundred thousand gay people, along with their friends, families and supporters, come to Orlando for a parade, and twenty to thirty thousand of them go into the Disney parks. "Gay Days at Walt Disney World" has grown into one of the largest gay parades in the country.

Disney neither supports the event nor opposes it. It tells its staff to treat the visitors as ordinary summer guests. Looking the other way is Disney's standard method with situations like this.

All of this recalls "Don't Ask, Don't Tell", the policy the U.S. military began enforcing in 1994, which drew constant criticism because anti-gay behavior in the ranks only got worse under it. The number of gay service members discharged each year rose from 617 in 1994 to 1,273 in 2001. In 1999, Barry Winchell was murdered for being gay.

"Don't Ask, Don't Tell" was repealed outright in 2011. What drove that was an ideological contest between Democrats and Republicans — put simply, the Obama administration needed votes. In the 2012 presidential race, Obama treated the repeal as an achievement and advertised it heavily.

Fights like this, waged over law and politics, are easier to push forward under cover of the two parties' agendas. In Disney's case, though, you can't wave a political flag to make a commercial company change its attitude. In a capitalist country like the United States, one basic consensus is that business and politics are separate spheres, and using state power to force a studio to add gay characters would itself cross that line.

When Disney weighs putting LGBT characters in its films, the first thing it has to consider is whether it will lose viewers.

That depends entirely on how Americans feel about LGBT people, and the reality is that the United States is not necessarily a very tolerant country. The Supreme Court did rule to legalize same-sex marriage, but four of the nine justices voted against it. And according to a Pew survey, in 2016, 55% of Americans supported same-sex marriage while 37% opposed it.

Worse than the problems on the surface is the prejudice people carry inside. A psychology study from 1997 found that when people heard words associated with Black people, negative words came to mind more readily, and when they heard words associated with white people, positive ones did. What that implies is that however many people say they hold nothing against gay people, the prejudice inside is still there.

"Divided" may be the best word for how Americans feel about homosexuality. In that situation, adding an LGBT character obviously gives Disney something to worry about.

What makes it more complicated is that Disney has always called itself a family entertainment company, with every film aimed at mom, dad and the kids. The question that follows is whether gay content should be shown to children at all.

Research says that the earlier children encounter this material, the more easily they shed prejudice — but that research has come under attack from conservatives. Their position is that even if homosexuality is neutral, not everything neutral belongs in front of children. Sex is the comparison: people broadly accept the idea that "sex is neutral," and films with too much of it still get an adults-only rating.

Whether sex and homosexuality can be compared this way is itself an open question. But until it has a settled answer, or at least a broad social consensus, it will remain a major obstacle to Disney adding LGBT characters.

In fact this is not Disney's problem alone. All of Hollywood has trouble fitting LGBT characters into its films.

According to a GLAAD report, of the 126 films the major Hollywood studios produced in all of 2015, only 22 had LGBT characters — and that count includes not just characters who are LGBT themselves but films whose actors are.

GLAAD also has a second measure, the Vito Russo Test, which judges how important those characters are to the film. Of the 22, only 8 passed. In the report, GLAAD noted specifically that passing the test does not mean the portrayal of LGBT people is fair or objective.

This is barely different from the treatment LGBT people got in films decades ago. In the 1920s, gay men were the most common LGBT image on screen, usually given flamboyant, feminine traits, and "sissy" was the word used to describe them. The stereotype was itself a way of making gay men ridiculous.

By the Depression, gay images were being used as a curiosity. In 1932 Paramount released The Sign of the Cross, in which some scenes show homosexuality bluntly. The tyrant Nero has the soft manner of a matinee idol, with a barely clothed slave boy kneeling at his side. In another scene the empress Poppaea asks her girlfriend to bathe with her.

"Why would a major studio like Paramount release such an explicit film? Part of the reason lay in the Depression and Hollywood's shrinking audience. To cope, filmmakers began using more extreme images, themes and dialogue to lure audiences into the movies," Harry Benshoff and Sean Griffin write in Queer Images: A History of Gay and Lesbian Film in America.

After the war, gay images were tied more often to sociopathy and mental illness. In Hitchcock's 1948 film Rope, the male characters Brandon and Phillip kill a boy. They share a one-room apartment; Brandon is domineering, Phillip visibly on edge. Hitchcock, thinking of the censors, never says outright that they are gay, but every one of these details points to it.

In June 1969 the Stonewall riots broke out, and LGBT people began speaking out in public for the first time — the start of the modern gay rights movement worldwide. That happened to coincide with Hollywood's American New Wave, when young directors started borrowing heavily from European technique and subject matter, and LGBT people came into their field of view.

A month before Stonewall, Midnight Cowboy opened. Ratso, played by Dustin Hoffman, and Joe, played by Jon Voight, develop a feeling for each other that is there and not there. In the film it is purely platonic, and it is also the only sincere attachment in the story. This first Hollywood film to portray feeling between two men honestly won three Oscars.

1970's The Boys in the Band was bigger in scope. It shows a birthday party attended almost entirely by young gay men, until Alan, a straight friend of the host, Michael, barges in. As the dramatic conflict plays out, each man's personality unfolds, and so do the difficulties each of them faces for being gay.

This short golden age was broken soon enough by George Lucas's Star Wars. The American New Wave stopped dead, and Hollywood returned to its classic model, the effects-driven blockbuster. 1975's The Rocky Horror Picture Show was the last Hollywood film of the 1970s with gay images in it; after that, films with gay characters went underground, made mostly by LGBT people themselves.

That has lasted to this day. The 1980s brought a turn toward LGBT films as art, and the 1990s a wave of independent films about LGBT people, but LGBT life still cannot become a mainstream subject for Hollywood storytelling. "While contemporary Hollywood does put some resources into films on such subjects, its narrow ways of telling a story still make an LGBT film hard to produce and distribute," is the conclusion reached in Queer Images: A History of Gay and Lesbian Film in America.

Compared with Hollywood, the game industry has been far more open to LGBT images. As early as 1988's Super Mario Bros. 2 there was Birdo, a dinosaur who, though male, thinks of himself as a girl and prefers to be called Birdetta.

When The Sims came out in 2000, the publisher EA let players form same-sex relationships in the game. In 2009 the game supported same-sex marriage. This June, the latest update to The Sims 4 let players put jewelry or high heels on male characters and a suit vest on female ones. For a sandbox game, The Sims series has in fact reported society back to us accurately.

Has the image of gay people in film and television gotten better by now? That is hard to settle. It is true that films like The Danish Girl, Brokeback Mountain and Carol now treat LGBT people seriously, and that directors like Bryan Singer have turned the mutants in X-Men into a metaphor for them.

But in many more films and shows, being LGBT has become a consumer good.

Sherlock's Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman are the best example. While promoting The Hobbit, Cumberbatch was asked whether there was anything between him and his friend Freeman. He made a point of it: oh, of course, Freeman got him the contract, looks after him on set, and even knows what temperature he likes his bath water.

This is called maifu, "selling rot." The word "selling" hints that the gay subtext is there to catch the eyes of fujoshi fans, a fan economy in disguise. Handling gay images this way still means selling LGBT people as merchandise rather than respecting them.

At bottom this is no different from Disney's "don't ask, don't tell" — both are calculations of pure commercial interest. Sherlock piles on LGBT elements because fujoshi fans like them. Disney refuses LGBT images because family audiences don't, and it doesn't want its brand touched.

Society as a whole is changing, LGBT people are starting to get the respect they should have, and sexual orientation is starting to stop being a standard by which people judge each other. But all of it is a long way from success.

Last June, in Obergefell v. Hodges, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the right to same-sex marriage is protected by the Constitution, that no state may legislate against it, and that same-sex marriage is legal nationwide — changing what the word "family" means across the country.

That was a milestone for LGBT equality, but its meaning shouldn't be overstated, because it happened only because Obama was in office and could nominate liberal justices, leaving the Supreme Court with exactly one more liberal than conservative. A law that sounds certain covers over a public that is anything but.

For a company like Disney, relentlessly positive and relentlessly politically correct, this is a hard problem. Until society reaches a consensus about LGBT people, following the new political correctness and pleasing every kind of moviegoer are opposed to each other; you cannot have both.

Add a few figures that leave room for the imagination, but say nothing definite about them: you can see that the ever-cautious Disney is testing how Americans will react, whether it's Gazelle in Zootopia or the passers-by in Finding Dory.

So it is worth saying once more: changing the law is easier because two parties are fighting over ideology, while getting rid of the prejudice in people's hearts has only just begun.