Mary Poppins Helps a Gay Dad

Remember Mary Poppins (1964), the classic Disney movie in which a strange magical governess sweeps down from the sky to introduce joie de vivre into the lives of two kids and their stuffy, negligent parents? 

To refresh your memory, the parents are stuffy George Banks, a banker (good name), and Winifred, who is ludicrously obsessed with women's suffrage (imagine, women having the right to vote!).  The two preteen children, Jane and Michael, needed saving from their nascent juvenile delinquency.

Well, now there's a sequel, Mary Poppins Returns (2018).

P. L. Travers actually wrote a sequel to her first book, with Mary Poppins returning a year or so later, dealing with the same family all over again.  But in the movie version, it's been 25 years.  The elder Banks are deceased.  Michael (Ben Whishaw, top photo) has abandoned his dream of becoming an artist and taken a job in banking, like his father, and Jane has grown into a shrill labor activist, like her mother.

Michael has three children (Georgie, John, and Annabel), but no wife, and a lot of financial trouble: he's in debt up to his eyeballs and may lose his house.  So Mary Poppins (Emily Blunt) has a lot of fixing-up to do:

1. Find some way to make Jane less shrill.
2. Restore Michael's faith in art.
3. Rescue the children from a kidnapping animal gang that also happen to be the Bad Guys trying to destroy Michael's career.
4. Find the note that will allow them to save the house.
5. Reveal the corruption at the heart of the British banking industry.
6. Oh, yeah, teach them how to fly kites again.

Bert, the jack of all trades who knew Mary from many of her dysfunctional-family-saving expeditions, has long since retired (Dick Van Dyke appears as the president of the bank).  Mary's new chum is the lamplighter Jack (Lin-Manuel Miranda), who teaches the kids the joy of being working class.

Beefcake:  Not much.  I couldn't even find shirtless photos of most of the male cast in other productions.  This is Tarik Frimpong, who plays one of Jack's coworkers.

Gay subtexts: Lots.

Mary doesn't try to get Michael a girlfriend (or, horrors, become his girlfriend), which is usual in a show about a single parent.  Could it be because Michael is gay?  Ben Whishaw is, after all, and Michael never expresses a glimmer of heterosexual interest (Jane does start dating Jack; have to put the hetero-romance in there somewhere).

Also, Admiral Boom (David Warner), the navy captain from down the street who thinks he's still living on a ship, has a "first mate"/boy toy (actually they're the same age, but they've been living together without the company of women for a number of years, so....).

And Edward Hibbert, who played the swishy-but-straight Gil on Frasier, and is swishy-but-gay in real life, does the voice of Mary's talking umbrella.

Was Mary Poppins Gay?

The Disney film Mary Poppins (1964) stars Julie Andrews as a magical, mysterious governess who introduces her young charges (and their parents) to the importance of having fun, a direct ancestor of such "servant brings joie de vivre to dysfunctional family" tv programs as The Nanny and the Professor, The Nanny, Who's the Boss, Gimme a Break, and Charles in Charge.

After seeing the movie, millions of kids sought out the original novels by P.L. Travers (the first two in 1934-1935, seven later), and were astonished by the original Mary Poppins: much more mythological, a sky goddess, sister to the stars, plus harsh, stern, condescending, demanding, a nasty piece of work.  How had this whimsy-hating sociopath been transformed into someone who says "supercalifragilistic"?

I just saw Saving Mr. Banks (2013), about the 20-year quest of Walt Disney (Tom Hanks) to convince the dour, whimsy-hating, jollity-hating,  Mickey Mouse-hating "my books have a serious purpose" Pamela L. Travers (Emma Thompson) into allowing a Disney film adaptation.  In desperate need of money as her book sales flagged, and desperate to present a hagiography of her father (Colin Farrell), an Irish storyteller saddled with a horrible job in a bank, she finally agreed, but with dozens of startlingly picky stipulations that straitjacket the screenwriter and lyricist (B.J. Novak, top photo)

1. Mr. Banks must not have a moustache (her father didn't), and he must be a positive, caring father.
2. The color red must not appear in the movie.
3. No animation.
4. Mary Poppins (never just "Mary") must not be attractive, must not smile, and must not dance.
5. There should be no hint of romantic interest between Mary Poppins and Cockney jack-of-all-trades Bert (Dick Van Dyke).

That last thing got me wondering: Pamela has no hetero-romance, in either her past flashbacks or in 1960s California.  Could she have been gay?

So I bought a recent biography by Valerie Lawson, Mary Poppins, She Wrote: The Lifeof P.L. Travers.

Travers did have some hetero-romances.  She tended to fall in love with men who were old enough to be her father, and in positions of authority over her, so she could move from disciple to lover.  One was poet and theosophist AE Russell, whose son Diarmund became her agent.

Aside from her hero-worship flings, Travers seemed to prefer the company of woman.  She lived with Madge Burnard, daughter of the editor of Punch, for over a decade.  The two took vacations together and photographed each other nude. "But that does not indicate that they were lovers," Lawson assures us.

Later Travers became an intimate friend of Jessie Orage.  They exchanged letters of "increasing intimacy," according to Lawson, and joined a lesbian social group in Paris.  "But that, of course, is not conclusive proof that they were lesbians," Lawson assures us.

Good grief!  What would be conclusive proof?  A notarized coming-out statement?  This is more evidence than we have for 90% of the lesbians in the world, including most that you  are personally acquainted with.  You have no way of knowing if they are actually having sex  (if that is, in fact, the requirement for being a lesbian, which is ridiculous; you're gay regardless of how often, or if, you have sex). 

Her literary creation, Mary Poppins, is obviously a lesbian, too.  She treats men as friends but has ecstatic, mystical relationships with female elemental spirits, fairies, crones, and stars.  A worshipper of the Divine Feminine.  What other evidence do you need?