Disney+, the brand that closets everybody or brags about its inclusivity while reducing queerness to a subtext, actually has a Pride Month category. I was curious to see what would be included.
1. High School Musical the Musical the Series: apparently at tv series based on the musical version of the movie High School Musical, which famously refused to let any of the high school drama club members be gay because "teenagers are too young to have sex." Apparently there is a gay character (played by Joe Serafini), who actually gets to date;
2. Out: a Disney/Pixar short about a man who is afraid to come out to his visiting parents, so he changes places with his dog, and discovers that they kind of know already.
3. Howard: "the untold story" of Howard Ashman (1950-1991), the lyricist behind "some of the most well-known family films in the world," like Aladdin and Beauty and the Beast.
4. The Little Prince(ss): a Disney/Pixar short. Chinese-American Gabriel, a little boy, loves ballet, wears pink, and plays with dolls, which is fine with his parents but upsets the father of his new friend Rob.
5. Growing Fangs: Another short. Mexican-American Val, half-vampire, attends a special monster school. Then Jimmy (Gilberto Ortiz), her best friend from her old human school, shows up, forcing her to reveal her secret. Val also has a crush on a girl.
6. The Runaways. A Marvel universe tv series. Six teenagers battle their parents, who run a criminal organization called Pride. So that's the Pride Month connection? Not exactly the same thing.
7. The Owl House: an animated tv series: a girl named Luz stumbles into a magical world, and eventually studies to become witch. She has a subtext same-sex romance with the witch Amity, which opens slightly for a dance in Episode 16. Apparently it took a lot of negotation to get the slight closet-opening past the Disney suits.
8. Big Shot: John Stamos as a famous basketball coach forced to teach high school (the perennial high school teaching as punishment! A job which apparently anybody can get, without the degree in education and student-teaching year that you need in the real world). It's an all-girl school, but there are lots of dreamy boys around to provide "love interests" (like Dale Whibley). Also two of the girls have a same-sex romance.
9. Diary of a Future President. The President of the U.S. reminisces to when she was in sixth grade. I'm out of time, so I'll have to review it separately.
The Disney Channel is very gay friendly
ReplyDeleteI disagree. It keeps closeting its characters or having a blink-and-you-miss-it gay subtext in the last scene of the last episode. "High School Musical" had no gay characters because "the characters are too young to have sex." When Disney discovered that Patrick on "The Suite Life of Zack and Cody" was played by a gay man, they almost fired him, but agreed to keep him on as long as his character was straight. "Ducktales" introduced two gay dads, in an unspeaking part in the third episode of the last season; they never appeared or were referred to again.
DeleteYes maybe then but if you see the shows they run now like the ones you list they are gay friendly up to a point of course
DeleteOwl House is good. Really good.
ReplyDeleteI think a lot of it more reflects international markets, see also the Ancient One not being Tibetan.
It is funny watching Mark Hamill subvert Disney's standards for Luke Skywalker, but then, he still loves queering Batman and the Joker with Kevin Conroy at cons.
Runaways is on the list because a large chunk of the cast is queer (or at least they were in the comics)
ReplyDeleteActually it's pretty funny. I don't know when mutants became queer coding, but I do know it became pretty well-known, even spreading to DC, a universe where the X factor doesn't even exist. Yet Disney for whatever reason chooses to censor that history.
ReplyDeleteTheir prerogative.