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Credit: ITMDisney has recently become a very huge, somewhat unexpected ally in the fight for gay rights, especially in Florida, where they are currently battling it out with Gov Ron DeSantis in a fight that can all be traced back to former CEO Bob Chapek and his response to the politician’s infamous “Don’t Say Gay” bill.
Disney has been criticized in the past for what some have deemed to be paltry attempts to support and represent the LGBTQIA+ community in their movies – from the police officer in Onward who mentions her girlfriend to a brief glimpse of a lesbian couple in Finding Dory.
The reason these “moments” were so criticized – at least, one of the reasons – because they were giving audiences even less to chew on than some of the subtly-hinted-at queer representation that had come out of Disney movies in the past.
While Disney may not have been able to do anything too “openly gay” until very recently, its films are still filled with references, homages, and winks to LGBTQ+ people – because artists and creatives are so frequently queer, this should come as no surprise.
Without further ado: These are the gayest things in Disney History.
Honorable Mentions: Disney’s Many Queer-Coded Characters
First thing is first: Disney obviously has a massive list of characters who, for whatever reason, just seem really gay. There might not be any substantial evidence or allegories outside of the movies themselves that point to this, but they set off the gaydar of many people who would know, and that’s not saying nothing.
These characters include, of course, the ever-popular queer-coded villains: Captain Hook is portrayed as a stereotypical, effeminate dandy; Maleficent reads to many (especially fans of Angelina Jolie) like a modern-day bisexual queen; King Candy literally walks around with limp wrists; Hades is Megara’s sarcastic, toxic gay frenemy; and there’s just something about Jafar.
Disney has been criticized for its history of making villains gay, as it’s easy to draw the line between that and gay people = villains – but at the same time, everyone must admit that there’s nothing quite like the camp and production value that come from an excellent queer-coded Disney Villain song. We can both be glad that this era is over and smile that it happened.
Aside from that, however, there are several recent female Disney characters whom audiences have latched onto as lesbians. These characters are Merida from Brave, Elsa from Frozen, and Isabela from Encanto.
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While it’s true that the only concrete evidence of these claims is that none of these characters ended up with men – and that, for two of them, one of the central conflicts of their films was their desire not to marry a man they didn’t love – they also do happen just to have those vibes.
While it’s true that no woman should be labeled a lesbian simply because she expresses distaste for the concept of being forced into marriage, the fact still remains that these characters are heavily gay-coded. It would be easy to believe that one of the reasons they know they are so avidly against being forced into a life they don’t want is because they know that they have been hiding their true selves – and what they do want is very different.
In Elsa’s case, there’s no marriage to run away from, but some fans have asserted that they sensed chemistry between her and Honeymaren in Frozen 2.
Speaking of Frozen…
Oaken’s Family Sauna in ‘Frozen’
Oaken’s Family Sauna was just a glimpse at a gay family, it’s true, but Oaken of Frozen has been confirmed to have a husband and three children – whom we see briefly, taking shelter from the cold in the family steam room.
It was barely two seconds, yes, but Disney didn’t try to brag about it either. They didn’t do that thing where they advertised that the movie would feature “the first openly gay character” only to have it be someone minor and inconsequential to the story.
Instead, they added the detail like it was no big deal – which is precisely how you start making other people see these relationships as the normal families they are.
Judy’s Neighbors in Zootopia
Here’s another example of a time Disney just casually dropped a gay couple into their movies without saying a word: Zootopia.
Can’t figure out where they were? That’s because they don’t even mention that they’re family. It’s Judy’s neighbors, the antelopes, who are constantly yelling through their shared wall. If you look closely at their mailbox, the name is “Oryx-Antlerson.” It’s not “Oryx and Antlerson;” that hyphenation means they combined their names when they married.
This act of normalization is subtle but still quite different from the days when Disney had to hide their obviously gay portrayals of characters in what many call “queer-coding:” Utilizing common stereotypes queer people have for one another, as well as mirroring storylines that they would find familiar, to make it clear that the creators intended to imply that a character is gay.
Many of Disney’s Early Shorts Were Queer-Coded
Queer-coding was incredibly common in the early days of film, as while the Hays Code strictly prohibited people talking about being homosexual or queer in any way, many artists and animators very much were. As such, you can find obvious queer-coding in many early animated works – Disney included.
Ferdinand the Bull, one of Walt Disney Animation’s earliest short films, is the story of a smaller, more effeminate bull with long, fluttery eyelashes. As the narrator tells the audience:
“All the other bulls wanted most of all to fight at the bullfights in Madrid, but not Ferdinand. He still liked to sit just quietly under the cork tree and smell the flowers.”
Poor Ferdinand is eventually captured and forced into the ring but refuses to fight, instead opting to smell the daisies.
Ferdinand isn’t inherently gay – there’s no love story to even really guess at – but he is also not performing his assigned gender as expected, so he’s definitely queer, no question about it.
Ferdinand the Bull won the 1939 Oscar for Best Animated Short, so clearly, it resonated with many people.
The Reluctant Dragon came out two years later, in 1941, before the Hays Code became more aggressive.
The short showcases a flamboyant dragon who gets himself into “fixed” contests with a group of knights: they go into a cave and bang pots and pans and shout to make it seem like they’re fighting, only to have a tea party; the dragon and a knight collide in a puff of smoke, only for it to be revealed that they are dancing inside, rather than brawling.
This short telegraphs how gay men have, historically, often had to hide their love behind fighting or aggression.
Jeremy Irons Said He Thinks Scar is Gay
As we have already discussed, there is room for argument that any one of the famous Disney Villains could be coded as queer after some fashion, but there’s only one whose voice actor has, years later, come right out and said it.
Renowned actor Jeremy Irons, during an interview with Queerty for House of Gucci in 2021, said that while he did not initially read Scar as gay, after rewatching the film, he realized it that the reason he does what he does must be, essentially, that he is closeted, lonely, and bored.
“There is no doubt that Scar is a gay who does not dare to come out and that makes him very unhappy. The story would have been very different if he had done that. Then he would probably have become happy with a nice partner somewhere and he would have completely forgotten to take over the monarchy, as he does now.”
It’s true that Scar is also clearly coded as queer in some fashion, much like Ferdinand the Bull: he is the runt of the litter, overshadowed by his confident, masculine brother with a wife and child. He is too scrawny – and limp-wristed – to fight, so he learned to his mind to manipulate others around him instead.
(And to inflict some biting sarcasm on his unsuspecting relatives.)
It’s unsurprising that some gay-coded characters are in The Lion King. After all, the music was written by one of the most famous (and fabulous) gay men in modern history: Sir Elton John.
We’re Not Sure if Jessie is Queer, but “When She Loved Me” Sure Is
Speaking of gay music…
Look, we know Jessie loves Buzz, but she has big bi-energy.
More importantly, though, even if she isn’t, “When She Loved Me” sounds very gay out of the very specific context of Toy Story 2. It’s literally Sarah McLaughlan singing:
And when she was lonely, I was there to comfort her,
And when she was happy, so was I
When she loved me…
Yes, okay, here it’s about a toy, but if a woman sings that song in any other context…there is no heterosexual explanation for that.
In the words of Michael Scott, “At the very least, it’s bisexual.”
Whatever Was Going on Between Ratigan and Basil of Baker Street in ‘The Great Mouse Detective’
First of all, The Great Mouse Detective is based on the stories of Sherlock Holmes, a character so often written as gay in fan writings that Arthur Conan Doyle’s estate has felt the need to address it in the past.
In said fanfictions, Sherlock is often in love with his partner Watson. Still, he also often has a psychosexual relationship dynamic with his rival, Moriarty – a relationship so strangely obsessive that they both seem to be deriving some kind of twisted pleasure out of chasing each other.
This is equally true in The Great Mouse Detective – especially for Ratigan, the Moriarty stand-in, who makes whole a meal of describing to Basil the exact details of how he will perish in his trap.
Ratigan is already queer representation by default: He was played by Vincent Price, who was famously bisexual in his day. It was an “open secret” in Hollywood that his directors would send attractive men and women back to his dressing room for…a little private time.
However, there’s also the whole metaphor of him denying that he’s a rat and pretending to be a mouse, which circles back to the same kind of “hiding yourself” coding that people found so compelling in Elsa and Isabela. Putting all this together, we’re almost just willing to call this canon: Ratigan is not straight, and Basil probably isn’t either.
‘The Little Mermaid’s Ursula Was Based on a Drag Queen
We’d be remiss if we didn’t mention this one, especially after all the attention it’s been getting in the press.
In 1989, The Little Mermaid had what you might consider the first true representation of a queer person in Disney’s animated films. Ursula was now famously based on Divine, a popular drag queen in the 1980s well-known enough to appear on David Letterman.
However, Disney The Company doesn’t get any of the credit for this representation, because it wasn’t their decision and likely wasn’t something they would have approved of had it been stated outright – in fact, nobody even knew she was based on Divine until 2016 when the late composer Howard Ashman’s sister confirmed it in an interview with Hazlitt.
There’s also a very easy connection one could make between Ariel and any transgender individual – the deep, all-consuming desire to be something other than what you were born as, to be part of a different world, even if it means losing things and changing your body and no longer being able to see or speak to your family.
As we discussed with Elton John: a gay composer writing the songs for a movie, even if that movie has no inherently gay content whatsoever, gives the whole thing a very queer flavor – and Ashman, the lyrical half of the composing duo behind The Little Mermaid and Beauty and the Beast, and the man who wrote Aladdin, was famously gay.
That, however, is a very sad story – one you can see and hear glimpses of in the last Disney film he got to work on before he died.
‘Beauty and The Beast’ Needs Its Own Howard Ashman Section
It’s time to wax poetic about Howard Ashman again, because if anyone at Disney deserves it, it’s him – and yes, that includes Walt Disney himself.
Ashman was gay when it was incredibly dangerous to be gay. If you’ve seen Bohemian Rhapsody, you have a little bit of the picture: AIDS was rampant, and nobody knew what it was or how you caught it, but it was labeled the “gay cancer” and known to be an eventual death sentence.
Because it appeared, in the beginning, to mainly affect gay people and drug users, the president at the time, Ronald Reagan, deemed it to be a “moral issue.” Conservatives in Congress refused to pass funding for research until it was also packaged with research for other diseases, like Toxic Shock Syndrome and Legionnaires’ Disease.
This lack of funding and research allowed the not only the disease, but also misinformation and fear, to spread, and many people began to form the same association between gay people and AIDS as others did with Asian people and COVID-19.
By the time The Little Mermaid came out in 1989, Howard Ashman was already working on Beauty and the Beast. He was also dying of AIDS, though he hadn’t even reached his 40th birthday.
You can hear the anger and pain that caused in Beauty and the Beast at many points. For example, “Belle” is the story of a bright, intelligent person who, for some reason, just doesn’t seem to act like everybody else in town – she’s “odd.” (Another word for odd is “queer,” in case you were wondering.)
Most prominently, however: nobody can deny the amount of pain written into the lyrics of “The Mob Song.”
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Even if some may argue that the easy comparison is coincidental, musicians and lyricists know that’s not how writing music actually works. The words have to come from somewhere inside of you, someplace true, to be as good as Howard Ashman’s lyrics – and the place that the lyrics of the “Mob Song” were coming from was one of deep pain, hurt, and rage.
If you listen to the penultimate song in Beauty and the Beast, where Gaston leads an angry mob of citizens to the Beast’s castle to pillage it and kill him, you’ll find something very sad indeed: the lyrics could be dually applied to a threatening-looking beast-man with an incomprehensible curse, and a gay man with AIDS in the 80s.
We don’t like
What we don’t understand
In fact it scares us
And this monster is mysterious at least
In fact, Gaston’s claims that “the Beast will make off with your children – he’ll come after them in the night!” will likely even sound familiar today, at least to anyone who has been paying attention to the recent attacks on transgender individuals and drag queens across the US and the world.
Also, Gaston only wants to hunt the Beast in the first place because the object of his affection, Belle, is obviously in love with him, which sounds an awful lot like what would so often happen to lesbians back in the day when their husbands found out they were cheating on them with women.
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Howard Ashman created what were arguably two of Disney’s best films to date, and he did it while he was actively dying – even on his deathbed, he was still thinking about Beauty and the Beast. He gave his whole heart and soul to those projects, and Disney, who is still profiting off of the beauty of his art, will owe him for that forever.
What’s truly beautiful about what Ashman did was that he found a way to communicate with a generation of queer kids from beyond the grave – queer kids who, because of the AIDS epidemic that killed him, now had far fewer role models and mentors to help them and look after them, as they grew into a community that had been decimated before they were born.
He probably wasn’t even aware that he was doing that – but the people who love his movies definitely do, because when Disney announced that Howard, a documentary about Ashman’s life, would be removed from Disney+ last month, it only took a few hours of internet backlash for them to reverse the decision.
If you haven’t seen the documentary, watch it as soon as you can – it’s a beautiful tribute to the man, the movies and shows he made, and the lasting impact he had and if you don’t cry by the end, then you might want to get your tear ducts checked.
But Wait – There’s More Gay Stuff from ‘Beauty and the Beast!’
We weren’t about to leave the rest of Beauty and the Beast alone: There are three more things about that movie that are very, very gay.
First of all, we need to talk about LeFou.
Look. What the live-action Beauty and the Beast did with Josh Gad’s LeFou wasn’t perfect. They made him more evidently gay for Gaston, and in the end, they took a joke about a man in drag and changed it so that the dude was happy that the wardrobe put him in a dress. They then had the two dance together to signal a happy ending.
It was corny and felt forced and bizarre, especially given the way Disney wanted it advertised in the press beforehand. However, given that the elements were already there in the film, it was much better than in the original when it was all played for a laugh, and it was much better than simply not acknowledging it at all. It was about the kindest way they could have played it.
Returning to the original movie, however, we also need to mention that no woman who is romantically attracted to a literal Beast the way Belle is is 100% straight. It doesn’t mean she’s gay, but like Ferdinand the Bull, it definitely makes her queer because that is NOT performing her assigned gender as expected.
There is also Lumiere, and the fact that they are all French. French courtiers in this era were another famously bisexual group. Historically, it would be accurate to say that Lumiere was probably having just as much fun with Cogsworth as with Babette.
Timon and Pumbaa Literally Raised a Child Together
Speaking of famous sidekick couples: Timon and Pumbaa get more than an honorable mention because…come on. It was all right there. They’re Disney’s Bert and Ernie; and they raised Simba together. Like, his whole adolescence.
Their whole dynamic screams “gay dads.” It’s too bad that Mitch and Cam never dressed up as them on Modern Family, because it would have been absolutely perfect – and a funny tribute to frequent Guest star Nathan Lane.
Oh yeah, that’s another thing: Timon is played by Nathan Lane, who easily ranks as one of the gayest men on the planet. Between that and the line “What do you want me to do, dress in drag and do the hula?” – followed by Timon dressing in drag and yelling “LUAU!” – it all telegraphs queerness pretty clearly.
And last, but in NO WAY least…
The Entirety of Mulan is Deeply Queer
Mulan is start-to-finish, wall-to-wall trans, nonbinary, and bisexual confusion. Ask any group of bi or pansexual 90s babies what movies and shows jump-started their gay awakening, and you’ll get a whole lot of Kim Possible, a whole lot of Pirates of the Caribbean, and a resounding chorus of “well DUH” for Mulan.
Guessing Mulan’s gender using modern terms in the context of a movie set in feudal China would be futile, but one thing that is safe to say is that, by today’s standards, Mulan is NOT cisgender. (Cisgender, for those unaware, simply means someone who identifies completely with the male or female gender that they were assigned at birth.)
Mulan doesn’t live up to her culture’s standards of a woman as a “perfect bride.” She also doesn’t understand why her gender should limit her. She is surprisingly sad when she fails at being a man, and – this is the real kicker – works extra hard to become one even when she is given an out that wouldn’t end in her death.
She could have left in the middle of “I’ll Make A Man Out Of You” when Shang says, “Pack up, go home, you’re through;” it would have fulfilled her law-bound duty and probably saved her life. Instead she stays, determined to pass a challenge that even the other men couldn’t pass. She seems to even, at points, enjoy being able to pass for a man among the others.
Being able to be this neutral about one’s gender, let alone derive joy from dressing up as another one – doing drag – is, once again, not conclusive proof that someone isn’t entirely straight, but it’s definitely compelling evidence.
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Speaking of Shang, he’s in his own category. It’s a very underrepresented one – bisexual men frequently say they identify with Shang’s obvious confusion when he seems to find himself attracted to “Fa Ping” (which, by the way, translates in some Chinese dialects as “flower vase,” often used as a euphemism to refer to a woman who is pretty, but dumb – which explains why everyone else in the camp were so flabbergasted by the name).
Some may say that his ability to be attracted to her, even when she was dressed in military drag, indicates that deep down, he could tell she was a woman. Still, most bisexual men would likely tell you that that doesn’t matter – if he liked her even when he truly thought she was a dude, there’s still something not-quite-straight about that.
(If you’ve never clocked Shang’s confusion, it’s not your fault – the movie isn’t exactly asking you to focus on it – but we encourage you to watch it again and look deeper, especially at Shang’s facial expressions once Mulan actually starts performing well in training.)
There is also a cross-dressing scene in Mulan, and it’s only a kind of played for a laugh – the scene emphasizes the power and strength that Mulan and her friends have, even when dressed as women. The laughs are fueled more by the fact that we know something the palace guards don’t than the “ha-ha, masculine soldier men dressed as ladies” element.
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There’s probably a ton of Disney history that we’re missing, but this should surely give you an accurate picture: Disney was gay in the beginning, it was gay in the 90s, and it’s gay now – that is, at least, as gay as the rest of the world.
That’s the real point: The real reason Disney has so much queerness in its history isn’t because of some agenda or because the company itself is gayer than any other – it’s because they’re one of the most well-known storytelling companies in recent history. They got that way by telling honest, touching stories about the world around them.
That world includes and has always included many gay people whose stories are deep, nuanced, and worth exploring, even when bigots insist they should be relegated to the shadows.
Here’s to the LGBTQ community and Disney – may they both continue to tell stories that hold up a mirror to our truest selves.
How much of this gay Disney history did you know? Were you surprised by any of it? Did we leave anything important out? Let Inside the Magic know in the comments.