Like many children, Sean Griffin grew up on Disney movies. One of his earliest memories is going to see The Jungle Book with his father as a kid, although his favorite was always Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Today, he’s a film scholar who has written extensively about Disney’s relationship to the LGBTQ+ community, but at the time, his reasons for preferring the studio’s first full-length animated feature were fairly literal: His mother had dark hair and seven children.
Disney films hold a particular resonance for “proto-queer kids” like the child he used to be, Griffin tells TIME. Before many LGBTQ+ youth even think about their sexual orientation or gender identity, he says that movies like Beauty and the Beast and Frozen tell stories “about characters who feel like they’re misfits.” It helps these kids feel seen and like their stories matter, which is one of the many reasons Disney has developed such a devoted LGBTQ+ fanbase over its nearly 100-year history.
“Eventually what it is that makes them feel like an outsider ends up being the thing that is valued about them,” Griffin, the author of Tinker Belles and Evil Queens: The Walt Disney Company from the Inside Out, says of Disney’s protagonists. “Seeing cartoons that show you that there’s somebody else who feels that way and then seeing a happy ending at the end is really powerful.”
The investment LGBTQ+ fans feel in Disney was tested earlier this month when the company’s CEO, Bob Chapek, defended its reported $250,000 in donations to backers of Florida’s controversial “Don’t Say Gay” bill. If signed into law, the legislation would ban discussions of sexual orientation or gender identity in K-3 classrooms. After passing both houses of the state legislature, the bill is headed to the desk of Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis,…
Source : time
