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    How Disney found its pride – and riled the American right

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    How Disney found its pride – and riled the American right Once known for its ‘traditional’ values, the entertainment giant is battling US conservatives over an anti-gay bill. Indeed the House of Mouse has had a long relationship with the LGBTQ+ community‘Christ. they’re going after Mickey Mouse,” said president Joe Biden in April, bemoaning the Republican party’s targeting of yet another American institution. A few days earlier, at a desk surrounded by small children, Florida governor Ron DeSantis had stripped Disney World of its self-governing status. Since its inception in 1967, Disney’s central Florida estate – officially the Reedy Creek Improvement District – has effectively operated under its own jurisdiction. The agreement has worked for both sides. Disney funds and manages public services in the district in return for autonomy over governance and development. Disney World has become the cornerstone of Florida’s tourist economy, employing 75,000 people locally. This is supposed to be Disney World’s 50th year, but the company finds itself in danger of being cast out of its own magic kingdom.DeSantis’s move was explicitly in retaliation to Disney’s opposition to HB 1557, better known as the “Don’t say gay” law. This vaguely worded bill prohibits discussion of, or instruction on, issues of sexual orientation or gender identity in Florida schools. After the successful weaponisation of “critical race theory” (an academic field that considers systemic discrimination in public life), Republicans have identified LGBTQ+ rights as another potential wedge issue, even linking them with paedophilia and grooming. DeSantis’s press secretary, Christina Pushaw, tweeted that the bill could be “more accurately described as an anti-grooming bill”. Disney responded with a statement calling for HB 1557 to be struck down in the courts. Sign up to our Inside Saturday newsletter for an exclusive behind-the-scenes look at the making of the magazine’s biggest features, as well as a curated list of our weekly highlights.To Republicans, Disney had crossed a line by interfering in politics. “Ultimately, this state is governed by the best interests of the people of this state, not what any one corporation is demanding,” DeSantis said as he signed the bill. Viewed from the opposite side, DeSantis is using the power of the state to punish a private corporation for its political views – a significant escalation in the culture wars, and a worrying look for a democracy. How did it come to this?In truth, conservatives have been going after Mickey Mouse for a long time now. Disney, which now owns Star Wars, Marvel, Pixar and 20th Century Studios, is the US’s pre-eminent cultural superpower, with particular influence over children. In recent years it has been targeted for its “woke” values in terms of inclusion and diversity in matters of race, gender and sexuality, both in its content and its employment practices. In terms of the LGBTQ+ community, though, Disney’s relationship goes far deeper, and it has developed in ways the company itself can never have anticipated.Walt Disney was never a card-carrying homophobe but he was a steadfast conservative, and long after his death in 1966, Disney’s output continued to promote “traditional” and “family” values. That didn’t discount “coding” Disney characters (usually villains) as queer, in that they exhibited stereotypically gay attributes such as effeminate behaviour or disinterest in the opposite sex: Jafar in Aladdin, for example, or Scar in The Lion King, or even Shere Khan the tiger in The Jungle Book. And, as with all forms of culture, Disney stories have lent themselves to queer readings regardless of their makers’ intentions.Dealing with themes of fantasy and magic, many classic Disney stories concern characters moving between two worlds, feeling like outsiders in their communities, transforming and becoming their true selves. These themes could equally be interpreted as explorations of sexuality or gender identity. Cinderella goes from dowdy domestic to sparkling princess at the wave of a wand; Mowgli must decide whether he belongs in the jungle or the village; Mulan masquerades as male to join the Chinese army, during which time she forms an ambiguous bond with the handsome captain. Princess Elsa in Frozen is urged by her parents to suppress her true nature but after she is figuratively “outed” (as a sorceress), she flees her heteronormative destiny, preferring to belt out Let It Go in icy isolation: “Don’t let them in, don’t let them see / Be the good girl you always have to be / Conceal don’t feel, don’t let them know …”Disney films have helped queer people discover their sexuality, says George Youngdahl, a lifelong fan. “Tarzan, Aladdin, Peter Pan, Hercules – all of those were people who I wanted to emulate and I was attracted to. I wasn’t looking at the princesses, or I was because I wanted to be them, not necessarily because I thought they were attractive.” After his first visit to California’s Disneyland, Youngdahl applied for a job at Florida’s Disney World when he was 25. He moved to Florida and worked for Disney for 15 years.Although Disney would never admit it, queer themes have sometimes been more deliberate than accidental. One of the unsung LGBTQ+ heroes of Disney lore, for example, is Howard Ashman, the openly gay lyricist and producer, who died of an Aids-related illness in 1991. With a background in musical theatre, Ashman was instrumental in bringing Disney classics The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast and Aladdin to the screen, and his involvment is obvious in the final releases.In The Little Mermaid, for example, Ariel is told by her domineering father that the human world is evil and forbidden, but to Ariel, it looks like more fun. “Up where they walk, up where they run / Up where they stay all day in the sun / Wanderin’ free, wish I could be / Part of that world,” she sings. The fact that the evil sea witch, Ursula, was modelled on renowned drag artist Divine only adds to the queer appeal. (The original Little Mermaid was written as an allegory for same-sex attraction, incidentally: Hans Christian Andersen was inspired to write the fairytale by his unrequited love for another man.)“Kids, even in the most accepting of environments, grow up knowing that they’re different and unsure of how that’s going to play out in the world,” says Eddie Shapiro, co-author of Queens in the Kingdom, an LGBTQ+ guide to Disney’s theme parks. “So there’s a sense of otherness. And in the Disney universe, the characters who triumph, the Dumbos of the world, are frequently also other. And they come out on top, or they come out loved, supported, safe. And that’s a big comfort.”It is fair to also call Shapiro something of a Disney super-fan. As we speak, he is on a Disney cruise from Florida to Castaway Cay, Disney’s private resort island in the Bahamas. As with the movies, Disney theme parks have a certain appeal from an LGBTQ+ perspective, he says. “Disney offers a perfect world that never was,” he says. “You didn’t always feel safe as a gay kid, now you’re walking down Main Street, USA, and everything is manicured, everything is clean. Everybody’s friendly. It’s perfect – something that appeals to the child within.”Disney initially resisted attempts by LGBTQ+ visitors to express their fandom at its theme parks. In the 1980s, the company was twice sued for prohibiting men dancing together at Disney World, for example. But in June 1991 a man named Doug Swallow organised a coordinated mass trip to Disney World, attended by 3,000 LGBTQ+ people, wearing red shirts to identify themselves. This was the park’s first Gay Day, and it has continued ever since. The event now brings more than 150,000 LGBTQ+ people to Orlando every June.In the early years, Disney would warn “straight” visitors when it was Gay Day and hand out white T-shirts to non-participants who had inadvertently turned up wearing red. While Disney does not officially recognise Gay Day, it soon came to appreciate the commercial clout of the LGBTQ+ community. There is no end of rainbow-coloured Disney merchandise on sale, and Disney accommodates and facilitates the Gay Day schedule of events, including a week-long festival taking place across the city, with club nights, drag shows, pool parties, and special hotel deals.After his first Florida Gay Day in 1998, Shapiro founded a sister Gay Day Anaheim at the Los Angeles Disneyland. While Orlando Gay Days are more party-centric, the lower-key Anaheim event takes place mostly inside the park. There is a high level of cooperation. Disney now hosts a table at its welcome centre promoting fairytale gay weddings at Disneyland and hosts premieres at Gay Day.“Gay Day was never formed with a political agenda,” says Shapiro. The idea was always integration rather than segregation. “You’re mixing with traditional families, and hopefully changing some hearts and minds. It was not at all lost on us that we were showing up at America’s number one family destination with our families of choice, and announcing by being there, that [we] were worthy, and should absolutely be there, and stand up and be counted. And we’re still doing that.”Disney has learned to embrace LGBTQ+ friendliness on screen and off in recent decades. In 1995 it became one of the first companies to offer health benefits to same-sex partners of employees (prompting a considerable conservative backlash in the process). Meanwhile, it has taken tentative steps towards representation on screen. Even if its “openly gay character” proclamations rarely live up to the billing, there have been fleeting references to same-sex relationships in movies including Toy Story 4 (two women drop off their daughter at kindergarten); Onward (Lena Waithe’s cop refers to her girlfriend); the live-action Beauty and the Beast remake (the character LeFou, played by Josh Gad, is telegraphed as gay and dances with another man, although not even Gad was particularly proud of that one; “I don’t think we did justice to what a real gay character in a Disney film should be,” he admitted). Jack Whitehall went a step further, playing a gay man in Disney’s live-action film Jungle Cruise last year. And Pixar was recently reported to be casting for a voice actor to play a “14-year-old transgender girl” in an upcoming project.But Disney has always balanced its support for the LGBTQ+ community with its appeal to more conservative-leaning consumers, which could be seen as playing both sides. The corporation was recently revealed to have donated almost $1m to the Republican party of Florida in 2020, and $50,000 directly to DeSantis – none of which appears to have deterred him from targeting Disney.Many insiders blame Disney’s mishandling of the Florida issue on its new CEO, Bob Chapek. His predecessor, Bob Iger, is regarded as a hero for presiding over Disney’s canny acquisitions of LucasFilm, Marvel and Pixar, and launching Disney+, all while vocally supporting progressive causes such as Black Lives Matter during the Trump administration. Chapek, who came from Disney’s parks division, is reportedly more conservative-leaning, more managerial and less experienced at this kind of political diplomacy.When DeSantis first announced the “Don’t say gay” bill in early March, Chapek’s response was to stay silent. He sent an internal email to Disney staff expressing his support for the LGBTQ+ community but claiming “corporate statements do very little to change outcomes or minds. Instead, they are often weaponised by one side or the other to further divide and inflame.” This enraged Disney’s LGBTQ+ staff and their allies. Pixar employees released a statement alleging that Disney executives had demanded cuts from “nearly every moment of overtly gay affection” in its movies. In response, Chapek gave a public apology, “You needed me to be a stronger ally in the fight for equal rights and I let you down. I am sorry.” That was not enough to prevent a series of staff walkouts leading up to the signing of the bill on 22 March. Hence Disney’s more confrontational statement about seeking to have the law repealed and struck down.“There is a widespread belief that this was bungled, and it’s a belief not just inside the company, but in the Hollywood community at large,” says Matthew Belloni, ex-editor of the Hollywood Reporter. “If they had remained on the sidelines, lobbied behind the scenes, and made employees know that they cared about the issue but didn’t do so in a way that provoked the politicians, they could have, in my opinion, gotten away with advocacy without becoming a punching bag.”If it happens, the removal of Disney World’s special status, which would come into effect in June 2023, is likely to hurt local citizens more than Disney itself. The burden of running the district’s public services will now fall to taxpayers, and could translate into additional bills for locals. As his public signing of the anti-Disney law, surrounded by schoolchildren, suggests, DeSantis, who many see as a presidential contender, is essentially engaging in political theatre. But potentially more harmful than the attacks on Disney is the “Don’t say gay” bill itself, which is likely to cause long-lasting harm to Florida’s young LGBTQ+ people and their educators.Cotton plantations and non-consensual kisses: how Disney became embroiled in the culture warsRead moreAs with previous occasions when conservatives have “gone after Mickey Mouse”, this latest attack is likely to blow over. “Disney is such a large corporation that I don’t think this specific punishment is going to register in the grand scheme of things,” says Belloni. “It’s more about how it moves forward, and whether it can operate as a down-the-middle, umbrella brand for everybody amid this kind of culture war that it has found itself the centre of.”Maybe Disney doesn’t have to pick a side. The Republicans’ current tactics feel like an attempt to turn back the clock – ironically to an era and a set of values Disney once embodied. But Disney is compelled to look in the opposite direction, led by a market that is increasingly global, young and diverse. While Disney’s centrism can be interpreted cynically as playing both sides or, more generously, catering to all tastes, the important thing is that “centre” has moved a considerable way during the company’s lifetime – and Disney has moved with it.TopicsWalt Disney CompanyLGBT rightsAnimation in filmFilm industryUS politicsFloridaRon DeSantisfeaturesReuse this content More

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      ‘Name names? Never, never, never!’ Lee Grant on her decades of defiance

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      Interview‘Name names? Never, never, never!’ Lee Grant on her decades of defianceEmma Brockes The Oscar-winning actor lost 12 years of her career refusing to out her partner as a communist, then had to endure his lectures about Marx while being treated as a ‘maid’. But a remarkable third act as a documentarian showcased her unique voiceLee Grant, child of the Depression, survivor of the anti-communist blacklist, director, Oscar winner and – incredibly – 95 and looking nothing of the sort, is standing in her Manhattan kitchen. It is the size of a medieval castle’s, with copper pots hanging from the ceiling, a catering-size fridge and what appear to be three ovens. “They’re all used,” says Grant, triumphantly, a tone she has earned. For 12 years during the McCarthy-era witch-hunt of the 1950s, Grant was banned from working in Hollywood, re-emerging in the 60s to become not only a wildly successful actor, but one of the US’s finest documentary makers of the late 20th century. Over the course of our conversation, the phrase she uses most often is “I was lucky”.If you have seen Grant on screen, it was most likely in one of her two best-known roles, from very different, seminal films. In 1967, she appeared as Mrs Colbert, the grieving widow, in the classic Sidney Poitier movie In the Heat of the Night. Eight years later, she played opposite Warren Beatty in the cult favourite Shampoo, for which she won an Oscar. Grant is a terrific actor, with a Zelig-like performance history that begins as a child dancer at the New York Ballet under George Balanchine (“My only memory of him is of my mother flirting with him; I was a fat little girl, that’s how I got in”), on through a scholarship at New York’s Neighbourhood Playhouse School of Theater under Martha Graham, and, after her acting career was unfrozen at the age of 33 – “old for Hollywood!” – includes a heady decade living in Malibu knocking around in Joan Didion’s circle. “It was like entering The Truman Show. I get to live here? On the beach? With my eight-year-old daughter? Are you sure?! It was so delicious. And then I met Joey.”Grant sits at her kitchen table, her second husband, Joe Feury, working in the vast living room next door. Together, they ran a successful production company specialising in documentary film, a genre in which Grant says she would never have been successful had she not survived those 12 years on the blacklist – or met Feury. (“Joey thought I could do anything,” she writes in her memoir, I Said Yes to Everything. “And I could.”) Grant grew up 50 blocks north of where we are sitting in Washington Heights, the only child of successful immigrants to New York. Her mother’s family were from Odessa, in present-day Ukraine, her father’s from Poland. Her father ran the YMHA, the Hebrew youth hostel in the Bronx, and her devoted mother and aunt Fremo ran a nursery school from the brownstone where they lived.It was a charmed childhood. “Fremo!” Grant’s mother would exclaim, pointing at four-year-old Grant, or Lyova Rosenthal as she was, then. “Look how she walks! How she talks! Sing something! Did you see that, did you hear that? Genius!” Grant bursts into laughter, remembering the scene. “I knew it was crazy; it was so theatrical. And delicious. They were very delicious, and funny.” And although it wasn’t a political household, they were political times, not only as the Depression raged across the US, but closer to home. Walking down Convent Avenue in the early 30s, says Grant, “the little girls who were on the steps of the Catholic school would shout: ‘You killed our Lord!’” She found this both surprising and comic. “I don’t think I felt sad about it; it was more like: ‘That’s strange. Me? I killed your Lord?’”Grant was innately confrontational, “something I was born with, no question about it”. The first time she recalls standing up for something in public, she was a teenager, walking along a stretch of Broadway near her house when she witnessed a man attacking a woman. The woman tried, desperately, to board a bus, but when the bus driver clocked the commotion, he shut the doors and drove on. Others in the street ignored it. Only Grant reacted. “I ran for a cop.” She ran three blocks, and the couple were gone by the time they returned. “Oh,” said the cop, “they’re probably in a bar now. It’s just a normal thing, don’t worry.” She did worry. “They didn’t have the kind of sensibility that I had. And then I married a blacklisted writer. And there was no hesitation. I certainly was not going to give names in order to work in film or television.”There wasn’t a second when …?“NOT EVEN A SECOND!” she booms. “Never, never, never!” Decades later, when she started to make searing documentaries about homeless Americans, victims of domestic violence and women in prison, she says, “I’d been there. I’d been on the other side almost all my life.”The man she married was called Arnold Manoff, and it cost her the first 12 years of her career. In 1951, straight out of acting school, Grant won a role in a Hollywood movie, Detective Story, with Kirk Douglas, and was promptly nominated for a best supporting Oscar. She was 23 years old and a huge future awaited. But by the time the film came out, Manoff, a communist writer, had been blacklisted – and so, by association, had Grant. A different person would have been furiously bitter. Grant was furious all right: “I was filled with rage and frustration at the blacklisters, who I was living among.” But she wasn’t bitter. She was ignited by a sense of injustice and common cause. In the beginning, she says, “we all stuck together and I really loved those people. And respected them. And they educated me. I had no education, I never went to college. I went right into acting. I felt lucky.”Soon, however, the situation curdled. Manoff was a bully and a hypocrite. “I was living with a man who had nothing but contempt for me,” says Grant. He tried to make her read Marx and Engels. “But I couldn’t get it,” she says. “I didn’t know what it meant.” She found a box of old letters she wrote to him, recently (he died in 1965), and was horrified. “They’re all supplications: ‘I can’t learn Marx, I’m sorry but I can’t.’” Looking back, she understands that he married her mainly to have someone to look after this two children from his first marriage. He belittled and controlled her. When, after the birth of their daughter, Dinah, Grant had an opportunity to appear in a play in upstate New York, her husband said he’d leave her if she took the job. Without hesitation, she took it. “I knew I had to go. Life was over. He didn’t like me at all. He was attracted to me in the beginning, and then it was over. I was the maid, I really was.” The funny thing is, I say, you ended up making a more political body of work than any of the men lecturing you to read Marx before putting on the dinner.“Lecturing the women around them, yes,” she hoots, then looks infinitely fierce. “Those fuckers.”The takeaway from those years was that Grant learned how to fight. She and some of her friends took on the fanatically pro-McCarthy clique that ran the TV union, and slowly, methodically lobbied members to vote them out and replace them with moderates. Eventually, she was permitted to return to Hollywood – three years after everyone else, “because they still thought I’d name my husband”. (She didn’t.) By then she was ancient by the standards of the era. She booked a very good facelift, lied about her age for the next four decades and started another phase of her career. After moving to Malibu and working a stint on the hit soap Peyton Place, offers started to flood in, particularly from liberal and leftwing film-makers, who “were stumbling over each other to give me work. Me first, me first! And they were artists, and brilliant.” She met Joe, 12 years her junior, and the opposite of her domineering first husband: “This really cute boy, and so dear, and so in love. A working-class Italian non-intellectual. It was like the biggest nourishment I could’ve had.”The greatest shift came, however, when Grant started to make documentaries. Before preparing for this interview, I had never seen any of them, but they are available on Amazon and I urge you to watch. They are staggeringly good. The first, made at the suggestion of Grant’s friend Mary Beth Yarrow, was about the Willmar Eight, a group of female bank tellers in a tiny town in Minnesota, who went on strike in 1977 after years of being paid a fraction of what their male colleagues earned. It is a deeply moving and shocking film – “A hell of a little piece that was really a calling card,” says Grant – and more were to follow, all for HBO. In 1986, Grant’s documentary Down and Out in America, in which she investigates the homeless and impoverished underbelly of Ronald Reagan’s America, won the Oscar for best documentary.What is striking about all her films is just how much she gets out of her subjects, who speak with an unselfconsciousness you no longer see on TV. Grant says much of this was down to her brilliant producers finding the right case studies. But her direction, and questioning, was a large part of it, too. In her 1989 film Battered, about domestic violence, she coaxes extraordinary testimony out of victims and perpetrators. One particular man, convicted of beating his wife, tells Grant how he can pick the one woman out of a hundred who is a soft target for abuse. “That’s the guy who stayed in my mind, too, that devil,” she says. “And he was attractive. Scary attractive. That was my first marriage! That guy who said I can come into a room and pick them out – that was me.”The Big Scary ‘S’ Word: why are people so terrified of socialism?Read moreGrant went on to make films about her old friend Sidney Poitier, and about Kirk Douglas and his family, and to strike a huge development deal with the US cable channel Lifetime. If she was shooting now, where would she look? “I would be fighting with HBO to let me go to Ukraine.” She thinks: “Or I’d be looking at Elon Musk, or at January 6th.”As it is, she says, “I’m old. I don’t look that old; I don’t feel that old, probably because I have a young husband – but …” In her memoir, she writes, “death makes me furious, which is a pity because I’m really up there myself”. But having survived all those waves of oppression in her youth, she isn’t done yet. “I feel there’s some way that I can still somehow do something. I don’t know what.” Experience makes her confident: something always turns up. “Life is like that. You slip to another place, go into another world, and you’re curious, and you take sides. And it’s a kind of miracle.”TopicsFilmDocumentary filmsFilm industryUS politicsinterviewsReuse this content More

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      John Kerry: 'People want a future. The orange menace is not providing that'

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      In 2004, the Democrats’ presidential candidate, John Kerry, was on the receiving end of one of the most egregious smear campaigns in modern history. At the height of the Iraq war, the Republicans came up with a strategy to combat the glaring military mismatch between Kerry, a decorated Vietnam vet, and the incumbent George W Bush, whose record consisted of a spell in the Texas Air National Guard. They concocted the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, a group of Vietnam vets who claimed that Kerry had lied about and exaggerated his record. The claims were later discredited, but the lies travelled around the world, and the damage was done.“It was really the first of the fake news elections,” says Kerry, speaking via Zoom from his home in Massachusetts. “Where you can take a legitimate military record, which the US navy had certified, and you can lie about it. And that’s where we are today: massive lies. We’ve had tens of thousands of lies told by the president of the United States. We’re just completely divorced from the reality of what is happening to people’s lives.”Does it still make him angry? “Yeah,” he says, “which is why I try not to think about it too much. I made the decision very shortly after that I did not want to get lost in anger.” Having seen what Al Gore went through in the 2000 election, which saw similarly questionable tactics, Kerry decided against a long court process, but now, with the 2020 election days away, he is reconsidering.“The recent machinations about voter-suppression and interference in the election have prompted me to question not litigating. Because we’re seeing it still challenging our democracy in ways that are unacceptable. I wonder if that would have changed if we’d done it.”Since he left office as President Barack Obama’s Secretary of State in January 2017, closing a five-decade political career, Kerry has kept a relatively low profile, but he has been transitioning from hard power towards soft. This is becoming a well-trodden route, with Gore making An Inconvenient Truth, and the Obamas signing a deal with Netflix in 2018. “After a long career in politics, if you’re doing it right, it’s about storytelling. It’s about having an impact on culture, and understanding what the culture is,” he says. More

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      Ridley Scott mocks Donald Trump over coronavirus response

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      The 82-year-old film director speaks out on the president’s handling of the crisis and says Boris Johnson should bring back rationing ‘Half the world’s leaders are idiots’ … Ridley Scott. Photograph: David Dettmann/Rex/Shutterstock Ridley Scott, the director of Alien, Blade Runner, Gladiator and The Martian, has taken aim at Donald Trump and Boris Johnson over […] More