Disney villains gay
Literally slaySleeping Beauty
Yeah yeah yeah, we all want Simba to emerge victorious at the end of The Lion King; and Snow White to wake up; and Ariel to stride on land; and the prince to marry Aurora, whoever the hell that is. Disney heroes are all very serviceable, but it’s the villains I’d rather spend time with.
Ursula has the best songs. The Evil Queen has the best cape. Maleficent has the best smile. Scar has the optimal quips. Prince John has the cutest underwear. Why waste time with the tedious heroes when you could be partying with these icons?
Disney villains are also — and there’s just no way around this — extremely gay. I’ve interviewed hundreds of queer people over the years about their pop culture influences, and I’ve lost count of how many cite the awful guys as inspirations. Even though there’s never been an openly queer Disney villain — still! — there still seems to be a sort of gay aura around them, and I’ve found that gay men are often particularly worshipful.
So … what’s the deal with that?
I think this phenomenon can be attributed to four qualities that seem to be distributed across a wide range of villains. First — the Disney villain was invented a
It’s Pride Month again, and each year we begin to marvel more and more at the lessening resistance to devoting a whole month to celebrating queer rights and the achievements of the LGBTQ community. While resistance to queer rights still exists out there in the larger culture, those roadblocks are growing fainter, and the rights of the Gay community becomes more and more affirmed with each successive generation. We are thankfully in a turning point in our culture where queer representation is no longer a taboo, as many fields that were closed off to gay people for years are now no longer off limits, and are in fact becoming more inclusive than anyone ever idea that they’d be. This has been especially true with fields that were distinctively defined in the past by outdated notions of gender norms. It was believed in the past that in order to be a part of something enjoy the armed services or professional sports, you had to adhere to the strict masculine ideals that were perpetuated in the customs, and that anyone who had a same sex attraction would be breaking that norm. For years, homosexuals were barred from military service, or were threatened with expuls
There’s something queer about Disney villains
April 20, 2017
PhD student Dion McLeod analysed animated film films in his thesis
Dion McLeod has watched the Disney animated movie Frozen 103 times – and the clip of the film’s hit ballad Let It Go another 100 or so times. He’s also watched Sleeping Beauty, Aladdin, The Small Mermaid, Tangled, Peter Pan, Beauty and the Beast and The Emperor’s Recent Groove between 30 and 40 times each.
While he did enjoy watching the films, the multiple viewings were done in the name of research for his PhD, which examines “the villain as gender non-conforming in animated Disney films”. He was awarded his PhD from the Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts in a graduation celebration at the University of Wollongong today (Thursday 20 April).
The concept for his study grew out of an English course on children’s literature Dion took while studying for his Bachelor of Arts. After writing an essay on positive portrayals of homosexuality in children’s and young adult texts, he became interested in writing about the less positive (and far more common) way gay males were portrayed in well-liked culture.
Recently after watching Pitch Perfect 2 I took to Twitter to compile a list of disaster bisexuals, in doing so (and with the help of others) I realised that a lot of the characters coming up were villains. This isn’t a new thing, queer representation and villainy has a long and complicated history, especially when it comes to kids films – here’s looking at you Disney. I expect to witness a camp, over-the-top antagonist in a Disney film, but why is it so easy to see Captain Link or Ursula as Bisexual/Queer when we don’t necessarily believe of our hero’s in the alike way?
Queer coding, much as the mention suggests, refers to a process by which characters in a piece of fictional media appear — or code — queer. This is usually determined by a series of characteristics that are traditionally related with queerness, such as more effeminate presentations by male characters or more masculine ones from female characters
– TRICIA ENNIS
A lot of this is born from negative stereotypes from the golden age of cinema, when actors or voice artists were told to engage a character as gay, embodying all the negative stereotypes, without them creature labelled as such. With female vill
Maleficent & 9 More Disney Characters You Never Knew Were Queer-Coded
For a distant time, Hollywood could not explicitly depict LGBTQ+ characters, and so queer characters were portrayed as a composite of various stereotypes, which is a practice known as queer-coding. Unfortunately, almost all of these queer-coded characters were villains since dominant American culture of the early 20th Century was unwilling to accept gay people in heroic roles.
RELATED: 10 Disney Villains That Would Be Impossible To Create Today
With that in mind, Disney villains are notorious for being queer-coded. In reality, an ongoing dialogue within LGBTQ+ communities is the influence Disney villains had on enabling young people to process their have sexualities. Now that gender non-conforming people can finally appreciate proper representation, it is worth looking back and noting some of the major Disney villains who were queer-coded.
Ursula (The Little Mermaid)
The sea witch Ursula is a classic example of a queer-coded character. While all of the merfolk in the film have their human anatomy below the waist replaced with fishy parts, Ursula’s lower half is a mass of writhing phallic tentacles. Interestingly, Ursula is based