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But if you look closely and read against the grain, you’ll find that these films were also full of fissures in the otherwise heteronormative text: places and moments and lines and lyrics that became entryways into a whole newer, queerer world. If there’s one thing to say about Disney’s banner projects, it’s that they present perhaps an extremely narrow vision of romantic relationships-from the 1950 fairy tale where a young girl becomes enamored with a prince she just met, to a 1989 fairy tale where a young mermaid becomes enamored with a prince she just met. Given that Disney’s fairy tales were so intent on enshrining heterosexual “happily ever afters,” it’s unclear if these childhood moments in darkened theaters predicted the gay man I would become, or I have simply warped them in my mind to do so. The slate of projects that reinvigorated Walt Disney Pictures in the 1990s encouraged me to thirst after its male protagonists and, sometimes, the fetching villains too. Such childish fantasies, so rooted in sincerity and optimism, meant these animated G-rated flicks had some secret magic that could encourage a young queer boy to take both prescriptive and imaginative leaps.īut if those early Disney classics trained me to pine for a prince, the animated flicks I saw in theaters during my youth asked me to go further. Yet, before I could grow up to further question the gendered roles films like Snow White modeled, I saw in that lyric a sense of possibility. Ever since I watched Snow White on VHS (we had quite the collection) and gawked at its Prince Charming, I’ve been haunted by what these fairy tales taught me-more importantly, perhaps, by the ways I’ve bent them to my will.Įven as a precocious eight year old, I knew that a line like, “Someday my prince will come / someday I’ll find my love,” for example, wasn’t meant for boys like me. Its focus on a helpless dewy princess in need of saving remains the ultimate example of the Mouse House’s dubious, if fascinating, takes on princely fantasies. That 1939 film was the company’s first attempt to repackage fairy tales for a twentieth-century audience. And what made Megara one of my most enduring teenage role models.ĭisney had come a long way since Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, one of the very first animated films I caught as a child.
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It’s what made Disney’s Hercules one of my earliest big screen crushes. They were covered up by an armor whose Ionic volutes guided your eyes towards them. Sure, his biceps had just bulged so much that they’d broken a measuring tape.
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In my defense, and as Megara’s dry-witted mockery showed me, I was all but required to notice, covet, and perhaps even lust after them. I had, in fact, been mesmerized by said pectorals, animated though they were. I was twelve years old and thankful that I was in a darkened theater so my mother couldn’t see how much that line had made me blush. “So, did they give you a name along with all those rippling pectorals?”
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This is Movie-Made Gay, a column by Manuel Betancourt on thirst, reading queerly, and the films that have shaped his identity as a gay man.