We will be starting our exploration into the relationship between the Disney parks and the queer community with an anecdote from a middle-aged cis-het woman, as is the way of things. (Look, those are the anecdotes you get from me. It’s not my fault I’m a middle-aged cis-het woman.) This would have been spring of 1995. My classmates and I were discussing the upcoming prom, which I would not attend. One of my best friends also wanted to skip it, for a list of reasons. One of them was that it was Gay Night at SeaWorld that night, and he wanted to go to that instead. He ended up going to prom, though, so I never did get his description of what Gay Night at SeaWorld would be like.
I somehow doubt that was an official event of the Busch Entertainment division of the Anheuser-Busch Corporation, who owned SeaWorld in those days. Certainly Disney wasn’t doing anything official at the time. However, the first unofficial event for the queer community at a Disney park had happened over fifteen years earlier, when my friend and I were in preschool. In 1978, Disneyland would routinely be rented out for private parties in the evenings, especially in the off season. At the time, Scott Forbes ran LA gay bar Studio One, and he rented out the park for Studio One and the Tavern Guild of Los Angeles.
If you guessed that the Tavern Guild of Los Angeles was an organization of gay bars’ owners and employees, well done. Officially on Disney paperwork, it was “the LA Restaurant Association.” There is currently such thing; it’s the Louisiana Restaurant Association. There’s an LA branch of the California Restaurant Association. Was there an LA Restaurant Association that was Los Angeles-based in 1978? Yeah, I’m not even sure how I’d do the research to find that out. As it is, I’m relying on scraping the web for what details I can find about these things. (Someday, I will read Tinker Belles and Evil Queens.)Either way, the leadership at Disney found out and had to figure out what they were going to do about this.
Disney, as we’ve discussed now and again, has some of the best lawyers in the business. However, Disney’s lawyers informed the company that the contract was valid and Disney had to honour it. Bethanee Bemis of the Disney, Culture, and Society Research Network website apparently interviewed Imagineer Bob Gurr (we’ll cover him Sunday), who said the company only asked for volunteers to work, to weed out people who would find it against their beliefs to work there. They were, he says, shocked at the sheer number of volunteers they got. Further, the cleaning staff also said that no other organization had left the park so clean.
Let’s be clear—it wasn’t all rainbows from there. For one thing, Disney had a ban on same-sex couples dancing at the park. The Bay Area Reporter interviewed the man now known simply as Crusader—he changed his name legally in 1995—who was friends with a lesbian who was warned about dancing with other girls in 1980. (She isn’t identified in the article.) He and another gay friend, Shawn Elliott, went to the Tomorrowland Terrace and danced to apparently quite bad disco. Perfectly staid dancing. They refused to stop and were kicked out of the park. Lawyer Ronald Talmo, himself straight, took their case and became the first lawyer to win a case against the Mouse Legal Forces.
So there was dancing. Eventually. But Disney wasn’t renting out the park as much, and an event like the Tavern Guild party would not happen again. Still, starting in the early ‘90s at the latest, unofficial gay days started happening in the parks. I found a site where the author claimed to have been at the “first” gay day, in 1998, but that’s impossible. It may have been the first one sponsored by the organization that trademarked the name, but they were only taking over an idea that had existed longer than that in my own personal direct knowledge.
Starting in 1987, Disney would close the park for a one-night fundraiser event to support AIDS Project Los Angeles. Unfortunately, the party was hosted by Odyssey Tours, and they were pocketing most of the money. This rather put a shadow over the whole thing. But in 1991, the unofficial Gay Day was starting, with the idea that people would wear red so they stood out and could find one another. They would respect Disney rules and the fact that, you know, small children present, but they would be part of a community. Including their own children.
The conservatives weren’t thrilled by all this. Disney actually started offering partner benefits, even, especially as it became clear exactly how many of their employees were, let’s say, eager participants in this sort of event. The company’s relationship with the community has long been uneven at best, but I will say that the Southern Baptists were right and Disney probably could’ve prevented those events if they wanted to, but they didn’t want to. For one thing, that first event? Sold some four times as much merchandise at the Emporium as Disney had expected. The Mouse respects a lot, but cold hard cash is high on the list.
You have to admit, though, Disney’s doubled down in their pursuit of that dollar, and it’s clear that their economic indicators suggest that Pride is more profitable. They started selling Pride merchandise in 2018, admittedly extremely late, but they were giving a percentage to Glisten, an organization that champions queer issues in K-12 education. When Ron DeSantis went after them, they went hard and started donating all the profits to Glisten. It’s easy to be angry at Disney, and you should be a fair amount of the time, but they do sometimes make enemies that get you to side with Disney instead.
There is now an official Pride Nite at Disneyland. It’s a separate-ticket event, and you’ve already missed it for the year. But they get queer-friendly celebrity guests, and there are parades, and Disney has a ton of Pride-themed food all month anyway. I think there’s a lot of things to fear in the current environment. But it’s worth noting that Disney wouldn’t continue to side with the community—even as a purely financial decision—if they didn’t think that it would continue to be the right decision in the public view. Even the Southern Baptists couldn’t keep up their boycott.