In today's day and age, people who identify as LGBTQ+ is much more normal than it used to be. 553 million people around the world identify as homosexual or bisexual. That's more than the population of the USA! Even with this data, plenty of people still think that people who are LGBTQ+ are “sinners” and should be looked down upon as though they are wrong to express themselves as who they are. Along with this, some companies have decided to only use LGBTQ+ characters to be humorous to a heterosexual audience rather than expand on who can enjoy these movies.. One of these companies is Disney.

Disney has gone out of its way to make LGBTQ+ characters in its movies to entertain a heterosexual audience even though other companies have had LGBTQ+ characters in their movies and TV shows. This led people to believe that Disney doesn't want to do this in big movies since they think they won’t make enough money, which is offensive to the LGBTQ+ community. Collider explains that Jungle Cruise tries to go for some ”gay-panic” this is where the audience is supposed to be amused when a character, before getting something off his chest, retracts when Houghton (homosexual) offers his “stick to bite on''. This was meant to be a funny joke for the audience, but it just made people uncomfortable and confused as to what had just happened. This went in the complete opposite direction of what Disney thought would have happened and made people question their decisions more.

Another way to think of this is that Disney is more mainstream than other companies which have LGBTQ+ characters in their movies and TV shows. For example, She-Ra and the Princesses of Power have two (confirmed) openly gay characters and people were ecstatic when the two characters became an openly gay couple and the creators of the show got way more praise than hate considering the number of people watching it. Even Disney has gay characters in their TV shows but they choose not to include them in their movies. Some speculate the reason for this is that Disney doesn't want to lose money over a movie because they included representation in a movie. Because of this, the audience may never see good representation in Disney movies if the general public doesn’t do anything about it.

Another controversy surrounding Disney is their move Luca where there was blatant queerbaiting(showing gay themes and not saying it's true) throughout the whole movie. This is shown through Luca and Alberto’s story as there were themes similar to a romance story, a connection similar to a couple, and many other reasons.

The audience of these Disney films. need to confront Disney about its mistakes and how they still have consequences for its actions.

Works Cited: 

Monson, Leigh. ““Luca” Continues Disney’s Legacy of Blatant Queerbaiting.” Whattowatch.com, 18 June 2021, www.whattowatch.com/features/luca-continues-disneys-legacy-of-blatant-queerbaiting.  Accessed 11 April 2022.

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“Why Disney Is Failing at LGBTQ+ Representation.” Collider, 8 Aug. 2021, collider.com/why-disney-queer-representation-is-failing/. Accessed 09 April 2022

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