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Things Disney have had a special appeal for gays and lesbians going back long before "Ellen," argues Sean Griffin in his new book "Tinker Belles and Evil Queens: The Walt Disney Company from the Inside Out." In this survey documenting both the accidental and deliberate embrace of gay consumers by America's most calculating purveyor of "family values" entertainment, the film and media scholar finds enough threads to weave a pink cape for Maleficent, the villainess of "Sleeping Beauty."

The political and religious right's outrage over this affinity peaked in the mid-1990s when Disney decided to extend health benefits to the partners of its gay employees. Griffin, however, doesn't paint Disney as an unambivalent ally of gays and lesbians -- after all, Walt himself offered to make an educational film warning children about homosexual pedophiles. Instead, the gay author portrays a winking camaraderie that clearly serves to bolster the company's bottom line. Salon reached Griffin at his home in South Florida, where he teaches at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton.

Tinker Belles and Evil Queens: The Walt Disney Company From the Inside Out By Sean Griffin NYU Press, 312 pages Nonfiction Buy this book at B&N.com

You open with a 1995 letter from 15 Florida legislators who claimed that Disney's domestic partner benefits undermined the company's record for representing "all that is good and pure and wholesome in our nation." That letter proves Disney may never be let off the hook by those who imagined Walt to be a moral conscience. Was he?

Because Disney consciously chose somewhere in the early '30s to try to be a family-friendly, kids-oriented company, it's always, even way back in the 1930s, been an easy target for attack. When "Snow White" first opened [in 1937], various parents' groups protested it because they thought the witch was too scary. So there's a history of people complaining. Not that the people complaining are wrong all the time. It's just part of what happens when you choose to market yourself with this image.

It was a good marketing decision in the '30s. At the time, there were calls for federal censorship in films. The early Mickey Mouse cartoons show him as a ne'er-do-well, someone who's not afraid to use violence [or to] chase Minnie around the couch. Since he was such a big star, some parents' groups started getting on his case then. So there was a conscious decision to shift over into a more family image that would help him maintain popularity. Since Disney was a very small company -- not a major studio, just a little cartoon factory -- that helped gain publicity that put him on more of a par with the big studios. It helped him gain more power by deciding to fashion this image. It was economics more than anything else.

Gay and lesbian historian Allan Berube found a photograph of a gay bar in Berlin from the 1930s called "Mickey Mouse." What's the connection?

During this early period within at least some gay communities -- there wasn't an organized community with mass media and journals and all that stuff we have now; communities were sort of circumspect and closeted -- some were using the term "Mickey Mouse" as a code word, or slang, for talking about being gay or lesbian. The idea of Mickey Mouse -- the way it's used in slang in general, as meaning offbeat, possibly a little tacky, strange -- would fit for the idea of a sexual orientation that was considered not normal. But it also sort of validated it, since Mickey Mouse was such a huge star at that point -- sort of awkward and offbeat, and yet fabulous at the same time.

Much of the early appeal of Disney's films for gay and lesbian viewers seems to come from a subversive reading. Were story lines and characters actually so ambiguous that anyone could read into it whatever they wanted?

You can't just create a whole bunch of new characters and a whole new story line out of nowhere to fit your needs. But, especially with Disney cartoons that focus so much on fantasy, where cookies or cakes or insects or animals take on human characteristics, you're already being asked to read into things. Since the cartoons are asking that already, it might be a stretch to some heterosexual audiences, but not necessarily to gay audiences, to further say, well, why can't you read somebody as being gay? Part of the fun for gay and lesbian audiences back then was being aware that this was not the intention, that they were doing something that the makers didn't realize -- they were sort of taking some power back. That's not necessarily the case nowadays, where people working in the studio who are openly gay have said that they've been aware of the possibilities.

The 1937 Oscar-winning short "Ferdinand the Bull" depicts an effeminate bull who is content to smell the flowers rather than chase more masculine pursuits. You cheer the story line as one among many that champion "outsiders," one of the ongoing themes that speak to gay sensibilities. I would have thought such a stereotypical portrait would produce outrage.

Because it's animals instead of human beings, there's a cushion there. It's played as sort of gently comic, so he's not looked on as some inordinate hero for standing up to things; he's not like some gay teen trying to get through high school. While he's content to be lazy and sit there and smell the flowers and not be out playing sports, there's no scene of him mooning over some other bull. That might have made it OK and possibly kept most audiences from being upset.

Next page | How naive could Walt be?