Fairies in Neverland: Queer Encounters with, and Reimaginings Of, the Disney Brand

There was always something compelling about The Little Mermaid. Perhaps it was the fact that Ariel has to seduce Eric without her voice; as a queer middle schooler looking for love, I had to become proficient in nonverbal cues. How did the other boys carry themselves? How did they look at one another, at me? Where did their eyes stay too long, not long enough? I never found my prince charming, but Ariel did, and that gave me hope. (As soon as I was able, I learned that saying “I’m gay, are you also gay, and if so would you like to go out?” is much more effective than six months of pantomime). 

Perhaps equally compelling is The Little Mermaid’s transformation narrative. Ariel initially cannot be with Eric because she doesn’t have legs; I initially couldn’t be with straight boys because I wasn’t a girl. At times I was like Ariel in wishing for a transformation of my body’s lower half (although some modifications up top wouldn’t have hurt either). However, just like Ariel, I was able to address this by accessing queer power. Ariel seeks out Ursula, a powerful sea witch whose queer source material (the drag queen Divine) is well-documented. Ursula then uses her magic to transform Ariel into a human. I didn’t want transformation. My queer power was gradual self-confidence: I was eventually strong enough to seek out other gay boys who desired my body as is, no magic or surgeries required. 

Given the sympathy I have for the film and story overall, I find it somewhat odd that its companion ride in the Walt Disney World theme park irritates me as much as it does. There’s something about the “Kiss the Girl” scene that just gets to me. Perhaps it reflects a lifetime of “kiss the girl” type moments in my own life. Perhaps being in a place saturated with performative heterosexuality heightens the sting of such explicit lyrics. Perhaps it was the fact that the ride got stuck and I had to listen to it for 20 minutes straight. Regardless, after being bitter from that scene onwards, I began to think. Am I ridiculous? Who am I to be “mad” at heterosexuality when both parties are consenting? What kind of gay hysteria is this? 

Then I began to think about what would happen if it were “kiss the boy” instead. The Christian-conservative groups that would be up in arms, jumping out of their plastic clamshells to decapitate the faggots. I realized then that I had been gaslighting myself. I had momentarily bought into a narrative of gay liberation that said the source of our anger was heterosexuality itself, that we wanted everything and everyone to be gay and anything less was a hate crime. And that obviously wasn’t right. I wasn’t mad at Ariel, or Eric, or even Disney. I wasn’t even mad that I had never kissed a boy. I was mad that for so long I didn’t even know kissing boys was an option. That I didn’t know these moments existed for us. Even once I did know, I was frustrated that I never saw them on television, in movies, that aside from some very colorful Wattpad stories, they only existed in my head. This kind of anger was political and proportional, but most importantly, it was rational. I wasn’t some crazy, spiteful homo that needed to be exiled from the kingdom of sensible minds.

The next day the ride got stuck again, but this time I got to watch Ursula very closely. I looked into her harshly-lit animatronic eyes and realized I didn’t know her at all. She was never given a backstory. She truly was a drag queen, putting on shows for her entourage of two in a dimly-lit cave by the edge of the sea, but it had never been explained to me why she had been exiled from public life in Atlantica. Who had she offended? Or, perhaps, who had been offended by her? What had she asked for that she didn’t get and then tried to steal? Did she feel entitled to Triton’s power like I felt entitled to queer stories? Was her “hysteria” somehow like my own? 

Perhaps the story is being told backwards. Perhaps we should start in a dark hollow by the edge of the sea, with a witch-queen in mourning, who sells herself back into public life by proffering her power to make unorthodox (one might say queer) relationships possible. Perhaps we should tell the story of an entrepreneurial woman (if Ursula knows one thing, it’s contracts) who demands that she be given a voice in public affairs, only to be silenced by the heterosexual, cisgender, masculine Eric, who murders her. 

I can only imagine what might be possible in The Little Mermaid universe if there wasn’t the compulsory centering of heterosexual romance and fetishization of queer villainy. I wonder about everything that Ursula knows but doesn’t say, her tongue cut by screenwriters uninterested in the depths of her queerness and her character. I remain watchful, patiently impatient, waiting for her, like so many other queer people, to speak.