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Ten years old this weekend, Gay Day -- a grass-roots gathering initially launched with fliers in local bars and now promoted worldwide on the Internet and in gay-targeted media -- is a phenomenon with undeniable impact on two fronts. First, it's become a mainstay of Central Florida's tourist economy. Host hotels -- there are three this year -- set aside blocks of rooms in package deals pitched to the tens of thousands who flock to the weekend.
Several late-night dance parties at multiple sites, including Disney-MGM Studios, will draw similar numbers at similar prices. The Orlando-Orange County Convention and Visitors Bureau doesn't track such concentrations of what it considers to be leisure travelers, but if each person who attended a Gay Day activity wore a delegate badge, the numbers would dwarf the 50, people who otherwise constitute the bureau's largest convention booking. And it's still growing. But more than the economic impact, Gay Day influenced the cultural landscape -- and, most dramatically, the culture of The Walt Disney Company itself.
Walt Disney's enduring impact on popular culture justifies portrayals of him as a visionary. But he was not an enlightened visionary. The man whose name has no match as a stamp for wholesome family fare also "remained to the far right on the political spectrum, suspicious of foreigners, and unwilling to hire Jews or blacks in his company," writes Stefan Kanfer in "Serious Business: The Art and Commerce of Animation in America from Betty Boop to Toy Story.
When Walt died in , Disneyland was just 11 years old; Disney World was still five years in the future. But so indelible was Walt's imprint that the loss of his creative vision caused the company to stagnate. Yet the family-friendly franchise Walt created left the company shackled with restraints.
Tampering with tradition and Disney's long-established mainstream, Middle-American appeal might backfire. Could the new team redefine Disney without losing their core audience? Would they? Eisner gave them no choice. He fortified the foundation, adding Disney's own cable network, a retail chain, new resorts and theme parks, even reviving Walt's signature Sunday-night TV show with himself as host.
But he also deliberately shattered the mold: When the former movie executive jump-started Disney's film division, he went after Disney's first "R" ratings. He pushed Disney into television sitcom production, rock-music releases and urban redevelopment, making over a famously seedy stretch of New York City's Times Square with a retail monolith and a restored Broadway theater.
In short, he diversified Disney with subsidiaries whose output was everything the brand was not: gritty, sexy and controversial. But the Disney name itself was still something to safeguard. It was less a conspiracy to defraud the public than an admission that certain lines were not to be crossed; as America's most calculating purveyor of family values, the new Disney placed image above everything but profit.
Which is why, in the early s, as some of its gay and lesbian workers urged Disney to extend health-care benefits to their same-sex partners, the company again seemed paralyzed. Eisner's push into sophisticated, adult-oriented entertainment had not harmed the Disney brand in the public eye.
But being perceived as pro-gay was another thing altogether. When, after a three-year internal debate, it finally put those benefits in place, conservative religious and right-wing lobbies unleashed what would grow into the largest prolonged attack on Disney in the company's history. But the origins of that attack actually lie in the Gay Day congregation, an event built around the first Saturday of June and over which Disney's heavy-handed corporate management had absolutely no control.
In , subscribers to an Orlando computer bulletin-board service picked that day for a group outing to the Magic Kingdom. They spread the word locally with fliers in bars, advising all who showed up to wear red so they would stand out.
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That first Gay and Lesbian Day at the Magic Kingdom, as it was then promoted, attracted a few hundred people. By -- the year Disney announced it would offer domestic-partner benefits starting the next year -- Gay Day was drawing an estimated 32, people. Anti-gay opponents had taken note and were demanding the company to put a halt to it.
The growing backlash brought national media attention.
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Alarmed and fearful when Gay Day began, Disney had tried to keep its head low, saying only that anyone had the right to buy a ticket to its theme parks. But as the event grew, the company had to confront reality. Even before the benefits debate, Gay Day put Disney on the defensive. And the company responded in a way that finally embraced the gay and lesbian communities with which Disney already had a winking alliance. Gay Day led Disney to stand up to its conservative critics. Gay Day showed Disney that opponents, even when mobilized, couldn't tarnish the brand -- or, more significantly, affect the bottom line.
Gay Day thus made it easier for Disney itself to come out of the closet. Disney's "family values" image is nothing new, according to Rick Foglesong, a political-science professor at Rollins College who tracks Disney's activity in the state. Walt built Disneyland because he felt amusement parks of the day were unseemly, and he didn't feel comfortable as a parent and grandparent taking kids there, says Foglesong.
In fact, when Disneyland opened, Walt gave instructions not to hire anyone who had worked at boardwalk-type theme parks, to keep that seedy element out. That determination to police disruptive influences was obvious again with the announcement, 10 years after Disneyland's opening, that the company would build Disney World.
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The new, 27,acre site was deliberately vast and distanced from anything nearby to avoid a repeat of the clutter that had swiftly surrounded Disneyland. When plans for the Florida resort were announced in , Walt offered this none-too-prophetic assurance: "When [patrons] come into this world, we will take the blame for what goes on.
Decades later, steely control remained a characteristic of corporate management. But that control was challenged by the company's growth. At the time that diversity created contradictions aplenty.
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The animated features "The Little Mermaid," "Pocahontas" and "Beauty and the Beast" both the film and Broadway musical had restored Disney's status as the dominant producer of family-friendly fare. But its book division also had released "Growing Up Gay," a humorous collection of coming-of-age tales by the comedy trio "Funny Gay Males. Rapid expansion also meant some things slipped through the cracks: Just before the release of "Powder" -- a feature film about a boy with pale skin and mysterious powers -- Disney presumably was surprised to learn the film's director had served jail time as a convicted child-sex offender.
Two years later, in , Disney's Hollywood Records label would recall an album by a rap act, "Insane Clown Posse," on the same day of its release after red-faced executives learned too late of its obscenity-laced lyrics. Starting not long after Eisner's arrival, advocates of traditional morality already had accused the company of abandoning standards set by Walt Disney.
By the mid s the opportunities for those voices to focus their attacks were starting to multiply. Only one exception interrupted the company's progress: In , Disney announced plans for a historical theme park outside of Washington, D. The howls caused an unprecedented retreat. But in all other matters of business and creative direction, the complaints were scattered, and Disney could easily ignore them.
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Besides, the company was charting its own course. As long as quarterly earnings continued to climb, Disney didn't need to answer to anyone.
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Gay Day became the lightning rod critics needed to challenge that corporate strategy. Never mind that the event was imposed on Disney rather than initiated by it; by refusing to discourage the gathering, argued those critics, Disney condoned it. The irony is that Gay Day caused Disney to align itself with organizers whose smirking ambition -- if they thought about the company at all -- was to rub Disney the wrong way.
Its beginnings couldn't have been more humble. Starting with the s use of Mickey Mouse as a code phrase for gay, Griffin says, gay culture has affectionately embraced much of Disney's output, whether in animation, live-action films, TV series, theme parks or merchandise. The appeal, according to both Griffin and cultural analyst Jamie O'Boyle, lies in Disney's storytelling themes of inclusion. This, says O'Boyle, despite the fact that, "When Walt first started, Mickey Mouse was the little irreverent guy kicking authority figures in the butt.
Walt's biggest supporters at the time were the political-theorist leftists. When you are gay and have to come to terms with yourself, your family and society in general, this message resonates with you. In fact, it's the core theme of all of our hero stories. Disney is not the only company that tells the story, but it's the only one that tells the story exclusively. I'm not sure if I would call Disney 'pro-gay.
Although in the s Walt is said to have stood by an animator arrested on a charge of homosexuality, compassion vanished when the company's public image was at stake. In , Tommy Kirk -- a child actor in such live-action Disney films as "Old Yeller," "The Shaggy Dog" and "Swiss Family Robinson" -- had his contract suspended "because of growing awareness of his homosexual orientation," says Griffin, whose book relates the story based upon Kirk's published comments.
Not until did a gay group first attempt a large-scale event inside a Disney theme park. That year a group of West Hollywood bar owners, organized as the innocuous-sounding Los Angeles Bar and Restaurant Association, picked a date and secured a block of discounted tickets to be used during Disneyland's regular operating hours. The sponsors succeeded in keeping Disney in the dark about the nature of the gathering. According to his interviews with participants, the company "sort of made preparations for the worst," says Griffin.
They beefed up security. They told people who were working that day, or at least for that night, that courtesy was optional. But the people who attended that night -- and it was mostly gay men who attended -- were very aware of the fact that they were not welcome there. Fooled once, Disney would not be fooled a second time. In the interim Disney took a high-profile stand against open homosexuality in its parks.
To be sure, those parks had -- and still have -- unposted policies for conduct and appearance. For example, bare chests are not permitted, and park hosts have replaced shirts on guests whose clothing bore offending words or images. At Gay Day in , a man whose drag outfit featured a purple gown was politely but firmly steered into a store on Main Street U.
Those policies also forbid overt and inappropriate sexual behavior by any guest, homosexual or not. As one gay supervisor at Disney World put it, "Anything that you wouldn't do in a mall, you shouldn't do here.