La Ron S. Readus
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How Gay is The Little Mermaid? (VIDEO SCRIPT)
🕑 Added 2023-05-10 20:00:02 +0000 UTCReaders, I, like I’m sure a good amount of you, owe a lot of my childhood upbringing as a millennial born in the late 80’s to the historical era of Disney animation known as the Disney Renaissance. The one that started the revitalization of their animation department as we currently know it being 1989’s The Little Mermaid
/Now for the longest, I was pretty much under the belief that thanks to its story centering around the mermaid princess Ariel wanting to know what it’s like on land, becoming smitten over the human prince Eric after saving him from drowning, only to get wrapped up in the personal vendetta of Ursula the sea witch when she sacrifices her beautiful voice in order to become human and given the task to obtain true loves kiss from him in 3 days, that this was a story mostly aimed for young girls, despite it being one that everyone could enjoy/
And that was definitely the case with me.
With the likes of Batman 89 and Superman 78 being the first movies I ever saw and absorbed as a kid...
/Seeing what Ariel went through after it was a clear indicator that Ursula was a bad guy was a great introduction to this type of storytelling to me, and initially introduced me to the concepts of romance and infatuation before Nickelodeon’s Doug told me how I should handle those concepts as boy according to heteronormativity./
But as a lot of you know and probably experienced yourselves, I got older, wiser, a bit gayer...
And the more I thought more about the likes of both queer and critical race theory as I began to grow in my fields of acting, writing and entertainment, I began to look at things such as the origins of a lot of things I loved as a kid.
This not only included looking at the behind the scenes machinations of the likes of The Little Mermaid, but also the very story that inspired the Disney classic.
So with us exploring these aspects in today’s lesson, I want to share with you all the initial interpretation of the original story The Little Mermaid, the minds of the individuals that brought the animated movie to life, and how the likes of both original intent and heteronormativity have allowed the many interpretations of the story to exist at the same time, all in order to answer one specific question:
/How Gay is The Little Mermaid? Let’s begin./
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Hey, Readers. La’Ron here. Offering you analysis and perspective on your favorite bits of geek and pop culture media
If it wasn’t obvious from the intro, this video will in fact contain spoilers for both Hans Christian Andersen’s and Disney’s “The Little Mermaid. The latter is currently available to stream on Disney Plus and you can get the fairy tale with the affiliate link in the description box below, so give them a watch and a read before continuing here if you don’t want me to spoil pivotal points of it for you in this video.
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That’s the syllabus. Now onto the lesson.
The Little Mermaid was ALWAYS Gay
And that’s because the original fairytale for The Little Mermaid as written by Hans Christian Andersen in 1837, was done so as a queer yearning piece.
As a matter of fact, it may be one of the earliest examples of a piece of fiction written to represent queer yearning in modern history, beating Tchaikovsky’s ballet Swan Lake by almost 40 years. Hell, it even predates the beginning of Oscar Wilde’s career!
Now if you want an in-depth explanation regarding the multiple aspects queer yearning can go in and how it’s been molded for modern day storytelling, I explained all of that in my video about Zootopia and Clawhauser’s possible desires for Chief Bogo that were brought to light in the anthology series Zootopia Plus.
But one thing that hasn’t changed regarding how queer yearning pieces have evolved from Andersen’s day to today is that one of the most popular aspect of yearning that is sought from the queer individual or, in this case, author avatar, is the unrequited love of another
Andersen and his fairytale The Little Mermaid were no exceptions to the rule. As a matter of fact, one could even say it was what set the rule into motion considering all the stories it predates.
This is because the story of the mermaid who upon turning 15 years old becomes completely heartstruck for a human prince after saving him from certain death...
That is willing to go mute to grow legs and walk the earth and endure constant pain with every step she takes in order to win his love and be granted a human soul...
And is willing to sacrifice her 300 years of life and die by turning into seafoam if the prince chooses to marry someone else instead of her the day after his wedding...
Is a fictional expression of Andersen’s real life queer yearning for an actual man.
While the little mermaid is Andersen’s avatar in this tale, the prince represents a friend of his named Edvard Collin, a man he had a crush on when he was in his thirties.
And just like the nameless mermaid in his fairy tale, Andersen was down BAD for Edvard, going on to confess to him in letters he’d write to him, where he said things like “I long for you as though you were a beautiful Calabrian girl.”
And, as you’d imagine from the whole Alexander The Great fiasco, when historians found these letters and other exchanges with Andersen and the men that actually reciprocated his affection -- one of them being a duke -- they were INCREDIBLY slow to say that he was queer.
Because telling a man in my life that I want them as much as a man is expected to want a woman is EXACTLY what one bro platonically says to his other bro.
God, I hate homophobic historians. I swear they’re up there with those “if a white civilization didn’t make these landmarks, then it was clearly aliens” chucklefucks!
Anyways, as you can imagine, Collin got married to a woman and Andersen was heartbroken over it.
So heartbroken over it that he wrote The Little Mermaid as a way of working through his unrequited feelings for Edvard.
/This ended up being quite a habit for Andersen onward in pretty much all of his work. To quote American sexologist Wardell Baxter Pomeroy in researching Andersen with his colleague Alfred C. Kinsey, “Andersen could not tell the world of his own homosexual love for the people of the world, but the original manuscripts showed his feelings clearly.”/
Part of how that was possible, as history would show over the course of male queer creators thanks to the likes of the Hayes Code, the queer witch hunts in Hollywood during the Cold War, and the ostracization gained by trying to live openly...
Was because instead of having queer men be the main characters in their stories, they instead put straight/hetero-leaning women in their stead.
That way the creation -- book, movie, television show, what have you -- could survive the homogenous mainstream of heteronormativity.
This is how Andersen’s The Little Mermaid was able to -- forgive the pun -- tread water.
Because of the mermaid character and her romantic desire factoring into the likes of heteronormativity, the queer yearning that is the root of the story is lost to a lot of the people who would read it.
This is the case of a lot of the stories that were made into movies during the Golden Age of Hollywood, jettisoning the careers of the likes of Judy Garland, Bette Davis and other starlets taking up roles initially meant to be queer men. And, as you can imagine, part of the reason why Diva Worship was huge with those stars and the queer fanbase they formed was because they knew both consciously and subconsciously that the roles they took up were meant to reflect THEM.
This was a sense of survivability that lasted until the 90’s, even with American television. Yes, The Golden Girls was aimed for middle-aged women, but you’d be surprised how many queer men wrote for that show. There’s a reason why it has such a huge queer following even to this day!
Nowadays, the practice of using hetero-leaning women to headline stories that are initially meant to be from the perspective of queer men -- yearning ones or otherwise -- are, rightfully so, dwindling as time goes by. As I stated in my Zootopia video, the mainstream desire to tell queer stories written by queer creatives that feature queer characters telling the tales of queer yearning and the like has increased to a certain degree in film, television and publication.
And while bigots beholden to white supremacy are constantly aiming to silence anyone that is not a cisgendered heterosexual white male due to their obsession with control, even finding ways to implant those ideals in members of other ethnicities that have their own rich history of queerness in their cultures -- black and brown especially -- the pushback from queer creatives has been strong in this regard.
What sets The Little Mermaid apart from this, however, is that yes; it did receive this treatment. The story was in the public domain when Disney decided to adapt it, just like Snow White, Pinocchio, Sleeping Beauty, Alice in Wonderland and multiple other adaptations that came before it.
And like a lot of the Disney Princess films before it, the heteronormativity of a female mermaid -- now named Ariel -- pining over a prince -- now named Eric -- that she saved from a burning ship, immediately told execs that this was going to be a gendered film aimed at little girls.
Then Along Came Howard.
Howard Ashman, more specifically, who was an off-broadway lyrical darling in the 80’s in the world of musicals.
/But if you need to put the name to a popular Non-Disney body of work, he’s the one who created the Little Shop of Horrors musical adaptation of the black and white b-horror film from the 1960’s, that’s been given cult classic status thanks its film adaptation written by Ashman, starring Rick Moranis and directed by Frank Oz./
Ashman was also gay. Like, Theater Kid gay. MUSICAL Theater Kid gay more specifically, because while he was fine directing and screenwriting as Little Shop of Horrors has proven, he’d find out that his passion was in being a lyricist for musicals.
It was in his success with Little Shop of Horrors -- both off broadway and in the film adaptation -- that he gained the attention of Disney.
And while he initially was brought on board to do stories for live action -- the first project he did in their collaboration was to adapt Tina Turner’s autobiography “I, Tina” for Touchstone Pictures YEARS before what eventually became “What’s Love Got To Do With It”...
He felt more comfortable in animation, its department on the brink of shutting down at the time, and was assigned to help transition their next animated feature that would follow Oliver & Company into a musical hit.
/That animated feature just so happened to be a very Disney adaptation of Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Little Mermaid”/
As I stated before, Andersen’s work -- like a lot of the fairytales Disney adapted into animated features -- already existed in the Public Domain by the time they got hold of it. And Disney initially wanted to do an adaptation of The Little Mermaid a lot earlier than when it actually happened in the late 80’s.
Surprisingly enough, a lot of the changes that they initially made from the source material when they first tried to adapt were coincidentally also applied to John Musker and Ron Clements’ take on the story in 1989.
/The changes in question involve removing the consoling grandmother and replacing her with her animal sidekicks, making the sea witch a straight-up villain as opposed to a neutral party with no ulterior motives like she is in the story, the fact that the little mermaid had to LITERALLY cut out her tongue to pay for the spell that granted her legs and that every step she took with them would, and I quote, “feel as if you were treading upon sharp knives, and that the blood must flow.” Removing the bit where she would die the morning after the prince’s wedding if he chooses someone else as opposed to her by becoming seafoam since mermaids have no souls, and that her sisters sold their hair to the sea witch for her to create a dagger that if she stabbed the prince with it and let his blood drip down her legs, she’d become a mermaid again and avoid her tragic demise./
Obviously, since the target demographic for the film was young girls thanks to the little mermaid character allowing heteronormative acceptance in order to make Disney selectively, and the cishet white male writer/director duo naturally, blind to the queer yearning Andersen placed in this piece, adapting all of the Brothers Grimm-esque bits that Andersen put in The Little Mermaid wasn’t gonna be very cash-money of them.
All of these changes were made to the script before Howard came on board, including giving the newly named mermaid Ariel a happy ending.
One of the things that Ashman did to help the movie’s impact as the one to begin Disney animation’s renaissance era however, was share his knowledge of the formula and building blocks to enjoyable musical theater...
/Including introducing these two straight creatives to the concept of the main character’s desire song, that they went on to admit they were absolutely embarrassed that they didn’t know about sooner./
Speaking of desire songs, he fought tooth and nail to keep Ariel’s desire song “Part of Your World” in the movie, after Disney execs wanted to cut it because they thought kids would find it too boring.
And, as you’d expect, he brought his experience as a gay man who had just been indirectly diagnosed with AIDS -- he would’ve lost his insurance otherwise -- into not just his work in the Little Mermaid, but in the other two films that also kicked off the Disney Renaissance; Beauty and the Beast and Aladdin.
As I stated before, when a queer male writer feels forced to make the main character of a story they’re trying to sell in Hollywood a hetero-leaning woman so that it can appeal to heteronormativity, and it successfully turns into a film or television show, other queer individuals tend to know what the original intent of the work was meant to be and gravitate toward it.
Not only was Hans Christan Andersen’s The Little Mermaid no exception to the rule, but Ashman, other queer male creatives attached to the movie, and even allies realized this about the story, even if they only read the Disney script and not the actual story it's based on.
And the way they chose to honor Hans Christian Andersen’s queer yearning within The Little Mermaid in this Disney film in a way that didn’t get them fired was through one thing that the LGBTQIA+ community does extremely well that also has musical theater in common. Express the queerness through camp.
/Now thanks to queer pop culture YouTubers like Matt Baume who made a spectacular video on the queer-coding of Disney villains during the Disney Renaissance, it's no longer a little-known-fact that the late drag queen Divine, the muse for famous queer and independent film writer/director John Waters, was the main inspiration for the design that would eventually become Ursula the sea witch./ (Kill everyone now)
Now while Ruben A. Aquino, the character designer for what eventually became Ursula, wasn’t queer, it was Howard who initially chose the form Aquino created that was inspired by the late Divine after John Musker and Ron Clements were initially aiming for something closer to a fish/shark version of Cruella De Ville.
/But that’s not to say that a queer animator DIDN’T involve themselves in the designs for a lot of the more prominent characters, including Ursula. Her human avatar Vanessa, when she used Ariel’s voice to hypnotize Prince Eric and keep him from kissing her to keep their contract bound, was designed by Andreas Deja, a gay man. Andreas also designed King Triton, Ariel’s father, and would go on to design some of the most iconic villains of the Disney Renaissance; most queer-coded themselves. Including Gaston from Beauty & The Beast, Jafar from Aladdin, and Scar from The Lion King./
Let’s also not forget that the reason why Sebastian the crab is Jamaican is because Howard suggested it.
The use of camp through the various expressions of queer culture from the creators brought on board the project, along with Howard Ashman’s knowledge and experience of musical theater and living life as a gay creative in the 70’s and 80’s respectively, helped honor the queerness that initially made up Hans Christian Andersen’s original story while still making it palpable to a heteronormative audience.
And, just like the original story and countless other queer ones that star a hetero-leaning woman, Disney’s interpretation of The Little Mermaid was treasured by just as many queer boys, girls, and those who would grow to identify with any all or none, as it did with its targeted demographic of young heteronormative girls, thanks to the queerness imbedded within it connecting with those who could see it.
And if it was capable of connecting its queer following with the likes of aesthetic, then you can bet your fins on The Little Mermaid’s story...
Being Just as Relatable.
It’s like I stated before, Readers: when a piece of fiction is written by a male queer creative and is meant to express said male queer creative’s experience to the point where the main character should be a queer man, but instead features a hetero-leaning woman as the main character in order for the story to be accepted in mainstream heteronormativity, queer men -- even before the internet -- have a way of knowing when a story given this treatment is about them.
The Little Mermaid -- both the original story and the Disney adaptation -- was no different. Queer men read Andersen’s fairy tale and related with the main character, just as much as baby gay millennials, without even knowing how Howard Ashman and company added queerness into it, watched the Disney classic and absolutely fell in love with it.
The movie allowed them to express themselves at a young age while I’m sure their parents were a bit hesitant, because, y’know, the 90’s. Some requested Ariel dolls, while others performed the entire movie to anyone who would pay them attention.
And as someone who used to randomly recite and reenact Penguin’s lines from Batman Returns when he was 4, no, I assure you, that’s not an exaggeration.
Also, just because I’m bisexual does not mean this movie hasn’t affected me in that regard either. While I was more aligned with Ashman’s follow-up Beauty & The Beast, my 6 year old self was the reason why my oldest sister named my now 28 year old niece Ariel when she was born in 1995.
/That goes double for the relatability they feel in comparing their experiences with Ariel’s. Whether it's being the youngest of her siblings like she is, wanting to experience a new life for themselves outside of what’s expected of them, or willing to do something drastic to get the experiences and validations they need because they don’t have a proper support network at home. This especially hits hard when you learn that at the end of the movie, Triton had the power to turn Ariel human the whole time./
Also, when you take into consideration how hard it is for some queer youth to do so...
/It’s really easy to see King Triton’s violent reaction to and his destruction of Ariel’s safe space, and compare it to a homophobic parent finding out in one way or another that their child is queer, and either beat them, berate them, destroy everything that brings them joy as punishment, or simply disown them./
Think I’m overexaggerating? /Watch the first episode of Pose./ (I want to be a dancer. And I’m gay)
On the other hand, we have to acknowledge that thanks to both versions of the story being forced to put on a mask of heteronormativity for the sake of both survivability and longevity, heteronormative takes and interpretations regarding what the story means for the likes of womanhood and feminism exist as well. And a lot of them are prioritized because current societal standards demand that heteronormativity be prioritized.
An example of this is, thanks to the story surrounding a mermaid becoming absolutely smitten with a prince and actively giving conscious consent to alter herself, sacrifice aspects about herself and endure tumultuous physical and emotional trauma in both the book and the movie respectively, a lot of women -- and rightly so, might I add -- looked at both of these adaptations and translated the actions of the main character to mean you shouldn’t have to drastically change yourself in order to fit the desires of a man.
Which, if we’re being honest, a lot of queer men thirsting after DL guys kinda need to follow suit.
/My friend and fellow video essayist Lindsey Ellis came to a similar conclusion analyzing the film the first time, during the period of her pop culture critic career when she wasn’t independent. It wasn’t until AFTER she was and re-examined the history and nuance of both the original story and the aspects of its Disney-fication that she became more lenient on it overall./
The same can’t be said for a lot of others, however. For example, Kiera Knightly, also of Disney fame thanks to the Pirates of the Caribbean movies, pretty much puts The Little Mermaid on her daughters no-watch list for similar reasons revolving around female empowerment...
/Saying in a 2018 interview on The Ellen Show, “This is the one that I’m quite annoyed about, because I really like the film, but Little Mermaid, I mean the songs are great, but do not give up your voice for a man. Hello.”/
This, of course, is not a “wrong way” of interpreting the original story or the Disney adaptation. After all, there’s a very popular reading of Disney’s version from a Dr. Michael Landis from State University of New York, Ulster that respectfully puts Ursula on the overall pedestal of feminism and is struck down because of it.
/He goes on to say in the 2019 issue of the Smithsonian he wrote this analysis for, “Ursula represents feminism, the fluidity of gender, and young Ariel’s empowerment. Ariel can be anything she wants, yet she chooses the role of young bride and human conformity. To ensure Ariel’s transition to domesticity, the men of her life murder Ursula with a ‘conveniently phallic’ symbol...’the ritual slaughtering of the archetypal evil feminine character’.”/
While I see where he’s aiming for with this read, there are aspects regarding Ursula’s overall motives for fulfilling Ariel’s request that don’t make me 100% agree with this take.
/Ursula’s reliance on Ariel failing to get Prince Eric to kiss her before the sun sets on the third day is very deliberate in regards to her extremely personal vendetta against King Triton, and her control over the seven seas would’ve grown absolutely catastrophic if left unchecked./
And because both gender expression and feminism are about freedom and equality respectively -- y’know, unless we’re shining a light specifically on how feminism is corrupted via white liberalism...
/I personally can’t see Ursula being a genuine liberator and representative of Ariel’s gender and feminism respectively like Dr. Landis can./
But while I’m completely entitled to my own opinion about how others choose to view, interpret and analyze this work, it doesn’t make me any less right or wrong about what I think about it. Especially if said take is based on how the story was presented to them, instead of knowing the history behind why its heteronormative mask was placed on the story in the first place.
It makes me an asshole however, if I were to just hear someone’s interpretation of the story thanks to how heteronormativity caused individuals to interpret this queer yearning story disguised as a heteroromantic tragedy and immediately go “no, you’re wrong, that’s a shit take because of all these aspects about the story and its writer that you never knew before and you should feel bad.”
This is the side-effect of generations worth of having to alter queer stories in order to make them both accessible and acceptable to a straight audience who, thanks to heteronormativity, already have the privilege of assuming that they take priority without any secondary thought.
It also provides very dangerous double-standards thanks to heteronormativity’s proximity to white supremacy, because once said demographic is fed the work that was initially created for the likes of us, a very loud aspect loves to declare that any critiques, or analysis, or interpretations that contrast what made the work cater to them in the first place is unacceptable.
When, for example, a queer writer uses a one-sided heterosexual romance to illustrate his own queer yearning for one of his very first crushes, knowing that nothing would come of the story if the main character was a more accurate representation of the author’s gender and sexuality, the indoctrination of heteronormativity grants those who are enslaved to it the privilege of not having to look further into narrative to see the queerness within. This also includes any critique and analysis of the work from these individuals that would follow.
However, this privilege granted by heteronormativity has the tendency to give some folks the gall to come after any interpretation, iteration, analysis or study of said work that doesn’t fit the mold of heterosexuality, despite the initial intention of the work.
Saying all this to say, that while we shouldn’t disregard the critiques and viewpoints that women and feminists have on the story, since aspects of it were shifted to appeal to them due to it being created in a time where that was the only way the story should thrive...
Do not extend that empathy to individuals who aim to claim ownership of said stories by saying we have no right to queerly interpret what was initially created with us in mind.
Because, as time has shown us, those same individuals who would loudly and wrongly claim that The Little Mermaid was only meant for girls and women, would easily extend their bigotry in order to gatekeep the story further. By saying Ariel can’t be black, for example.
Conclusion
Readers, when it comes to the queer allegations, The Little Mermaid -- both Andersen’s original story and the Disney version -- isn’t beating them.
And to the demographic of people that are upset about that, I don’t care.
Queer creatives have had to adjust and remake their art in order to cater to heteronormativity for YEARS.
And in doing so, it’s given assholes who perpetuate the hold heteronormativity has on society the excuse to claim the work as their own first and foremost without even taking into consideration the queer history behind the piece before said adjustments were made, even going as far to say that there’s no evidence of queerness in either the work or the author when there clearly is.
And while others see how important both acknowledging the queer yearning that was the root of the story and what this story means to young girls are without feeling the need to disregard one for the other...
We have people like Howard Ashman and the other queer creatives that were attached to one of the most popular adaptations of this story, to subtly find ways of bringing it back to its roots, so that the same experience the girls had could be just as easily given to queer children.
If knowing that the original Little Mermaid was written by a queer Danish man as a way of him crying over his first recorded crush on a guy, or that its Disney adaptation had its song lyrics and character designs created and approved by queer creatives near the end of the AIDS crisis, suddenly turns you off from enjoying this property anymore, then you never deserved to be a fan of it in the first place. And that’s the only gatekeeping I’m gonna allow here.
But I digress, Readers. Your homework assignment for the day:
Write in the comment section below which is your favorite version of The Little Mermaid; the original fairytale by Hans Christian Andersen or the 1989 Disney classic?
Or, if you feel like sharing with the rest of the class, a story you’ve seen or read that was created and intended for queer expression, but had to be adjusted to meet the marketing survivability standards of heteronormativity.
Whichever question you decide to answer, I’d love to know your thoughts.
/A HUGE shoutout to my Patrons both big and small for helping make this channel possible.
Make sure you check out the card at the end of the video to join, or click the link to it or any of my affiliates in the description box below.
But until then, this is Readus 101. Class dismissed./
