Disney employees pledge efforts to insert more gay characters

The company, which owns a famous piece of real estate near Orlando and produces scores of films and television programs, mostly for young people, held a virtual “all hands” meeting to discuss the bill, which Gov. Ron DeSantis signed on Monday. Several people on the Zoom call boasted of how they are doing their best to create characters who are either homosexual or transgendered. 

While the Parental Rights in Education law prohibits classroom discussion of sexual orientation or transgenderism for children in the third grade or younger, Disney writers and animators are ready to fill the void. Latoya Raveneau, an executive producer for Disney Television Animation, for example, admitted in the meeting to having a “not-at-all-secret gay agenda.” 

“I was just, wherever I could, just basically adding queerness,” Raveneau said in the video. “No one would stop me and no one was trying to stop me.”

Another Disney employee, production coordinator Allen March, spoke about having self-imposed quotas for LGBT characters in Disney’s Moon Girl TV series. 

“I’ve had the privilege of working with the Moon Girl team for the last two years and they’ve been really open to exploring queer stories,” March said. “I put together like a tracker of our background characters to make sure that we have the full breadth of expression [with] all of our gender non-conforming characters.”

Karey Burke, President of Disney General Entertainment,  said she’s gone beyond making sure such characters get into stories. She said she’s determined to see that a certain number of gay, lesbian, and transgendered characters have leading roles. Speaking of a recent meeting at Disney-owned 20th Century Studios, she said an executive there pointed out that “we only have a handful of queer leads in our content.”

“And I went, ‘What! That can’t be true,’ and I realized oh, it actually is true, we have many, many, many LGBTQIA characters in our stories, and yet we don’t have enough leads,” Burke said. 

Disney issued a statement strongly critical of the Parental Rights in Education bill, which states that “classroom instruction by school personnel or third parties on sexual orientation or gender identity may not occur in kindergarten through grade 3 or in a manner that is not age-appropriate or developmentally appropriate for students in accordance with state standards.” The law also requires district school boards to “adopt procedures that comport with certain provisions of law for notifying a student's parent of specified information; requiring such procedures to reinforce the fundamental right of parents to make decisions regarding the upbringing and control of their children in a specified manner” and requires “school districts to notify parents of healthcare services and provide parents the opportunity to consent or decline such services.”

The Disney statement – apparently issued after vocal employees protested a more tepid initial response – said the bill “should never have passed and should never have been signed into law. 

“Our goal as a company is for this law to be repealed by the legislature or struck down in the courts, and we remain committed to supporting the national and state organizations working to achieve that,” the March 28 statement said. “We are dedicated to standing up for the rights and safety of LGBTQ+ members of the Disney family, as well as the LGBTQ+ community in Florida and across the country.”

But if the Parental Rights in Education law elicited a commitment on the part of Disney to continue normalizing transgenderism through its kids programs, the dust-up has also brought to light an ongoing effort to provide a more wholesome alternative. The Daily Wire, a conservative website featuring a popular podcast by Ben Shapiro, announced plans to begin producing children’s programming next year, Variety magazine reported. 

“The Nashville-based company announced Wednesday that it plans to invest at least $100 million over the next three years into live-action and animated kids’ content,” Variety said. “That’s on top of more than $100 million it expects to spend on conservative-values entertainment content for adults, according to Daily Wire co-CEO Jeremy Boreing. The right-wing outlet’s first content targeted at children is supposed to launch on Daily Wire’s subscription platform in the spring of 2023.”

Americans are “tired of giving their money to woke media companies who want to indoctrinate their children with radical race and gender theory,” Boreing said in announcing the initiative. “But they want to do more than just cancel them. They want alternatives.”

“Disney was once a reliable source of wholesome and innocent entertainment for children,” The Daily Wire said in a press release. But now parents are “fearful that the content their kids are consuming is brainwashing them at best and endangering them at worst.”

Boreing said that three months ago the company recruited Eric Branscum and Ethan Nicolle of the Christian-themed “VeggieTales in the House” series and conservative Christian news satire site Babylon Bee to lead content development for “DW Kids.” The plan was to announce the new line-up this fall, but news of Disney’s radical response to Florida’s new law led the company to reveal the plans this past week.