The Fabulous Kingdom

I love all things Disney. Princess, adventure, theme park, cartoon, Broadway, whatever. I love it and will always have to fight the urge to immerse myself in Disney Scrooge McDuck style. I am convinced that I will never be too old for Disney movies or a romp through Disney World. In fact, the first time my family and I went to Animal Kingdom, I was 12 and it was early June. My uncle warned my father that we might want to wait and go to the park a different day because it was Disney's Gay Day. We went anyway, and all of our pictures have men in red shirts and shorty shorts in the background.

I was doing my usual "bored on the Wikipedia" routine (beginning with one person and clicking on various articles that interest me and reading them) and I stumbled upon the entry for Tommy Kirk, one of the ubiquitous Disney live-action movie stars of the late 1950s and early 1960s. It turns out he was fired by Walt Disney in 1963, after it was discovered that Kirk, at 23, was having a sexual relationship with a 15 year old boy. Whoops.

One of the footnotes to that story is to an interview called The Fabulous Kingdom, which is an interview with Sean Griffin, the author of Tinker Belles and Evil Queens: The Walt Disney Company from the Inside Out. The article describes the book as "documenting both the accidental and deliberate embrace of gay consumers by America's most calculating purveyor of "family values" entertainment" and that the author "finds enough threads to weave a pink cape for Maleficent, the villainess of Sleeping Beauty."

I must read this book.