A top Disney executive in charge of content has promised that at least half of the characters in its productions will be LGBTIA or minority by the end of the year, admitting that the company has a ‘gay agenda’
The term LGBTQIA stands for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, questioning, intersex, pansexual, two-spirit, asexual, and ally.
During a staff meeting on Florida’s recent enactment of the Parental Rights in Education bill, an executive producer at Disney said she was advancing a “not-at-all-secret gay agenda” to insert queerness into children’s animation/cartoon productions.
Latoya Raveneau, executive producer for Disney Television Animation, talked about how the studio’s treatment of her progressive ideas defied her negative expectations of the company, in a video obtained by journalist Christopher Rufo.
Instead of rejecting her pitches for LGBTQ-friendly Easter eggs, Disney gladly accepted and included them, she claimed.
“In my little pocket of Proud Family Disney TVA, the showrunners were super welcoming . . . to my not-at-all-secret gay agenda,” she said.
“Maybe it was that way in the past, but I guess something must have happened . . . and then like all that momentum that I felt, that sense of ‘I don’t have to be afraid to have these two characters kiss in the background.’ I was just, wherever I could, adding queerness. . . . No one would stop me, and no one was trying to stop me.”
She said that when she joined, she felt Disney would try to keep LGBTQ elements out of content for younger audiences, but she was pleasantly surprised by the company’s acceptance.
“I love Disney’s content. I grew up watching all of the classics. They have been a huge informative part of my life, but at the same time, I worked at small studios most of my career, and I’d heard whispers. I’d heard things like, ‘They won’t let you show this in a Disney show.’ So I was a little sus when I started, but then my experience was bafflingly the opposite of what I had heard,” she said.