Gay Days at Disneyland: My Experience

WOW, it’s been a lot longer than I’d like. School started and we go real busy with that and then it got hot and with that a lack of desire to do anything other than sit in front of the AC. Hopefully I can get into a better rhythm now.

Last weekend we went to Gay Days at Disneyland. We discovered it by accident one year and every year after that we either forgot about it or had scheduling conflicts. But we made great effort to avoid both forgetting and scheduling conflicts to finally be able to attend this year!

If you aren’t familiar with Gay Days, it is an organized event, not sponsored or endorsed by Disney though they do go to great lengths to both accommodate and make money from the event. It is over a weekend and the organizers plan many activities and shows for the attendees. People who participate wear red shirts. It happens at both Disneyland and Disney World.

We had fun and got to see Fantasmic! before it goes away for a whole year. It was real neat to see so many couples and families like us and all the allies! It was, over all, a very enjoyable experience. Disney went out of their way to accommodate the event and, in their non-official away, endorse it. There was a display at the Emporium that I wanted to take a picture of but got too caught up to do so. It was a display of red t-shirts with a Mickey on them and on the shelf over the shirts was a bowl with rainbow Mickey heads for dangling and rainbow Mickey head pins. There were also rainbow candy apples and a special rainbow mickey mug. There were probably more things we did not see.

We did not buy the official Gay Days shirt but wore our own. We saw many people do the same with many of them having custom made their shirts with different sayings and drawings. Lots of "love is love" in the Disney font and rainbow Mickey heads. Some of the sayings were cute and original and creative, I really loved them! Some, not so much.

I’m not one to openly voice my opinions on what people wear. If I see something that I think is stupid or ridiculous or inappropriate I usually mention it only to my wife and nothing more. There is no point in giving it much time or attention when the person is a stranger you are likely to never meet. This usually happens out and about in the street or mall, open public places where people do have the right to wear whatever they want. However, I have very strong objections to some of the shirts we saw.

Disneyland is a theme park aimed at kids. Yes, there are a lot of things for adults and I have enjoyed Disneyland the most as an adult without a child so I definitely understand the appeal. But it does not change the fact that it is a family place where there WILL be many children. As such, people need to dress for being around children. This includes not only the style of clothing and what is or is not shown but also what is WRITTEN on the clothing. Between my wife and I we saw, at least, 20-30 people wearing T-shirts with very inappropriate things written on them. We weren’t actively seeking out people’s shirts so there had to be more that we missed. The milder of the bunch was something to the effect of "I want a Prince in the streets and a Beast in the sheets" with "prince" being in Disney font and "beast" in Beauty and the Beast font.

No. Simply no. My child may not be able to read but a good bunch of them at the park can. And I would be mortified if my 10 year old asked me what that man meant with that shirt. I don’t want to know what strangers, gay or striaght, prefer in the bedroom, to each their own. And had I seen such a shirt at the mall I would have probably just rolled my eyes and moved on. But at Disneyland?? Really?? Have we no class? No respect for other families? For children??

And I know straight people wear things like that too and that they too wear it to the park. But there are two things that make this different. One, it’s on a red shirt amongst a sea of red shirts. It doesn’t take much brain power to figure out that there is something significant going on with people in red shirts when you show up at Disneyland on Gay Days. And people very quickly figure out, due to all the red shirts that say Gay Days or other gay related phrases or rainbows, what the whole thing is really about. So naturally people are curious as to what all the shirts say, we’ve made a point of standing out by wearing the same colour and now everyone turns to look. If it were a lone red shirt in a sea of people wearing all sorts of shirts, no one will likely take notice. So yes, people are looking at you because you are wearing a red shirt. If you didn’t want to stand out on Gay Days, you shouldn’t have worn a red shirt. So by purposefully putting inappropriate phrases on your red shirts you are asking people to please take the time to read them. And we do.

Secondly, straight people aren’t stereotyped as child predators simply by being straight. You don’t help dispel this stereotype by wearing a shirt with the goal of attracting attention with an inappropriate phrase, in a Disney font, in a place full of kids! Kids will see the all familiar font and turn to read it because that is what kids do. I think most (if not all) parents would agree that they’d rather explain why the man in a red tee is wearing sparkly eye shadow and a tiara than explain what "spitters are quitters" on that man’s red shirt means. And sure, you can spin it to be about something else entirely. However, I think that is a disservice to all our allies that approach it as a learning opportunity to talk to their kids about equality and love and tolerance and then someone throws THAT at them. And to the tweens and teens that are old enough to put the clues together. And at the end of the day it comes back to one of the opposition’s standing arguments: you are attracting children to look at you and exposing them to things they are not old enough to be exposed to. No one should be put in a position to try to explain something like that to a child during a family day at Disneyland.

After about a dozen of these shirts, and despite the fact that the vast majority of the red shirts were tasteful and clever and completely appropriate, I honestly felt like taking off my red shirt and rainbow pin and NOT be associated with them.

We had fun but I don’t know if we’ll be doing it again next year. And maybe I’m overly sensitive, I have been accused of that before, but those tasteless shirts did leave me not wanting to do it again. That kind of stuff belongs at adult events not at Disneyland.

Common Question: How Do You Explain It?

Every time something major happens in the LGBT+ (depending on who is posting) community that is all over the media such as federal rulings or things involving celebrities, I am inevitably asked by people how we explain these things to our son.  And I struggle with that answer.  These people are almost always people that know me and my family well enough to know some basic facts about us:

• My son does not watch mainstreem/popular TV.  He watches, even at almost 8, only kid friendly tv shows and the food network at his aunt's house.  He doesn't actually watch much TV at all.
• My son is autistic and not aware of much of anything beyond his surroundings.
• We live in a part of town with a large gay population.
• My wife came into our lives when he was 3 and, therefore, from his point of view, she has always been there.

So I stop, and remind them of these facts and watch as their expressions tell me what I suspected all along: They don't want my answer to their question, they want me to answer that question which they are struggling with themselves.  They want me to tell them some magic recipe for telling their questioning children.  And I think this is what people are generally asking when they ask gay parents how they explain it to their kids.

The truth is that our son doesn't know about a world where gay people do not exist any more than your child knows about a world with slavery and public hangings.  He grew up in this city where it is just as common to see a male and female holding hands as it is to see two males holding hands.  He has seen people with beards and hairy legs wearing dresses just like he has seen the same king of people wearing pants.  He sees and doesn't give it a second thought.  Why should he? Women wear both dresses and pants, why can't men?  There are actually some buddhist monks that we've seen in the neighbourhood, I'm pretty sure there is a monastery near by, and he thinks they're wearing orange dresses too.  It's just clothing to him.

He has known his specific parental structure as long as he has use of memory.  And he has not questioned it.  Maybe because I don't have a father in my life.  Maybe because I come from a long line of powerful matriarchs and single mothers.  Maybe because The Lion King was his favourite movie for a long time and we've seen Bambi and Annie plenty of times as well.  He just knows that different children have different looking families.  I know questions will come up eventually.  But as of now, we have never had to explain our adult relationship to our child.

So I'm sorry I don't know what you should tell your questioning child.  Part of parenthood is explaining things to our children that we could have never anticipated and don't quite understand ourselves.  I've had to explain to my son that a parent going away doesn't mean she doesn't love him and explain that there are laws that make it difficult for us to just live happily ever after.  Explaining the immigration process was one of the most difficult things I've ever had to deal with, but we figured it out.  But maybe you can start with, "Everyone is different, and that's ok."