Disney is ubiquitous. It owns most of our favorite media. Having them in our lives might seem unavoidable. 

However, over the last week or two, a lot of Americans got used to the idea of not having a Disney+ subscription as they protested the company for rolling over and allowing a massive violation of free speech in the face of government threats. That decision was a sign that even Disney’s collection of IP wasn’t enough for us to ignore their corporate actions. 

Related

The artifice of male supremacy: Why trans men are often ignored in the debate about trans rights

While they’ve reverted course for now, it might be worth remembering who they are, looking at how much their decisions are motivated by greed rather than morals, and knowing that withholding your subscription even just a little longer sends a clear message that these sorts of mistakes don’t just go back overnight, that there’s a real cost here.

Returning Jimmy Kimmel to the airwaves was a great move by Disney, one that will likely help to prevent other companies from bowing to political pressures over free speech quite so quickly in the future. However, to call it the right move would be to ignore the fact that the right move would have been not to give in to that political pressure to cancel Kimmel in the first place, or to wait until the company was losing billions in market value to bring him back.

Dive deeper every day

Join our newsletter for thought-provoking commentary that goes beyond the surface of LGBTQ+ issues
Subscribe to our Newsletter today

Regardless, the decision to reinstate Kimmel’s late-night show might give the casual observer the idea that Disney is fully in good standing again. But this reinstatement, along with the somewhat weak explanation for the whole thing, isn’t enough to make up for the way that Disney has repeatedly abandoned ethics in favor of making a few more bucks.

Disney’s willingness to go wherever the political wind blows is particularly evident in its approach to LGBTQ+ representation. Prior to 2016, Disney included no notable queer content whatsoever—to put that in perspective, Laverne Cox was already playing a major role in Orange is the New Black in 2013 and Transparent debuted in 2014. Ellen owned daytime talk for a decade by 2016 and many shows had LGBTQ+ characters.

When Disney did start to show more diversity on screen, it came very slowly and in the most watered-down way possible.

That has never stopped Disney from boasting about how inclusive and progressive they are, of course. When they teased that 2017’s Beauty and the Beast would have their first openly gay character, people hoped for more than a shot of LeFou dancing with a guy in the background. Whether it was Phastos in the Eternals or America Chavez’s parents in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, Disney’s LGBTQ+ representation has tended to be a two-faced combination of heavily-advertised and minor, merely implied, or condensed into easily-cut “blink-and-you’ll-miss-it” scenes. When Avengers: Endgame came around, one of the directors, Joe Russo, had to play the gay man in a cameo himself to avoid the content being cut.

While the quality of LGBTQ+ representation in Disney products had been on a definite (if slow) upswing for several years, with Donald Trump’s second term, they’ve been more than happy to throw queer characters, stories, and anything that can be remotely labeled as “DEI” straight out of the window. Barely a month after the 2024 election, news broke that Disney was removing a trans character and storyline from its then-upcoming show, Win or Lose.

A microcosm of all of that representation-meets-political grandstanding and backpedaling played out in Florida in recent years. When Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) introduced Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill (H.B. 1557), it came out that Disney had donated to the political chests of every single sponsor and cosponsor of the bill. When they were asked to make a statement on the bill, then-CEO Bob Chapek declined to take a stand for either side.

As with Kimmel, for Disney to do the right thing, they had to be publicly shamed and in fear for their bottom line. In response to the backlash from Disney creators and consumers, Disney stopped financial support for the relevant politicians, reintroduced a previously cut same-sex kiss to Lightyear (which people would then try to blame for the poor performance of that movie), and entered into a feud with DeSantis. That feud lasted two years and saw Disney threatened politically for speaking out against the “Don’t Say Gay” bill, with Florida removing several perks and tax benefits the company enjoyed in the state.

As with Kimmel, it was great that Disney stood up to DeSantis. But it would have been right to stand up to the attacks on free speech and the LGBTQ+ community without needing the threat of a major backlash to do it. Until people spoke up, Disney was perfectly content to sell the LGBTQ+ community down the river if it meant not challenging the revenue streams too much.

Even Disney’s “but the foreign market!” excuse, based on China’s massive market share that would disappear for movies with LGBTQ+ content, might have expired. China has just demonstrated an ability and willingness to deepfake the gay away using AI on Together, which might render that excuse moot.

Disney’s willingness to back down and cancel Kimmel fits far too well with the way that they have run their business: being the happiest place on Earth apparently means providing a reductive version of reality and trying not to upset whoever is the loudest at any particular moment. Their about-turn on cancelling Kimmel shouldn’t be seen as a great redemption, but rather as a response to the financial pressure from canceled subscriptions. 

We need too-big-to-fail corporations like Disney to actually stand up for moral causes because it’s what is right, and to be willing to lose some of their market share while people adjust because they’re on the right side of history for once.

Oh, and they’re raising the price for Disney+ next month.

Subscribe to the LGBTQ Nation newsletter and be the first to know about the latest headlines shaping LGBTQ+ communities worldwide.