It’s unclear if Disney’s actions were deliberate or if the studio simply went along with the general consensus and voiced what many people already believed about the LGBTQ community, but the overt queerness of their villains is undeniable.

Think of Ursula shaking her hips during Poor Unfortunate Souls, Scar toying with the mouse he’s about to eat in The Lion King, or Governor Ratcliffe gleefully proclaiming his superiority and greed during Mine, Mine, Mine from Pocahontas. And then you die.” Certainly, Disney villains thrived on their queerness, savoring the wickedness of their actions and almost getting off on it. We could interpret Disney’s use of queer coding on its villains as the studio trying to reaffirm the negative connotations most closely associated with the LGBTQ community. However, whereas queer coding in classic literature served to include the oppressed voices and perspectives of LGBTQ people, Disney’s use of it on its villains added further stigma to a community already struggling to be seen and accepted. Queer coding became prominent in cinema during the Golden Age of Hollywood, especially after the rise of the Hays Code. Queer coding has long been a way of including LGBTQ-adjacent characters without stating their sexuality openly, and we can trace it back to literary classics like Jane Austen’s Emma and Pride and Prejudice, Virginia Woolf’s Orlando and Mrs.

Queer coding is the practice of imbuing queer traits into a character without outright declaring them part of the LGBTQ community.

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