On a recent morning at Disney’s California Adventure Park in Anaheim, dozens of large, bearded, red-shirted men (and a handful of clean-shaven, not-so-large allies) are gathering in front of the park’s Grizzly River Run for a communal trip down the ride’s simulated rapids.
Named Grizzly Bears Unite!, this meetup, part of the park’s Gay Days festivities, welcomes “bears and bear-lovers” alike. Many attendees are sporting official red Gay Days shirts, featuring versions of Peter Pan and Jessica Rabbit, while others are wearing Pride-themed tees, also red, some sanctioned by the Mouse House and featuring Goofy et al. in a Disney version of a Pride parade, others probably not, like the ones that read “Daddyland: The Happiest Place on Earth.” A photographer gathers the hirsute revelers for a group shot in front of the ride’s mascot, a 20-foot-tall wooden bear wearing a life jacket and holding an enormous oar. Men drape their arms around one another for the photo; some hug and kiss. When the photographer tells them to growl like bears and show their “claws,” they smile and growl with gusto.
Gay Days Anaheim (also the name of the group that organizes the festivities) is one of the most popular events at Disneyland, traditionally held over a three-day weekend in September during regular park hours. Although Gay Days is not formally endorsed by Disney, sponsors include assorted Disney entities, such as Aulani Resort and Disney Pride, the company’s LGBTQ diversity group. Participants enjoy discount tickets, free Gay Days swag, and the joyous camaraderie that comes from being in a sea of like-minded, red-wearing folks from all over the world. But in most ways, Gay Days attendees are just like any other Mickey Mouse ears–wearing guests.
Among the bears and bear lovers today is Jhonny Navarro, an Amazon packer from Corona, who is waiting for his partner, a Lutheran minister, who’s preaching a sermon this morning and can’t make it till the afternoon. William Gould is also there, taking in the park with five friends from the Gay Fathers Association of Seattle, a support group for gay men who are or were married to women and have families. “More than 40 years ago, when the group was founded, you couldn’t just come out if you wanted to keep your job and your apartment,” says Gould, a former president of the group. “Now, we’re obviously very public.”
A few girls dressed as Disney princesses stop for a moment to take in the spectacle of a bunch of large men all dressed in red, then quickly lose interest and wander away, possibly to the Little Mermaid—Ariel’s Undersea Adventure, right around the corner. A mom asks what the gathering is all about. Upon hearing the answer, she replies with a heartfelt “Well, good for you!”
Good for you” was probably not something heard at Disneyland’s earliest gay-themed events. On May 25, 1978, the very first private party at Disneyland aimed at gay attendees occurred surreptitiously under a deliberately ambiguous name, the L.A. Tavern Guild, and held hours after the park’s other guests had gone home. When the first Gay Days events were launched in the ’90s, Disney offered ready refunds to unwitting tourists who didn’t want to share the park with groups of gay guests. Gay Days was condemned by groups like the Southern Baptist Convention, which called for a boycott of the Walt Disney Company, and 700 Club televangelist Pat Robertson, who warned Orlando, Florida, that waving Pride flags on Disney’s Main Street lampposts “in God’s face” would risk hurricanes.
Today, Gay Days barely raises eyebrows, attracting tens of thousands of guests to the Anaheim and Orlando parks every year. While still an unofficial, unsanctioned event, Gay Days has reached a mutually beneficial partnership with the Walt Disney Company: the parks get all those guests’ money and the good PR that comes with the event’s LGBTQ-friendly messaging, while Gay Days gets to host parties for a passionate fan community in two of the most popular tourist destinations in the world.
After so long on the margins of the Disney universe, Gay Days has become, well, Disneyfied. This year marks the California event’s 25th anniversary, and at the Anaheim park’s shops, booths, and eateries, one can purchase all sorts of Pride-themed merch, from pins and mouse ears to rainbow-colored Donald Ducks and Plutos. “Now, you can walk down Main Street any day of the week and see people in all kinds of rainbow attire that Disney produces,” says Eddie Shapiro, cofounder of Gay Days Anaheim. “It’s a totally different landscape.”
Even so, the revelers in Disneyland aren’t immune to the homophobic rhetoric directed at Disney’s sister park in Florida. In many ways, Ron DeSantis’s recent “Don’t Say Gay” bills and anti-LGBTQ policies hark back to the bad old days when gay Disney lovers had to think twice about bringing their full selves to the park. “Was I called faggot at a Disney park within the last couple of years?” says Shapiro. “Yes, that happened. So we’re not out of the woods.”
Gay Days Anaheim was not Disney’s first gay party, not by a long shot. In May 1978, Carol DiPietro (then Taylor) was working as a food-service cashier in Fantasyland. Already active in the gay community, serving on the board of directors for Orange County’s gay community center, DiPietro, then 20, had worked at numerous private, invite-only parties at Disneyland, including the park’s popular and long-running Grad Nites. Why not have a private party just for gay folks? she thought. “I was young, so for me, everything was possible,” she recalls.
DiPietro had energy, inspiration, and hope. But the $31,500 required to reserve the park after closing? Not so much. For that, she went to Scott Forbes, whom the Los Angeles Times once dubbed the city’s Disco King. Forbes owned the legendary West Hollywood disco Studio One and was a rabid Disney fan. DiPietro knew that Disneyland would never knowingly book a gay party, but Forbes was also the president of the L.A. Tavern Guild, a collective of gay bars and restaurants around the city. Why not use the benign-sounding trade group as cover?
More than 20,000 tickets were sold for that first event, about half of them in the week leading up to it. “A lot of people waited because they didn’t believe it was really going to happen,” DiPietro says. “They thought it was too good to be true. And I think some people might have thought it was a trap or something, you know, to kill all the gay people.”
Disney found out about the nature of the party two weeks out, but lawyers advised the park not to cancel. Lines of limos rolled up to the entrance, disgorging hundreds of revelers, mostly men, as the daytime crowd trickled out. Additional security was brought on by Disney, but revelers had been given strict instructions about how to behave: No poppers. No booze. No drugs. No rude messages on your clothes. No drag.
The party went off without a hitch, with partygoers spending four times more on food, drinks, and merch than expected. Dollar signs in their eyes, other theme parks soon followed suit and booked their own parties through DiPietro, including Magic Mountain, Marriott’s Great America, and Knott’s Berry Farm. “The ’70s was a different world,” says DiPietro. “But the Disneyland event definitely helped make strides.”
Those first after-hours parties paved the way for Gay Days, which began in Orlando’s Walt Disney World in 1991 before making its way to Anaheim seven years later. Gay Days is held during regular park hours, and from the start, revelers have been encouraged to don red T-shirts as a means for participants to identify one another. In those early days, Disneyland would hand out free white T-shirts to random tourists who’d inadvertently shown up wearing red on Gay Days and worried about being mistaken for a Gay Days participant. “We call those people the accidental reds,” says Shapiro.
The thinking at Disney has changed a lot since then. One particularly striking example of that is the photo meetup at Pixar Pier, which takes place inside a candy store called Bing Bong’s Sweet Stuff. In the 2015 Pixar film Inside Out, Bing Bong is a pink elephant who cries candy and drives a wagon fueled by rainbows and “song power.” In this, his kingdom, rainbows abound, making it a natural spot for Pride-themed photos.
Today, dozens of red-shirted visitors are gathering here, buying sweets and checking out the vast array of Pride merch, which includes pink tees and Mickey plushies in rainbow attire. When it comes time for a group photo, a small crew of Disney cast members and a Disney photographer corral the crowd. Photo after photo is taken, but something’s missing. One of the Disney employees rushes in with a couple of Mickey plushies, each waving a tiny Pride flag, for a pair of guests in front to hold. What’s a Disney photo op without the mouse himself?
Across the park, Andrew Kwan and two of his friends are taking a break from Gay Days celebrations to grab a bite to eat at the park’s San Fransokyo dining area. The trio are members of the San Francisco Gay Men’s Chorus and have been coming to Gay Days for years. “I went to USC for undergrad,” says Kwan, “so I have an affinity for red shirts, generally.”
Recently, they’ve noted the upswing in the Walt Disney Company’s involvement: the Pride-themed pins and T-shirts and backpacks and tumblers, the rainbow-colored cookies and beignets and Rice Krispies treats. And the Disney employees themselves, they say, have totally bought into Gay Days as an event.
The most recent indication of Disney’s gradual change of heart was this summer’s Disneyland After Dark: Pride Nite celebration, its first ever. Unlike the inaugural gathering created by outsiders under the Mouse House’s very nose, or even Gay Days, Pride Nite is an official Disney event, created, sanctioned, and promoted by the Disney folks themselves. “It says something about the evolution of the world and of Disney,” says Shapiro. “But at the same time, there’s something safe about it. It’s not as if they’re putting out Hercules for people to ogle. They’re not pulling out Captain Hook and outing him.”
It’s hard not to draw a connection between the 2023 launch of Pride Nite and DeSantis’s declaration of war on Disney just a year ago. Since the company went on record opposing the governor’s anti-LGBTQ legislation, DeSantis and one of the world’s biggest entertainment conglomerates have been openly at odds. But if anything, these most recent celebrations are less political, and a lot less charged, than past ones. Where once the mere idea of hundreds of gay men and women gathering in the Happiest Place on Earth drew protests and hatred, today they’re just another group of slightly over-the-top “Disney adults.”
“The world has changed,” says Shapiro. “When we started, the idea of walking down Main Street holding your partner’s hand was really something. It was a little subversive. You knew you’d be attracting the stares of families who were like, What’s going on here?”
Now, he says, there’s a lot more support among the general public. The events themselves have also become more inclusive, as the Gay Days crowds better reflect the wide array of LGBTQ Disney fans. To get people to come to that very first celebration, says Shapiro, “I’d be standing shirtless on the corners of West Hollywood or Santa Monica signing people up for the AIDS Walk, and then I would hand them a flyer to come to Gay Days.” Perhaps predictably, he says, those first events drew crowds of largely young white males. “As that whole scene has changed, so too have our guests’ demographics,” he says. “But also, because we began to notice those things, we’ve really started to add events to attract greater diversity. We’ve added lesbian events. We put on youth events. So the Gay Days crowd is really very much an everybody crowd.”
Over the years, says Shapiro, Gays Days has been transformative, often in ways he might never have predicted. Last year, a young woman from Irvine approached him and told him that she had come on a class trip to Disneyland every year, a weekend excursion that just happened to fall during Gay Days.
“She was in the closet at the time, but just being there for Gay Days showed her that there was going to be a welcoming community waiting for her when she was ready,” he says. “And there she was now, as an out lesbian, telling me that those events helped usher in her own acceptance of herself.” Just another Disney lover enjoying her own version of happily ever after.•
Robert Ito is a journalist based in Los Angeles. He writes about film, television, and theater for the New York Times.
