ABSTRACT
GAY MALE VIDEO PORN AND Walt Disney family entertainment may not seem the most likely or companionable of subjects, regardless of those of us who spent inordinate childhood hours humming bars from Disney’s Sleeping Beauty and fantasizing that we were Hayley Mills’s Boston twin in The Parent Trap. But gay sexuality and Disney sensibility—or, better, gay sensibility and Disney sexuality—came together in a unique encounter during the 1992 Christmas season, under the auspices of Matt Sterling Productions. Best known for its extensive video collection of gay male porn, as well as sponsorship of numerous exotic theme parties on the Los Angeles gay club scene, Sterling’s company announced it would be teaming up with Disney on December 23, 1993, for an exclusive “Matt Sterling Presents a Gay Night at Aladdin,’ Disney’s latest in animated family entertainment; the special screening was a benefit for Project Angel Food, a Los Angeles-based AIDS organization. That Howard Ashman, the Academy Award-winning lyricist of the film’s songs, had died of complications of AIDS while the movie was in production perhaps helped the Disney corporation legitimize its participation in the event, despite the fact that it meant being verbally linked on the publicity flyer with the king of West Coast gay porn (see figure 1). Yet even the Ashman connection could not entirely naturalize the sheer queerness of the unlikely liaison between “gay” event and “family” spectacle that occurred that evening.
