Dear Commons Community,
Disney employees staged an all-day walkout yesterday after a week of smaller break-time walkouts, all meant to call out the corporation — with much of the anger targeting CEO Bob Chapek — over its silence and inaction leading up to the approval of Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill, currently awaiting the signature of Gov. Ron DeSantis. As reported by several media outlets.
“All eyes are on you Disney, how you choose to proceed will decide whether you remain culturally relevant or become a relic of the past. You don’t get to decide which lives do or don’t matter,” noted one employee in a Twitter thread of employee statements by Disney Walkout, the official account for the protests, also tied to the official website, Where is Chapek.
Noted another, “Disney would be nothing without its queer and trans employees.” And another: “Queer employees have been pushing for years to make this company better—it shouldn’t have taken all this for us to get the attention of people up the food chain. Our voices mattered before all this.”
According to Variety, about 75 employees staged a walkout from Disney’s Burbank, Calif., studios, with Rachel Anderson, an employee in Disney Music Group who has a transgender son, telling the publication about Disney, “They are willing to take political stands when it generates money.” She added that the controversy has “been really painful and soul-crushing on a personal level.”
Raven-Symoné, along with the rest of the cast of the Disney Channel’s Raven’s Home, walked off the set yesterday. The star shared video of the walkout on her Instagram, explaining in a caption, “In support of our LGBTQ+ family and all of those who will be damaged by the ‘don’t say gay bill’ we the cast of Raven’s Home are walking out.”
Disney companies supporting the walkout — through which protestors are demanding that Disney permanently stop all campaign donations to any politician who created or supported the “Don’t Say Gay” bill, among other demands — include Hulu, ESPN and FX.
Official Disney accounts, including Disney+ and Disney Parks, posted words of support. But many say it’s too little too late.
“You needed me to be a stronger ally in the fight for equal rights and I let you down. I am sorry,” Chapek said in a statement. “We are hard at work creating a new framework for our political giving that will ensure our advocacy better reflects our values. And today, we are pausing all political donations in the state of Florida pending this review. But, I know there is so much more work to be done.”
Critics have noted that, had Chapek spoke out earlier, with a firm stance, fear of economic repercussions could have possibly held sway.
A planned “media storm” in the midst of the walkouts, held at 11am PST yesterday and using hashtags including #DisneyDoBetter and #DisneySayGay, brought a flood of support, including from celebs George Takei and Kerry Washington — as well as a cavalcade of brave employees.
Disney started feeling the heat over this issue last month, when Orlando Sentinel columnist Scott Maxwell dedicated his Feb. 25 piece to Disney’s alleged support of the politicians backing the controversial bill.
“The parks preach inclusion in their marketing campaigns. But Disney has given money to every single sponsor and co-sponsor of this year’s infamous ‘Don’t Say Gay’ bill,” Maxwell wrote. “Disney knows who these people are. The Senate sponsor, Ocala Republican Dennis Baxley, has backed anti-gay legislation for years — including laws to prevent gay couples from adopting kids who otherwise wouldn’t have a family at all.”
That prompted gay historian Eric Cervini to create a meme based on Maxwell’s article and post it to Instagram, where it went viral. “Please boycott, share (TAG DISNEY!), and use that saved subscription money to donate” to Equality Florida, he wrote. “LGBTQ+ kids’ lives are at stake.”
Also in response, the global nonprofit AIDS Healthcare Foundation launched an ad campaign “demanding Disney speak out publicly against hateful Florida legislation.”
Cervini told Yahoo Life at the time, “It’s not too late for Disney — and other companies with a history of pinkwashing — to walk the walk and come out forcefully against the proposed legislation.”
On March 14, an organized group of anonymous Walt Disney Company employees — operating through the Where Is Chapek website and Disney Walkout twitter handle — released an open letter announcing the upcoming walkouts.
“We were sick of two things: our LGBTQIA+ community being attacked by our government and Disney’s continual failure to create a work environment that is safe for us,” the organizers said in a statement to Yahoo Life. “It’s been a lot of words with little action.”
The group’s demands included and still include: for the Walt Disney Company (TWDC) to “immediately and indefinitely cease all campaign donations to these politicians involved in the creation or passage of the ‘don’t say gay’ bill’; for TWDC to “publicly commit to an actionable plan” that protects LGBTQ employees from “hateful legislation,” such as stopping any efforts to move employees to Florida; to reaffirm the company’s commitment to advocating for LGBTQ staff, “even in the face of political risk”; to take responsibility “for their inaction to protect the rights of LGBTQIA+ children and their families” by substantially contributing to the Trevor Project and other human rights advocacy groups; to allocate content spending and outline how it will expand LGBTQ representation; and to create “an LGBTQIA+ brand” that focuses on queer creators and “underrepresented voices.”
Other related Disney drama in recent days included an announcement from Disney’s Pixar — following employees calling out the company for nixing “overtly gay affection” from previous Pixar films — that it was reinstating a previously-cut same-sex kiss in the animated Lightyear. Then, on Monday, Disney postponed its management retreat in the wake of the continued fallout.
Mr. Chapek and Disney need to listen to their employees!
Tony
This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.
