Queer Coding in Disney’s Pocahontas

David Thorpe’s documentary Do I Sound Gay? sparked conversation about queer coding amongst villains, Disney villains in particular.  More recently, critics have proposed that this isn’t such a bad thing; villains and queer people both occupy unique positions of duality in society, and queer people should be allowed to occupy all spaces, not just virtuous and villainous ones.

Do I Sound Gay? argues that effeminate speech patterns, flamboyant costumes, and contrasts to the hero’s masculinity codes Disney villains like Scar (The Lion King), Jafar (Aladdin), Hades (Hercules), Sher Khan (The Jungle Book), and Governor Ratcliffe (Pocahontas) as queer.

I always thought of Governor Ratcliffe, the large fancy man who terrorizes Virginia in Pocahontas, as a pesky plot interruption for the REAL drama- the interracial romance of Pocahontas and John Smith! Taste the sun- sweet berries of the Earth, already!  Even into adulthood, I praised Pocahontas for its themes: environmental preservation and overcoming prejudice through deep personal relationships.  I completely missed the queer coding and colonial fetishization.

Governor Radcliffe sips cordials with his pinky sticking out.   He wears a flashy gold outfit in his musical number “Mine”. He speaks softly, using what Thorpe would describe as a “gay voice”. And he has a boyfriend!! Wiggins, his skinny manservant, accompanies Governor Ratcliffe to the New World and hangs out in his very nice tent.   Governor Ratcliffe also has a stuck- up pug named Percy, who likes to perch on a plush cushion. Percy the pug eventually learns to accept differences through his friendship with Meeko the raccoon, but Governor Ratcliffe never learns to see the Powhatan people as anything other than “savages”- and this makes him one of the Most Evil Villains Ever.

Now that I think about it, the queer coding in Pocahontas is probably some of the most offensive of any in a Disney movie.  Governor Ratcliffe sucks.  He mistreats his crew of young men, forcing them to dig with no food while he “sits up in his tent all day, happy as a clam”.  His crew hates him.  He attempts to exploit John Smith’s relationship with Pocahontas to find gold.  He has no regard for nature.  He only cares about wealth and reputation.  At least Movie Radcliffe takes his misguided greed back to England.  The REAL Ratcliffe was so inept at starting a colony that John Smith overthrew him and established the only successful example of American communism to date.  (John Ratcliffe was eventually skinned alive with mussel shells and burned at the stake by Powhatan women, according to an 1609 eyewitness.  Ew).

I never connected the subtext surrounding Governor Radcliffe’s character to his sexuality.  Queer coding in cinema usually relies on affects other than sexual relationships to define queer characters.  But Governor Radcliffe has a boyfriend, making his sexual identity pretty obvious.  And yes, you might think, as I did, that Wiggins is just a cute, silly sidekick who, like Meeko the raccoon and Percy the pug, serves to lighten the movie’s heavy subject matter.  And he is.  Hollywood cast queers as insidious villains or foofy sidekicks.  More on that later.

I don’t think the Disney storytellers used queer coding maliciously, or even conscientiously.  Disney employed many queer artists during its heyday.  Howard Ashman wrote the music for The Little Mermaid and Beauty and the Beast, two films that pulled Disney from its 1970’s and 1980’s slump.  Ashman died of AIDS in 1991.  The people who worked on the Disney classics (which I define as everything from The Little Mermaid in 1989 to Atlantis in 2001) grew up watching movies dictated by the Hays Code.  The Hays Code regulated American cinema from about 1930- 1968.  In 1968, the MPAA rating system replaced it.  The code said, among other things, that open depictions of homosexuality could get your movie banned.  Unbeknownst to many at the time, a Catholic layman and a Jesuit priest wrote the Code.  Religious sexual ideals, like virginal women and homosexuals as perversions of nature, subconsciously permeated pop culture.  We’re still trying to live down those damn colonists.

But the painful thing to remember when watching a movie like 1995’s Pocahontas is that queer people didn’t have a voice.  The AIDS crisis loomed over American social climate, making gay people seem like lepers.  Even though queer artists likely worked on these films, American cultural codes kept them quiet.

I still like Pocahontas.  If you haven’t read the lyrics to “Colors of the Wind” lately, they could basically heal the world.  But, for better or for worse, Governor Ratcliffe is a seething example of queer coding in Disney films.  At least he doesn’t get scraped to death by scallops.