Lena Waithe to voice first openly gay Disney character in Onward and we are truly blessed
Lena Waithe will make Disney history as the studio’s first openly lesbian character in upcoming movie Onward. (Disney/Karwai Tang/Getty Images)
LGBT+ kids tucking into popcorn and sipping sodas in cinemas might look up and, for the first time in a Disney film, see a character just like them.
Outward will make history for the beloved animation studio by featuring the first queer character, Officer Specter, voiced by actor Lena Waithe.
The character is a cyclops cop and if that doesn’t say, and we cannot stress this enough, lesbian rights, we don’t know what will.
Waithe celebrated the news on Instagram, taking a screenshot of an article by the Advocate on the announcement, captioned with a rainbow emoji.
What will Lena Waithe’s character in Onward be?
Rumours swirled about the possibility of a same-sex couple in Onward on reddit since the first trailer for the Pixar flick dropped a trailer and what appeared to be a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it queer couple dining in a restaurant.
Set in a fantasy world, the Pixar film follows two elf brothers, voiced by Chris Pratt and Tom Holland.
The pair try to bring back their later father for 24 hours using magic.
Waithe’s Officer Specter makes a drive-by appearance in the film. Pulling the main characters aside, she mentions her off-screen girlfriend before letting Pratt and Holland continue with their adventures.
“My girlfriend’s daughter got me pulling my hair out,” she says.
“It just kind of happened,” Kori Rae, a producer of Onward, told Yahoo of Waithe’s casual comment.
“The scene, when we wrote it, was kind of fitting and it opens up the world a little bit, and that’s what we wanted.”
However fleeting the character is, the move to include a character attracted to someone of the same sex is a seismic leap for the studio. It comes after Disney featured both its first same-sex romance on High School Musical as well as on the cartoon, Star vs. the Forces of Evil.
Moreover, it comes after Pixar studios subtly introduced a same-sex couple in Finding Dory. Although, filmmakers tirelessly skirted outright labelling the pair as LB+.
Eye-rolls were induced across the community when co-director Andrew Stanton simply said: “They can be whatever you want them to be.”
Yawn.
