As a child, singing the Ariel aahs was synonymous for me with being or becoming Ariel. More than looking like her, dressing like her, acting like her – all of which would have been surely warded off by my parents’ cautious corralling of my outbreaks of femininity – there was a genderless aura of Ariel in the rhythm and flow of the aahs. You could be and play Ariel that way without a wig or a tail, which I never would have been allowed to have, but surely wanted. It was a performance of identity that could not be curtailed by a policing of the exterior body. It was a verbal performance of high Ariel drag.
* * *
I knew I was queer when I watched The Little Mermaid. It took me until now, at 32 and with a PhD in Film Studies, to understand this, but it’s true.
In Eve Sedgwick’s essay “Queer and Now,” a personal touchtone for me as a student and scholar, she speaks quite plainly of the need for queer academics to “smuggle” their childhood fascinations into their writing and research (Tendencies 3). I have always been keen on her perfect choice of word: “smuggle.” These fascinations comprise our treasure trove of personal secrets buried beneath our layers of jargon-y justification for their need of study. I was once a child staring at a television, and when I saw these things my heart sang. That is the truth. And because my heart sang, I have questioned every moment since why. You see, as a closeted gayby (i.e., young gay, or gay-baby) in a conservative Republican Catholic home growing up in the 90s there was a want in my life for art, culture, and acceptance. My heart did not sing often. Yet certain engagements with media felt like mine, though they weren’t. They were not made for gay kids. But as a gay kid I could find myself so deeply within them that this never mattered. They were mine. I claimed them. More recently, in comments on an essay, a reader wrote the following: “So, this is queer just because you say so?” Softly, reading the remarks alone to myself, I murmured, “Yeah, pretty much.”
I am not alone in this, by the way. Alexander Doty makes the beautiful case in his work that queer potential exists in all media, including popular mainstream films, and that queer readings need not be thought of only as subversive and alternative readings but merely as parallel readings equally legitimate and valid to straight ones. He observes that “any text is always already potentially queer” and that these engagements need not be relegated to the perception of “subtext” or “reading into things” (2). Moreover, he acknowledges, and I would echo, queer fascinations with mainstream cinema’s queer potentialities – as opposed to overtly queer cinema – do not valorize the position of the closet, but merely honor the experiences of queer spectators with these media. For so many, these engagements start from a young age, before self-identifying as queer, trans, lesbian, bi, or gay. Adult reflection on these media years later, after I self-identified as queer, leads to interesting questions about the role of queerness in shaping so many early attachments. Particularly, when you find that other adult queer people have also had similar attachments, often to the same or similar media. You find yourself wondering how two gay men born and raised in different places and living different lives had come in their own separate ways to identity so strongly with The Golden Girls, Britney Spears, or Baby Spice.
For me, it all began with The Little Mermaid. I don’t remember any of this, but my mother has often told me that in 1989, when I was two, she took me many times to a theater to see The Little Mermaid. She had a work acquaintance who owned a movie theater and let us in for free. So, as children, we were shepherded there for hours of cheap distraction. And still to this day she wonders how I ended up someone with a PhD in Film Studies. But I digress. She took me regularly at two to see The Little Mermaid. She says it was the only thing that kept me perfectly quiet, perfectly still, time after time without fail. When it was released on VHS, we brought it into the home, where it continued to be a thing in my life that kept me perfectly quiet, perfectly still. It still does to this day. As an adult me in my present, the queerness of The Little Mermaid jumps the fuck out – as the kids say. It’s about a pretty mermaid with hair always billowing like in a Beyoncé video who makes a deal with a drag queen-ish sea witch modeled after Divine to change the bottom half of her body – in this case, legs instead of a tail – to make herself more appealing to a man. It ends with her, having fully transformed, sailing off into the sunset with her dream man while a tidepool of mer-folk usher her off under the light of a bright rainbow. That shit is gay.
Ariel has only one major song in The Little Mermaid, “Part of Your World,” but the entire movie revolves around the fact of her voice. The film begins at a concert with Ariel’s father, King Triton, looking on as all of his daughters sing in a revue intended to highlight the star singer of the family – Ariel. But Ariel does not show. This is the first signal that she is not like her sisters, or her father. She is represented, at first, as an absence, a non-compliant singer refusing the song. Ariel is lonely and feels unsatisfied by mer-life. Instead she makes trips to the surface, where she spies on a cute human boy named Eric, who is a handsome prince. Because, why not? When Eric is thrown from his ship in a storm, Ariel rescues him and brings him to shore, where she serenades him with a reprise of “Part of Your World.” He is too groggy to remember her face but looks ferociously to find the woman whose voice he heard on the beach. Ariel knows she cannot be with Eric as a mermaid. She wants legs. She goes to a sea witch, Ursula, who offers her legs in exchange for her beautiful singing voice, which is fierce as hell. Ariel is so desperate to woo the leggy prince that she gives up her voice in a convoluted pact where she must, voiceless, seduce the prince and make him love her and kiss her in three days or else she becomes a bottom-dwelling sea slug–type creature. In order to take her voice, Ursula makes Ariel sing, as though it has the physical properties to be captured and contained. As this happens, Ursula eggs Ariel on with menace, “Sing! Keep singing!” There are no lyrics in Ariel’s song, just a string of melodic aahs. It is memorable, though. At some point in my early childhood if you even showed me a photo of Ariel, I would break into the Ariel aahs. Because Ariel is excellent, she nearly succeeds at romancing Eric in only two days, prompting Ursula to play dirty and come to land as a woman named Vanessa who – shock twist – has the voice of Ariel trapped in a seashell necklace. With Ariel’s voice, Ursula wins the prince. During their wedding, seagulls, starfish, and other sea creatures attack Ursula and smash the voice-having seashell. At the moment the seashell is broken, the sound of the Ariel aahs is carried from the shattered fragments back to and inside of Ariel’s throat in a moment of declarative singing. When Ariel’s voice returns, Eric understands for the first time who Ariel is to him – that she rescued him. He has been looking for her. In the moment of vocalization, there is simultaneously an identification of Ariel as a person.
Wayne Koestenbaum gives us a lovely queen-y read on voice through gay men’s obsessions with opera in The Queen’s Throat. It has always stuck in mind. Among his many poignant observations is his unshakable recounting of what exactly happens when a diva sings. The diva’s throat, he argues, is so open, such a self-affirming blast of sound, that it makes her audience feel small and closed. It is, he says, as if you know in that moment your life was wasted because none of it had ever been as open, as all-encompassing as her sonorous tone. Though we all may feel small in the presence of the diva, queer people have an especially storied history with the closeted experience of not saying, not seeing, not doing. Not acting on impulses and living as freely as desired. I am reminded that when queer musician and actress Janelle Monáe officially came out in 2018 it was as a “free-ass motherfucker,” and that utterance was itself her act of being freed (Spanos). For those of us whose throats may be closed, less free, than that, Koestenbaum offers that in hearing the diva, “the listener’s inner body is illuminated, opened up: a singer doesn’t expose her own throat. She exposes the listener’s interior. Her voice enters me, makes me a ‘me,’ an interior, by virtue of the fact that I have been entered” (43–44). In entering the listener’s body, the voice constitutes the self being entered and creates for the listener the feeling of interiority, of being open and filled with the expression of openness her voice projects. The channeling of the diva’s voice through the listener’s body becomes their way to see and understand a self.
As a child, singing the Ariel aahs was synonymous for me with being or becoming Ariel. More than looking like her, dressing like her, acting like her – all of which would have been surely warded off by my parents’ cautious corralling of my outbreaks of femininity – there was a genderless aura of Ariel in the rhythm and flow of the aahs. You could be and play Ariel that way without a wig or a tail, which I never would have been allowed to have, but surely wanted. It was a performance of identity that could not be curtailed by a policing of the exterior body. It was a verbal performance of high Ariel drag.
This was different from wanting to be any of the other girl characters I adored in childhood. Those characters needed a certain physicality or a costume for me to feel that I was embodying them. Yvonne Craig’s Batgirl from the 1960s Adam West Batman series, a shiny glitter angel with a Coco Peru red flip wig, had a distinctly color-coded costume with a cape that was purple on the outside but lined inside with bright yellow. We had three costume capes for play when I was young – a blue one, a yellow one, and a purple one. I so wanted as a kid to set the purple cape over the yellow cape to make a true Batgirl cape. The costume was essential, and it could not be fudged. A purple cape could suggest Batgirl, but I needed layers to make her my reality. If there were more than two of us playing, the full Batgirl fantasy was impossible. No group of three or more friends could handle the idea that I needed two capes when there was barely enough to go around. I also rarely even got to suggest Batgirl with the purple cape as we had a cousin who was actually a girl, a mere technicality, who would claim that she, a girl, should be Batgirl. At that age I hadn’t the language to explain why Batgirl should have as easily been mine. So, mostly I wore yellow, which was my favorite color, and played Robin, close enough to a girl but nowhere near as stylish. Then one day being Robin I smashed my elbow on a particularly sharp corner of our wood-paneled basement wall and bled all over the yellow cape. This ended all hope of a Batgirl illusion. The point being, I could hardly see a way into Batgirl vocally. She was a costume to obsess over. So was Wonder Woman. To be Wonder Woman, you needed rope to be your lasso of truth and the bravery to feign blocking bullets with the imaginary gauntlets on your wrists on a playground patrolled by eighth-grade boys. Or you could squat in mid-air and pretend you were flying in the invisible jet. This was, after all, the 1970s Lynda Carter Wonder Woman, which aired after the ’60s Batman series on the then newish cable channel FX from 4–5 pm when I got home from school. Ariel never needed this costume or scenery. When I was Ariel, I just aaahed.
Michael Moon addresses a popular history of viewing gay men as “hypermimetic,” as “imitation women” given away by our femininity and flamboyance (Moon 9). Embracing this thread of representation, Moon observes the patterns of behavior that grant gay boys a form of “initiation” into gay life through their imitation and identification with women. He gestures to experiences like mine, describing how the earliest traces of a gay boy’s queer identity are often not same-sex attractions but a deep affinity and recognition of oneself in representations of women.
For how many gay men of my own and the previous generation were our earliest intimations that there might be a gap between our received gender identity and our subjective or “felt” one the consequence not of noticing our own erotic attraction to another boy or man but of enthusiastically enjoying and identifying with the performance excesses of Maria Montez rather than Jon Hall, or Lana Turner rather than Burt Lancaster, or Jayne Mansfield rather than Mickey Hargitay? (Moon, 86)
If you asked me what was the moment that first gave away that I was gay, it was not adolescent crushes on boys. It was being Ariel. That was the first thing I could probably point to and say “Here.” This is the beginning of everything.
In her ruminations on the historical framing concept of “the closet,” Eve Sedgwick posits the social importance of disclosure through both overt verbal means and more implicit ways. She explains how “coming out” is so much more than an utterance as specific as “I am gay.” This is crucially important to remember. Sedgwick notes that “closetedness” is dependent on a very deliberate form of silence, one that conveys meaningfully through its specificity that someone is not yet “out” regardless of what one may know about them (Epistemology 3-4). Sometimes coming out to someone has little to do with disclosing sexuality. Maybe most often it does not. It may instead be a disclosure of interest in drag, in Joan Crawford movies, of growing up pretending to be Batgirl, Wonder Woman, and Ariel.
I think it’s safe to say that I was coming out over and over again each time I sang the Ariel aahs. Each one was an expression of wishing to “open,’ to “be,” to escape the limits of my body and its norms. It was a cry for freedom. In these reverberating echoes of being Ariel reclaiming her voice and being seen, as if for the first time, by Eric as herself, I was myself and was seen in that way, maybe for the first time. I confused my parents a lot as a child. They did not understand why I wanted the things I wanted or did the things I did. They saw a “boy’ acting like a “girl,” and they worried about the ramifications of this. There was no absence of compassion there, but an incredible lack of understanding. This divide shaped much of my shame about my queerness. As a child, I thought of being Ariel as simply fun. I can look back now and see, in their eyes, I was basically shouting in their faces “She’s a little fag and she always will be. . . . whaddya think of that, sweets?” It makes their fear and discomfort a bit more understandable. These were not empty gestures. They were the first intimations of my queerness and I deployed them guilelessly for some time before forming a hardened shell of self-awareness around myself in later, more trying adolescent years. I never verbalized to them “I am gay.” I merely sang the Ariel aahs. Through Ariel, I became a queer subject.
References
Doty, Alexander, Flaming Classics: Queering the Film Canon (New York: Routledge, 2000).
Koestenbaum, Wayne, The Queen’s Throat: Opera, Homosexuality and the Mystery of Desire (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 2001).
Moon, Michael, A Small Boy and Others: Imitation and Initiation in American Culture from Henry James to Andy Warhol, (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1998)
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: U of California, 1990).
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, Tendencies (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1993).
Spanos, Brittany, “Janelle Monáe Frees Herself,” Rolling Stone, April 26, 2018, https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/janelle-monae-frees-herself-629204/
