Or: The Owl House and the Magic of Representation
I first heard of The Owl House when a bunch of conservative housewives shared articles warning parents not to let their children watch it as it allegedly glorified witchcraft and demon worship. Naturally, I started watching immediately and was transfixed by the world and its inhabitants as well as all of the loving nods to various fandoms and general nerdhood.
On the surface, The Owl House is a children’s fantasy cartoon. Luz, the protagonist, is a fourteen year old girl with an overactive imagination. She’s magically transported to The Boiling Isles and decides to stay for the summer while her mother thinks she’s at camp. During her stay, she meets a colorful cast of characters, including Eda the Owl Lady, who takes Luz in and attempts to teach her magic, and her companion King, a demon who is lovable and cuddly despite his best efforts.
This show, which started out so simple, has grown into a complex and layered narrative. The world of The Boiling Isles seems like it’s always existed and there’s a consistent feel of dangerous whimsy. The background characters are brilliantly creative little eldritch horrors that I wish were my friends, and the monsters would give me nightmares if they were presented to me in any other format.
As the first season nears its conclusion, I find myself looking forward to new episodes in a way that I haven’t looked forward to television since childhood. I’ve told friends that I’m not available to chat on Saturday evenings to make sure I don’t miss seeing new episodes as they air. I’ve watched video essays dissecting the characters (sent over by my buddy Grant, who’s love of the show goes even deeper than my own). I think about the characters often. I even named a chicken after Amity, a minor antagonist turned main characters.
All this to say, I was already in love with the cast and the story before August 8th, 2020, the night that changed everything.
I snuggled up in a blanket on the couch in my parent’s living room. Losing my job and living in my childhood home through the pandemic had reverted me to my teenage personality, comprised almost entirely of gay yearning and angst. Watching The Owl House was one of the few things I took genuine pleasure in.
The show’s creator Dana Terrace and the episode’s writer Molly Knox Ostertag had promised that “Enchanting Grom Fright” would be a special episode, but I was skeptical. I’ve never been a person who cared too much about dances or television surrounding dances, so I thought a prom-themed episode wouldn’t do much for me.
But Grom was different. More than just a dance, in universe Grom is an annual ritual where one student, the Grom Queen, has to destroy a monster that takes on the form of its adversary’s greatest fear before said monster escapes and destroys The Boiling Isles. Amity is crowned, and Luz offers to take her place. It’s sweet, and highlights how far Luz and Amity’s friendship has come.
And then, the unthinkable happens. The show takes a turn for the gay.
My jaw dropped. Tears began to flow freely, because I realized millions of kids across the world had just seen the same thing I did. And not behind a paywall on Netflix or Hulu. Right on Disney Channel. Accessible to anyone with basic cable, likely without a parent’s permission.
As I cried and messaged Grant, I couldn’t stop thinking about what had happened.
The Owl House wasn’t marketed as a show for LGBTQIA+ folks. As things played out, I was refreshed to see a total disregard for “traditional” gender roles and had some gay ships in my head for sure, but I never let myself believe any of them were possible. We were talking about Disney after all. While some of the more embarrassing members of my extended family think that Disney is a poisonous company spewing forth progressive propaganda in an attempt to dismantle the nuclear family, I knew that that was (sadly) not the case.
Truthfully, Disney and the other Big Media Conglomerates have been dancing around representation in cartoons since the medium’s inception. Representation has traditionally been about subtlety. It’s about coding certain characters as queer while maintaining enough plausible deniability that a midwestern housewife won’t notice. In most cases, the only chance for outright representation comes from side characters or is made canon in the series finale to limit potential backlash. (Note: most creators are not the ones standing in the way of increased LGBTQ+ representation, and are simply doing the best they can with what the studios will give them.)
Recently, we’ve made steps in the right direction. She-Ra and the Princesses of Power on Netflix is the single gayest piece of mainstream media I have ever seen. It’s also one of the best cartoons ever made, with thrilling action, high stakes, and complex characters. And I still haven’t seen Steven Universe, but everyone I know who has seen it says it has fantastic representation as well.
But The Owl House is the first Disney Channel cartoon to feature LGBTQ+ leads. It’s also the first cartoon I’ve seen where the queer characters aren’t already in a relationship. This opens the door to so many wonderful slow-burn storylines that queer people have traditionally had to rely on fanfic for.
Once my tears dried, I took a moment to consider the impact of this. Growing up in rural Wisconsin, I did not meet an openly gay person until I went to college. The few gay people on tv or in movies were either punchlines or punching bags. And now, one of my favorite cartoons had at least one queer character.
Conservative talking heads like to complain any time a show lets an LGBTQ+ character have screen time. When it’s a cartoon character, the complaints turn into outrage and scandal. To have a main character be gay spurs greater backlash.
Recently, CNN tweeted out an article about The Owl House and its historic representation for the Queer Community. The comments section was the flaming heap of trash that you’d expect to accompany this kind of article. What really got to me were the people saying that children didn’t need to see this kind of content, and that there shouldn’t be a potential for a gay romance between two fourteen year olds. They said the show was sexualizing children.
There are so many reasons that this is bullshit. The double standards of “sexualizing” children have been called out millions of times, but for a refresher, shows frequently depict children having heterosexual crushes/love interests/relationships/kisses/etcetera and that’s never a problem as long as the kids are straight. But if queer kids do anything remotely similar, it’s inappropriate.
But even more egregious to me than that stale argument is the thought that fourteen is too young for children to think about sexuality. When I was fourteen, I knew I was different, but I still didn’t have the words to describe how. Around age sixteen, I figured out I was gay and that I would go to hell if I ever acted upon my “sinful desires”. I was a freak, and I didn’t have any reference points in real life or in media of a gay person who was loved and accepted for who they were.
By the time I was eighteen, I had internalized years of self-loathing and homophobia that I’m still trying to work through. I became dangerously depressed and suicidal because I thought there wasn’t a place in the world where I belonged. I’d see commercials promising that “it gets better,” but there was nothing in real life or the media I consumed that supported that statement. I still carry mental (and physical) scars from that time period.
I was twenty-three before I felt comfortable enough with myself and my surroundings to come out to my friends and family. I still have one foot in the closet to protect myself from the outpouring of abuse many in my ultra-conservative hometown and conservative Christian college would heap onto my me and my family.
I can’t help but wonder what would have been different if I saw that being gay wasn’t a sentence to a life of misery. What would have happened if I had seen a gay person flourishing not in spite of their sexuality, but because they were able to be fully who they were without fear?
What if the homophobic people in my life grew up watching a cartoon with a powerful, complex, and interesting gay lead character and realized that a person’s sexuality wasn’t something to bully them for? What if they grew up knowing that being gay was normal?
What if I didn’t have to work overtime my whole life to make sure nobody could tell that I was gay and instead could have enjoyed the ability to explore the things that interested me, to be fully myself?
For a long time, I couldn’t watch a person come out in a TV show or in a movie without an involuntary twinge of sadness hitting me. I couldn’t help but associate queerness with a life filled with depression, rejection, and loneliness. And I would immediately feel guilty for having that twinge of sadness and smile and celebrate a small win for representation.
Watching “Enchanting Grom Fright” was the first time I didn’t feel that sadness. Maybe it’s because I’ve been engaging with more gay media lately. Maybe it’s because the world that Dana Terrace has created is already so magical that it only makes sense that queer people could live their best lives in it.
Or maybe it’s because for the first time, I’m seeing a show on a major network presenting a same sex crush and potential relationship as something completely normal and lovely. Something aspirational. And millions of kids are getting that message loud and clear. Some of them are already gay. Some will come out, secure with their place in the world at a far younger age than me and my friends were. And honestly, most won’t. But they’ll hopefully have internalized the message of love and acceptance and grow up to be people that their queer friends feel safe around. And that’s a beautiful thing.
Jesse Freaking Rogers 