Gay Subtext in The Little Mermaid? Stories with a Secret Message
for Queer Youth  Photo: Wiki Commons Photo: Wiki Commons  As a
gay youth I spent countless hours looking for myself in the
pages of the books on the mandatory reading list at my Catholic
school. Much as they tried to suppress anything even remotely
queer (in both senses of the word) there it was, that
certain something in the subtext that read a little different, a
little more than the other characters, a little… gay. Ponyboy
and Johnny in S.E. Hinton’s The Outsiders shared something
between them I coudn’t quite articulate but I knew it made me
feel a funny. Ferdinand and his refusal to stop smelling the
flowers and toughen up was basically me at every team sport I
ever played. The Little Mermaid and her forbidden love were
almost exactly how I felt when I started to feel the first pangs
of same-sex attraction. Thank God for the X-Men and their
demonstrating that in spite of society’s bigotry I had inner
resources I could call on when times got