1313 Disneyland Drive, Anaheim
“The Happiest Place on Earth” has long played an outsized role in American culture, and its presence and influence are even more overwhelming in Orange County.
The Walt Disney Company is Orange County’s largest employer, with over thirty thousand workers who do everything from dressing up as beloved icons to making hotel beds. The Disneyland Resort is the company’s name for the original theme park, plus its siblings, Disney’s California Adventure and Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge, along with three hotels and the Downtown Disney outdoor mall. It is a space where questions of race, gender, sexuality, labor, and the pursuit of happiness are all contested.
In the early 1950s, when Walt Disney decided to build this carefully controlled utopian space, he bought 160 acres of farmland here next to the new freeway, explaining he needed “flat land because I wanted to make my own hills.” Bulldozing eleven thousand trees before planting his own, Disney also constructed a twenty-foot berm around the park to screen out the messy reality of the city outside the park’s boundaries. Eschewing trained architects, Walt Disney and his assistants designed an orderly world on two paired axes, with Main Street America balanced by a fairy-tale Europe and with Frontierland’s retrospective balanced by Tomorrowland’s futurism. Combining obsessive cleanliness, tight control, and playful creativity, Walt Disney constructed replicas of history and nature meant to be more satisfying than the real thing. Disneyland guests stroll through carefully choreographed scenes to experience reassuringly predictable adventures often centered on consumerism, patriarchy, and nostalgia.
Disney’s standardization extends from architecture to employees. The park required acting characters to wear park-owned underwear until the Teamsters Union successfully complained. The notoriously finicky employee dress code, known as “the Disney Look,” forbids perfume or cologne, dark sunglasses, bright nail polish, “unnatural” hair color, clingy clothing, more than one ring, visible tattoos, and ankle bracelets. Although Walt Disney himself had a mustache, the corporation’s idea of respectability and tradition also precluded facial hair until the code was adjusted in the early 2000s, when carefully trimmed beards up to one-quarter inch long and mustaches were permitted for male employees, once the park began to increasingly rely on more diverse workers. The early 2000s was also when female employees finally received permission to wear skirts without pantyhose.
Disneyland’s earliest performers included mariachi musicians, “Indian dancers,” and reenactors of mythical and real Old West Latino heroes like Zorro and Elfego Baca, but in the mid-’60s, in response to the sensitivities of the civil rights era, all costumed nonwhite performers were replaced by animatronic bears, with the sole exception of the servant character Aunt Jemima.
On August 6, 1970—the anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing—the mischievously rebellious Yippies (members of the Youth International Party) threatened to invade Disneyland to hold a “Black Panther Hot Breakfast” at Aunt Jemima’s Pancake House, followed by a feminist liberation of Minnie Mouse, a barbecue of Porky Pig, and the capture of Tom Sawyer Island in order to protest the war in Vietnam. Park officials braced for thousands of radical hippies, but only about three hundred arrived. The Yippies planted a Vietcong flag on Tom Sawyer Island, then danced down Main Street cheering “Fuck” while waving their flag featuring a large marijuana leaf. When conservative guests tussled with them, hundreds of riot police from Anaheim and beyond evicted the Yippies. Twenty-three Yippies were arrested, and park officials were so frightened that they closed early for the second time in the park’s history. The first park closure had been in 1963, after the assassination of President Kennedy. The park would also close early in 1994 after the Northridge earthquake; on September 11, 2001; and during the 2020 coronavirus crisis.
In 1970, after the Yippie invasion, Disney strengthened its “grooming policy,” reinstating the ban on long-haired male guests that it had lifted the year before and evicting more than one hundred young people. Park spokesman Jack Lindquist told the Los Angeles Times that long hair was “the easiest visual clue to potential trouble” and that the park was shut to anyone “with a chip on his shoulder.”
Long hair worried Disney officials for reasons of both politics and sexuality. A decade later, in 1980, Disney evicted Andrew Exler and Shawn Elliott for same-sex dancing. Guards told them, “This is a family park. We do not put up with alternative lifestyles here.” Exler, who later changed his name to Crusader, successfully sued the park, although in 1987 three other men had to threaten another civil rights lawsuit when Disney guards told them, “Touch dancing is reserved for heterosexual couples only.”
The park was particularly slow to embrace the potential profits of Gay Days, which unofficially began in 1988 on an October weekend and are now held in March, when tens of thousands of LGBTQ visitors wear red shirts in solidarity. This festival remains unsanctioned by Disney, although in 2018 the park began capitalizing on Gay Days by selling a rainbow-colored mouse hat. In 1995, pressured by the Lesbian and Gay United Employees (LEAGUE) group, which had begun organizing clandestinely just a few years earlier, Disney granted benefits to the same-sex partners of cast members. It was one of the last corporations in the entertainment industry to do so.
Other labor disputes have also shaken this park. In 1984, members of Bakery and Confectionery Workers Local 66, Hotel and Restaurant Employees Local 681, Service Employees International Local 399, Teamsters Local 88, and United Food and Commercial Workers Local 324 surprised union leadership by going on strike to fight for wage increases, less outsourcing, and health insurance. Disney hastily trained managers to run rides inside the park, while each union set up picket lines around the park, with signs saying, “Please go to Knott’s Berry Farm today, thank you.” Disney won a lawsuit temporarily banning pickets, but 120 workers defied that ban. Six were arrested and sued Disney, until they all went back to the bargaining table and the workers won most of their demands.
By relying on part-time workers, Disney chipped away at those gains until Disney workers united in the Coalition of Resort Labor Unions and, in 2018, began publicizing a survey revealing that three-quarters of Disney’s thirty thousand employees struggled with food insecurity and that 10 percent had been homeless in the last two years. In the early 2000s, while the Disney Corporation’s revenue soared past $3 billion, more than half of park employees earned less than $12 an hour. Some slept in their cars or commuted more than two hours, unable to afford Orange County rents. “I call Disney a bad boyfriend sometimes,” night custodian Artemis Bell told the Huffington Post. “I love him, but he doesn’t always treat me well.” Walt Disney’s granddaughter, Abigail Disney, publicly urged the company to institute more ethical pay scales and became a prominent member of the Patriotic Millionaires, a group whose slogan is “Please raise our taxes.” In 2018, when workers threatened to erect a “shantytown” at Disney’s gates to represent their strained living conditions, the corporation agreed to boost wages to $15 an hour, a few years earlier than they would have been required to by California law.
To Learn More
- Avila, Eric. Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight: Fear and Fantasy in Suburban Los Angeles. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004.
- Dick Hitt Files on Gays and Lesbians in Orange County, MS.R.124. Special Collections and Archives, University of California Irvine Libraries.
- Steiner, Michael. “Frontierland as Tomorrowland: Walt Disney and the Architectural Packaging of the Mythic West.” Montana: The Magazine of Western History 48, no. 1 (Spring 1998): 2–17.
- Turner, Craig, and Bill Hazlett. “Disneyland Clamps Down, Bars Most Long-Haired Youths.” Los Angeles Times, August 8, 1970.
- Riot police gather in front of Sleeping Beauty’s Castle, August 6, 1970. AP Images / Ed Widdis Photograph reproduced with permission.