"The ancients saw it coming:

you can see that they tried to warn them 

in the tales that they told their children 

but they fell out of their heads in the morning.

They said sex can be frightening 

but the children were not listening 

and the children cut out everything 

except for the kissing and the sing-ing-ing.

Then they finally found their home 

at Walt Disney studios 

and then everyone grew up 

with their fundamental schemas fucked."

- Car Seat Headrest, "Beach Life-in-Death"

Will Toledo of the band Car Seat Headrest was only eighteen years old when he penned these lines for the song "Beach Life-in-Death" from his album Twin Fantasy. The song - which documents everything from his attempt to come out ("I pretended I was drunk when I came out to my friends/ I never came out to my friends/ we were all on Skype/ I just laughed and changed the subject"), fears of being mentally ill ("I don't want to go insane/ I don't want to have schizophrenia!"), nightmares of domestic abuse ("Last night I dreamed he was trying to kill you/ I woke up and I was trying to kill you"), and the confusing experience of falling in love with another boy for the first time ("it's been a year since we first met/ I don't know if we're boyfriends yet") - may seem scattered upon first listen, but what brings these topics together is precisely the time they embody in Toledo's life. At eighteen, Toledo is legally an adult - with the ability to vote, get married, sign contracts, open bank accounts and credit cards, go to a strip club, and buy tobacco, lottery tickets, and guns, as well enroll in the military industrial complex and/or be sent to the prison system - but still is treated by society, in many ways, as a "child," as "becoming," as something liminal. Toledo is also queer, which only further positions him within a kind of liminal space. And it's in "Beach Life-in-Death" where he best articulates the terror of this position. Near the end of the song, Toledo turns away from his own narrative, and speaks of the ways in which adults disavow their children's sexuality, and in turn the children run towards the only figure they know how to: Walt Disney. Toledo does not mince words about what kind of an effect he thinks this has had, however. Toledo blames Disney outright for generations of children who he sees as being fundamentally "fucked." Toledo recognizes in Disney yet another adult who is trying to tell children who and how to be. And Disneyland, as an embodiment and extension of Walt's fantasy of children's happiness, is therefore an adult's projected fantasy not of what childhood is, but what it should be.

When originally designing what would eventually become Disneyland, the site to which all these children in Toledo's song want to run away to, Walt Disney envisioned four distinct "lands" stemming off of the park's entry point, Main Street USA. Each land, as a produced "social space," carries with it an implicit ideological message. Each of the Disneyland "lands" envisions a particular subject who will occupy that space and a particular mode of "happiness" that will be expressed within it. And this stems from the ways in which each "land" was designed: within a fantasy of what childhood is, could, or should be. Take Adventureland an as example. Originally envisioned as an extension of the True Life Adventure documentary series that Disney was producing at the time of the park's design - True-Life Adventureland - the "land" was proclaimed as a "space" in which "here will be the wonders of Nature and Man for all to see and understand" (Barrier 243). Which is to say that the "land" would be structured around the same ideological principles that were the guiding force of the True Life Adventure series, and that the imagined "audience" of the park itself when it originally opened would be familiar with these texts. As such, when advertising the park's construction on the Disneyland television series, vignettes and episodes from the True Life Adventure films were recycled into the program in an effort to promote this kind of engagement with the park itself (Barrier 248). This is a case wherein a representational space and a representation of space would, according to Henri Lefebvre, converge. 

Lefebvre, arguing for a reconsideration of "social space" within the realm of neocapitalism, states that "if space is a product, our knowledge of it must be expected to reproduce and expound the process of production. The 'object' of interest must be expected to shift from things in space to the actual production of space" (Lefebvre 37). Which is to say that our understanding of what the "social space" entails and asks of us can be found within an analysis of how that "social space" is produced. Lefebvre goes on to describe a "conceptual triad" of ways to think about "social space." The first is through what he calls spatial practice, "which embraces production and reproduction, and the particular locations and spatial sets characteristic of each social formation. Spatial practice ensures continuity and some degree of cohesion. In terms of social space, and of each member of a given's society relationship to that space, this cohesion implies a guaranteed level of competence and a specific level of performance" (33). Rather: this first iteration of space is one of behaviour within a space, how we perform in it, whether or not we fail at this performance, and how this constitutes our being-perceived within a given space. The second is representations of space, "which are tied to the relations of production and to the 'order' which those relations impose, and hence to knowledge, to signs, to codes, and to 'frontal' relations" (33). Rather: spaces that are rendered conceptually by "scientists, planners, urbanists, technocratic subdividers, and social engineers ... all of whom identify what is lived and what is perceived with what is conceived," (38) which is to say that representations of space are those wherein what occurs within a "space" is based on how that space is envisioned; one goes hand in hand with the other. And finally, through what he calls representational spaces, "embodying complex symbolisms, sometimes coded, sometimes not, linked to the clandestine or underground of social life, as also to art (which may come eventually to be defined less as a code of space than as a code of representational spaces)" (33). Rather: representational spaces are those visions of "space" which imagine certain ways of inhabiting, using, or being within them. Lefebvre argues that this social engagement with a "space" is a "passively experienced ... space which the imagination seeks to change and appropriate" (39), which is to say that he believes our engagement with these representational spaces is one in which the representation of a space tells us how to be within that space, and we, in turn, listen and behave accordingly. It is through these three conceptions of how "social space" is produced that this essay will proceed in thinking about Disneyland's social practice (the behaviour encouraged by the "site" of the park itself and how this is regulated among its difference occupants), its representations of space (how the construction of "lands" such as Adventureland conceive of a way of living and being within them), and its representational spaces (the paratexts that inform the "space" that is Disneyland and the ways in which they signify ways of being within that "space").

Adventureland's relationship to the True Life Adventure series is complex. Although in many ways it produces a "white-gaze" of the "exotic-other" (the Disneyland website, as of this writing, describes Adventureland as "a place where you can experience the thrill of exploring exotic lands, where every step of the journey is a foot further into the unknown") that is found in much of the series, the actual "land" and its attractions differ in many ways from the series and have also shifted further away from it over time. Upon opening, Adventureland was positioned around Magnolia Park - a reflective nature space that later bore as its centerpiece an a bandstand that had been moved from Town Square because it blocked the view of the Castle. The Tropical Cantina was nearby. Both of these attractions closed in 1962. The only remaining attraction from the park's opening is the continent-hopping Jungle Cruise, which fantasizes that the Irrawady, Mekong, Nile, and Amazon rivers, among others, are all enjoined into a singular, coherent "space," one that is heavily controlled (the boat which travels the cruise is on a track and the animals are all animatronic). This original iteration of Adventureland seems more interested in representing precisely the same gaze exorcised in their documentary series. However, in 1962, the land became more developed, and the developments suggest that the "adventure" portion of the land's name needed further emphasis: a Swiss Family Treehouse - based on the Swiss Family Robinson film - was opened, as well as the Big Game Safari Shooting Gallery (which seems to harken back to film's like Bring 'Em Back Alive! [1932] more than the True Life Adventure series). In 1963, the Enchanted Tiki Room, an animatronic performance of singing and talking birds, was introduced into Adventureland, which seems to steer the "natural" away into the realm of fantasy. The Swiss Family Treehouse has since become Tarzan's Treehouse as of 1999, and the Big Game Safari Shooting Gallery became Aladdin's Oasis, which was there from 1993-2008. As Disney's corporation has expanded, other franchises have been introduced in Adventureland, such as the ride Indiana Jones Adventure. Thus Adventureland, like all of the "lands" in Disneyland, is a shifting "social space" that has demanded and required different ways of being within it at different times throughout its history.

Two years after the grand opening of Disneyland in Anaheim, California, Walt Disney studios released an anomaly in their True Life Adventure film series: a True Life Fantasy called Perri (N. Paul Kenworthy Jr. & Ralph Wright, 1957). Perri uses live animal footage to tell the story of a young female squirrel (named after the title of the film) living in a forest called Wildwood Heart (Utah's Uinta National Forest) as she survives the constant "perils" of nature during the first year of her life. With the help of a male squirrel named Porro, with whom Perri ultimately becomes romantically involved, she outsmarts a marten who has been trying to eat her since she was born. Winston Hibler provides rhyming narration throughout the "play," using the animals in the forest as object lessons as to what a proper family should look like: children who learn how to behave by mimicking their parents, mothers who are always there to keep their young from harm, and fathers who will always be there to save the mother, Rather: heteronormative patriarchy unfolding over and over, through the four seasons, for "this is nature's way." The film begins and ends in spring, or what the film calls "the time of together." This is the mating season, and since this is a Disney "fantasy," there is a song about what this means: "one is too few, two is just right." According to Disney, heterosexual monogamous coupling is not only natural but also mandatory, for there should be "two of everything!" Although other films in the True Life Adventure series are encoded with this particular ideological message (in the film Secrets of Life, the narrator states simply that "nature must reproduce each species"), none of the rest of the films have a song like this. Nor do they have a dream sequence in which all of the animals are suddenly as white as snow, though this is not Disney's only foray into racist fantasy. It is moments like these that mark Perri as separate from the rest of the True Life Adventure series - by using a fictional framework not unlike their animated films, Disney attempts to make nature resemble a "story." In doing so, it makes this particular ideological message even more palatable to Disney's most targeted audience: children. And if we are to believe in the kind of family values that a film like Perri seems to so vehemently endorse, then Disney's films must act like parental figures, providing object lessons for our children to mimic so that they can grow up and have their own children and repeat this cycle for the rest of time. Although Perri carries the same "postwar ideologies of progress and individualism, homeland prosperity, and so-called family values" (Chris 28) as the rest of the True Life Adventure series, it uses a framework of fantasy rather than of documentary, and it is here that I would like to suggest that Adventureland might be better understood, then, through the anomaly that is Perri. Rather, Adventureland might be better understood not as a representation of "nature," but as a fantasy of "nature" - and an ever-shifting one at that. Which is to say that although Perri is entirely absent from the park itself, it represents precisely the kind of ideological fantasy that Disney embedded into their products - which includes the park - and shows the ways in which these fantasies have been shaped and reshaped over time. (Remember, too: the animals in Adventureland are mechanical.)

Of course, not all of the children who grew up with films like Perri were able to fulfill this heterosexual monogamous fantasy. Some children, much like some animals that Disney and many scientists still try to ignore, do not end up fulfilling the heterosexual part of the bargain. Kathryn Bond Stockton argues in her book The Queer Child or Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century that we can only speak of "gay children" in the past tense of "I was a gay child" (Stockton 7, emphasis added). She argues that this enunciation marks the "death of one's straight life. And yet, by the time the tombstone is raised ('I was a gay child'), the 'child' by linguistic definition has expired" (Stockton 7). Thus we can only understand gay children through retrospection, particularly since it seems we will stop at nothing to disavow children any kind of sexual autonomy, even if recent studies indicate that present-day teenagers are queerer than ever, with only 48% of what is being called "Generation Z" identifying as exclusively heterosexual (Tsjeng). So what happens to the gay child - the one that we presuppose does not exist but that Stockton (and myself) insist do - who grows up watching films like Perri and its many, many counterparts that consistently reinforce the notion that there must be "two of everything"? How is this child encouraged to be, and more importantly, how is this child encouraged to be in Disneyland? Lefebvre, when talking about the construction of a "social space," mentions "holes, passages, labrynths" (42) as examples of "childhood memories and dreams" (41), which is juxtaposed against a rhetoric of "ego, bed, bedroom, dwelling, house" (41) for adults. Which is to say that, for Lefebvre, the child's "social space" is an ever-more confusing one to parse, since the "social space" for children and the "social space" for adults are variably different from one another. The child occupies a "space" of confusion, grasping, searching; the adult, in turn, occupies a domestic "space," of knowing the self, the body, and its relation to its "space." Think of the many secret passages in Disneyland - they construct a "child-like" world, instructing both children and adults alike to explore, grasp, search. And thus, even an adult in Disneyland is meant to behave like a child. So what, then, of the gay child and the gay adult?

Well, now, there's a special day at Disneyland dedicated to celebrating those gay children. Or at least there is a day dedicated to what those children became when they grew up. It's called Gay Days Anaheim, and although it is not officially sanctioned by the park itself, it receives support from the park in the form of hotel room blocks and reduced pricing, and they work closely with PRIDE, Disney's LGBT diversity group, to pull it off. Gay Days Anaheim takes the Pinocchio classic "When You Wish Upon A Star" as its theme song, highlighting its inclusive "makes no difference who you are" message atop a flood of images of happy gays all proudly wearing red to signal who they are to other park-goers. Since Gay Days Anaheim is not an officially sanctioned event, the park remains open to all visitors, leading to the decision for those who are wanting to partake in Gay Days to wear red so that they can easily spot each other. Or, as one heterosexual vlogger notes, they wear red to show they "support gay rights" (though in this video it seems there aren't very many red-wearing gays on that particular Gay Day). But what we now know as Gay Days have a long and complicated history. In 1978, the gay bars and restaurants of Los Angeles rented out Disneyland for a private party. Sean Griffin explains what happened: