Portrayal of the LGBTQ community in animated children's films

Brian Spagnoli, a Communications--Media Studies major in the Verrazano Honors Class of 2018, talks about how research impacted his life.

My time at CSI was turbulent to say the least. There were moments of pure excitement inspired by professors and the people I’ve met at the school, but the research project in which I worked with Professor David Gerstner and my great friend Lauren McKenna led to the culmination of some of my favorite people and work. If you had asked me when I had first started my academic career at CSI, I would have never thought I would have even begin to openly identify under the LGBTQ umbrella nor would I have thought I would have invested a significant part of my time as a student researching and studying so many social issues in America.

Brian posing after being told to "look like a smart person."

In fact, I never entirely intended on pursuing this research myself. It was a day like any other when Lauren had come up to me and said “I put your name down to work on a research project with me and Professor Gerstner.” At the time I had spoke to Dr. Gerstner maybe once or twice, but I didn’t have any idea of what I was getting in to. I just said “sure.” That sort of became my identity over my last two years at CSI -- saying yes to the little projects and endeavors that people had asked me to get involved in. This “little project” turned out to be a bit more than that.

We didn’t have a clear thesis from the get-go. All I knew, is that Lauren and I were in similar situations with how we were sexually identifying, and being able to invest our time into researching why LGBTQ people have certain stigmas and stereotypes was something that tied incredibly well into our interests. Eventually, after literally weeks of deliberation on what our thesis should be -- and a few times being rejected by Dr. Gerstner for being “too broad” -- we settled on researching how animated films have perpetuated gay stereotypes. Specifically, we examined children’s films, because people are socialized at a very young age on what to expect from the greater society. We spent nearly two months researching LGBTQ history and watching animated Disney films highlighting when LGBTQ stereotypes could be construed by an audience and how that influences other films and audiences. The expectations for where gay people were “allowed” to be in films became clear as patterns and trends began to form.

It was almost exciting to find real ideas and concepts related to the grander scheme of LGBTQ representation that weren’t exactly uncovered in the way we were uncovering them. It felt new, and while our research was preceded by others, we found new ways to integrate these concepts with other concepts. This was the only undergraduate research project I had gotten involved in, and part of me even regrets not doing more of them. I got closer with Dr. Gerstner and Lauren because of it, and gave me life-long academically-inclined friends that shared many common interests with me.