DISNEY CHANNEL PRESENTS
SAPPHIC OVERTONES
I spent my childhood feverishly desperate for my brother's approval. Just eighteen months my senior (so, two grades ahead of me), Zach, to me, embodied the pinnacle of coolness and funniness from my earliest days through high school. When we were little, Zach played soccer, so I wanted to play soccer. Zach collected baseball cards, so I collected baseball cards. Zach played Pokémon, so I borrowed his Game Boy and played Pokémon after him—then stoked his ire by saving my own game and inadvertently erasing his, a memory that still wallops me with guilt. When Zach got into alt pop-rock bands like Weezer (The Blue Album and Pinkerton only, thank you) and blink-182 (all of it, frankly), I followed suit. Same goes for The Simpsons and Conan O'Brien and, in high school, The Office and, in college, Summer Heights High. I assumed Zach's taste in comedy was infallible and adopted it as my own.
I was a tomboy, sure. But when I was little-little—like, kindergarten age-my identity wasn't based on boys in the general sense. Rather, I gleefully based my whole sense of self on my big brother, who knew better than to bequeath unto me his love and approval, lest I get above my station. I'd try to hang out whenever Zach had friends over in the basement, but he'd give me the boot. This craving for Zach to validate my existence bled into our adolescence: when he drove me to high school my freshman and sophomore years in our family's green Volkswagen van, I could never touch the iPod. The soundtrack was always in Zach's hands and always included some Brand New. He laughed at some of my jokes, sometimes. Enough to keep me tap-dancing for him, trying to be cleverer, trying to win his laughter— the ultimate validation.
It might've been my literal desire to become my brother that spurred my infatuation with the Disney Channel Original Movie Motocrossed (2000). 
Okay, so: meet the Carson family. They're your average, American, motocross-obsessed family. You know the type. The dad was an off-road motorcycle racing champion back in his heyday, and he's grooming his teenage son, Andy, to replace him as the Fastest Biker Boy. Andy's twin sister, Andi (note to parents seeking to avoid their twins swapping identities: give your children different names) is a cheerleader but desperately wants to be a motocrosser like the guys. But dad says no! Motocross is not for girls, it's for boys. "I want you to start concentrating on things that a thirteen-year-old girl should be concentrating on," says dad. "And that does not include motocross!"
But when Andy (the boy) gets injured and dad goes off to recruit another racer for their team, Andi (the girl) chops her hair off and races in (the boy) Andy's place. At first, their mother is horrified by Andi's dyke chop. "Just look at your beautiful hair!" she says, in the exact tone my own mother had upon viewing my foregone side-shave. But soon, Andi's mom is on board and takes her daughter to a motocross competition disguised as her son. There, hilarity ensues, including Andi developing a crush on a boy who thinks she's a boy. Apparently, Motocrossed is loosely based on Twelfth Night. Those adaptations sometimes work—10 Things I Hate About You, Clueless, and She's the Man are modern classics based on classic classics. Other times, you just get Motocrossed. In the end, Andi gets outed as a girl, but she wins over her crush nonetheless and wins a big motocross sponsorship. Girl power! As someone who spent the first ten years of her life trying to emulate her near-twin brother in every way, Motocrossed got me.
I'm sure I don't need to spell this out for you, as I just wrote motocross and dyke chop in the same paragraph, but the queer imagery in Motocrossed is, quite frankly, unrelenting. Andi, who looks like an *NSYNC member everybody forgot about—wait, no, that's Chris Kirkpatrick—spends 70 percent of the movie vrooming away on her hog, fretting that her real gender will be exposed. When she's not in head-to-toe motocross gear, she wears a baggy striped T-shirt with a flannel shirt layered on, spiky blond hair, khaki cargo shorts, and a faux-deep voice. In one scene, Andi and her crush, Dean Talon (my new drag king name), go on a motocross ride through backroads before stumbling upon a lake and taking a dip. Dunking and splashing is involved. As Dean thinks Andi's a boy, he does not know it's a date, but this is most certainly a date between two butch lesbians. Watching our heroine cross-dress is supposed to be a point of comedy, as it is in Twelfth Night, but, sorry to essentialize, any teen girl who yearns to mount a dirt bike is at least 30 percent queer. I was both enthralled with and terrified by Andi's boyishness, as I saw my own boyishness reflected in her. Upon rewatch, Andi's appearance isn't all that funny; rather, it's just a decently accurate depiction of a baby butch.
Six years later, High School Musical carried on the tradition of clearlygay- but-actually-not-gay characters in DCOMs. High School Musical is a musical about auditioning for a musical. Two star-crossed heterosexuals, Troy (Zac Efron) and Gabriella (Vanessa Hudgens), discover their mutual crushes and singing talents and grapple with whether to try out for their school's new production. No one is more opposed to the duo's meteoric rise than Sharpay and Ryan Evans (Ashley Tisdale, Lucas Grabeel).
The Evans twins rule the drama club and heretofore have happily scooped up leads in every school production for which they've auditioned. The Evans twins are villains, both clearly sculpted by a gay man. Sharpay Evans's blown-out, cartoonish femininity makes one forget, momentarily, that they're watching a Disney movie and not RuPaul's Drag Race. But Ryan Evans is the one we really need to talk about. Ryan—I don't know how to put it any other way—is, well, very clearly a homosexual. Like Andi Carson simply is a baby butch, Ryan Evans just, like, is a gay boy. I say this with the utmost love: Ryan is a hip-swishing, jazz-square-dancing, eye-rolling, bitchy young man. He wears a different, neon-colored Kangol hat in every scene. "It's a crowd favorite," the allegedly straight character tells his twin sister/dance partner after their first audition for the musical. "Everybody loves a good jazz square!" I'm all for straight men embracing their femininity, but Ryan Evans is clearly played in the spirit of a gay musical theater terrorist, and arguing otherwise would feel insincere at best. To the point that, had Disney made Ryan openly gay, the character might've been panned as a gay cliché.
But they didn't. Ryan's sexuality isn't addressed at all until High School Musical 3: Senior Year, when he dates the composer for the drama club, Kelsi, who is in fact a girl. In 2016, Lucas Grabeel told BuzzFeed News he'd asked director Kenny Ortega about Ryan's sexuality right after reading the script.1 "I know it's Disney Channel, so I'm not really gonna be gay, but I mean, yeah, right?" Grabeel paraphrased. Ortega apparently told him, "Well, think of it this way: you have the opportunity to play a character who's young, he's into theater, he's an artist, and let's go at it from that point of view." So Grabeel played Ryan as a peak theater twink and left it at that.
On the one hand, that's real. There was literally not one out gay person at my high school, but there were plenty of people who were just obviously queer. For Halloween one year, a fellow concert band flutist, Jonathan, went in full drag (heels, too) as a notoriously cruel popular girl, Hope Jameson (absolutely not her real name; I'm still terrified of her and fear she will hunt me down and pierce my heart with a stiletto if I publish her name). Particularly at a Catholic school with no Gay-Straight Alliance and teachers who told us God hated the sin of queerness, this was nothing short of rockstar behavior. It was hilarious and brave and perfect. Now, I don't know if Jonathan was out to his friends—we weren't friends, he was two years ahead of me and refused to speak to me despite sitting literally next to me in band—but he was someone who was just so plainly queer that he didn't have to say he was gay to be gay. It was just implied, it was understood. Jonathan was an extreme example, but there were a lot of teenage boys like Ryan Evans in the 2000s: effeminate, clearly uninterested in girls, but not explicitly out to their peers.
But High School Musical is a Disney movie, so "let's give gay teens an accurate depiction of their lives" probably wasn't a top-fifty priority for those executives.
As a culture, we do not like the idea that young children have sexual agency. We have a difficult time talking about kids playing doctor or masturbating or being curious or turned on in any way. It's weird, it's gross, it feels borderline predatory and pedophilic to even acknowledge that elementary schoolers have their own sexualities. Even writing about it, I feel a knee-jerk yikes on the topic. And it's because of that cringiness, I think, that I never talked about queerness with adults as a kid. It wasn't due to overt homophobia, per se; I don't think my parents and teachers and camp counselors explicitly didn't want me to know of or about gay people. Rather, queerness was deemed an inappropriate topic for kids to talk about. Gayness was sex, and sex was something for adults, and thus queerness simply wasn't in my purview as a Catholic nine-year-old. 
It's this half-assed logic, I think, that creators like Disney used in the '90s and '00s (and continue to use) to omit queer characters from entertainment. Disney Channel Original Movies might've been about high schoolers, but they were made for elementary schoolers and thus devoid of any sexuality whatsoever. On the rarest occasion, characters engage in chaste, mouth-closed kissing (but nothing more); because straightness—though technically a form of sexuality—is seen as the default setting in our culture, boy-girl kisses are nonthreatening. And since culturally, we hadn't untied the Gay Community in popular society's mind from the image of hedonistic, meth-induced orgies in Berlin sex dungeons, there was no space for gay teenagers on Disney Channel. By merely existing, queerness is disruptive.
And yet, we talk about straightness all the time with little kids. Instagram bozos constantly joke about their two-year-old sons being "lady killers!" and preschool-aged boy/girl pairings get called "boyfriend and girlfriend" on the regular. Sure, these kinds of comments are typically facetious, but we're culturally quite comfortable with the notion that our three-foot-tall humans will grow into thriving heterosexuals. In the same sense, DCOM kisses might be rare and close-mouthed, but the movies almost always include a hetero romantic plotline. Even Jennifer and Kelly's Cadet Kelly rivalry, the beef that launched a thousand baby queers, is initially sparked over a boy. Andi Carson and Dean Talon don't make out at the end of Motocrossed, but the film ends on a freeze-frame of them both in midair on their bikes, flirtatiously racing around the Carsons' backyard motocross course, the Disney equivalent of hard-core pornography. Ryan Evans, the pink Kangol–wearing jazz-squarer, gets a girlfriend.