Remember When a Drag Queen Inspired Disney?

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Thinking of Disney classics, many things quickly come to mind: romances, frog princes, girls being rescued (perhaps today even rescuing themselves), and many other archetypes, but certainly not a cult drag queen. Well, in the case of The Little Mermaid, not only was a drag queen at the center of the fairytale, but she was a self-consciously vulgar, unapologetically big, and convention-busting one at that. Enter Divine, the now iconic queen and John Waters collaborator—and inspiration for Ursula, who would have been 74 this weekend.

Born Harris Glenn Milstead, Divine’s childhood as a queer and overweight boy in Baltimore, Maryland in the late 1950s and early ‘60s, was not easy. As a child, he was beaten so badly and so regularly that his doctor had to have the police intervene. Shy and artistic, Milstead also loved war movies and action films. When he went on a diet and lost 80 pounds his junior year of high school, he learned quickly how shallow his peers were; many people started talking to him for the first time.

When he met John Waters at age 16, things started to change. Waters had recently returned home to Baltimore after being kicked out of NYU for smoking weed, and the two became close. Milstead went to hairdressing school after finishing high school, where he began trying his hand at drag. He also began throwing wild, ornate parties with Waters (unknowingly sponsored by his parents, who’s credit card he took it upon himself to use). It was Waters in fact that gave Milstead the name Divine, calling her “the most beautiful woman in the world, almost” and hoping she would become the “Godzilla of drag queens.” Because Divine wasn’t like other drag queens. “I think with John wanted a very large woman, because he wanted the exact opposite of what normally would be beautiful,” Milstead told NPR shortly before his death of an enlarged heart at age 42 in 1988. “He wanted a 300-pound beauty, as opposed to a 110-pound beauty. He wanted, as I’ve been called, inflated Jayne Mansfield. And also, it’s ironic that he would say the most beautiful woman in the world turns out to be a man.”

The friendship between Waters and Milstead gave birth to transgressive cult pictures which have come to redefine the way we think about taste, performance, and satire: Pink Flamingo (in which Divine infamously eats dog shit), Serial Mom, and Hairspray, in which Milstead plays both female and male characters, were just a few. At 300 pounds, Divine challenged the conventions of drag, an already subversive art form, and created a conversation around who was allowed to perform gender and how. She was also a talented character actor, a skill few realized until near the end of her short life.

So, how did Divine’s doppelganger end up front and center as a Disney villain? As it turned out Howard Ashman, one of the writers ofThe Little Mermaid, had grown up in the Baltimore queer scene with Waters and Divine, who would ultimately influence animator Rob Minkoff’s final version. The creators of The Little Mermaid and Waters have since agreed that Divine would have loved to play Ursula, had she been alive. The role itself is arguably about a character who finds a way to derive power despite of and even because she was socially ostracized and different. It’s also subversive: The Little Mermaid—and especially the Hans Christian Andersen piece the film is based on—is itself a queer story, a fable referencing Andersen’s queer and trans love for the son of one of his patrons. Of course, few people know the origins of the fable, just as few people will recognize Ursula as Divine. For those that do however, there is a brilliance and a joy in this subversion: A story that looks on its surface to be so conventional, is in fact, not about tradition at all. Somewhere, Ursula, and the ghost of Divine, are having a deep laugh.

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