'Gravity Falls' Creator Calls Out Disney for Pride Post Hypocrisy

Alex Hirsch is speaking out.

The 35-year-old creator of Disney Channel series Gravity Falls spoke out on Twitter following the company’s post for Pride Month.

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“Disney privately: Cut the gay scene! We might lose precious pennies from Russia & China! Disney publicly: Clown face Honk honk we put rainbow bumper sticker on Lightning McQueen today CONSUME OUR PRODUCTS TEENS,” he wrote.

“To any creative at Disney TV, Feature, Publishing or Streaming: please mercilessly spam your execs with ‘there’s room for everyone under the rainbow’ next time they tell you to ‘please revise’ your LGBTQ+ character for ‘not being Disney appropriate,’” he continued.

Alex has spoken out about conflicts with Disney execs over LGBTQ-related plot points in the show before. In a 2017 interview, he revealed one scene in particular that didn’t make the cut.

“When one of our storyboard artists presented the scene to me, she’d made one of the couples two lovable old ladies. It was sweet and casual and I knew INSTANTLY that it was going to turn into a huge fight with Disney. So naturally I left it in. The note came back immediately ‘The scene of the two old ladies kissing in the diner is not appropriate for our audience. Please revise.’ I responded with a one word answer: ‘Why?’” he said at the time.

“This basically broke the censors. The couldn’t think of a single way to phrase an answer to that question so they made me talk on the phone so there would be no paper trail. They were terrified of sounding like bigots—but I honestly don’t think they were bigots, I think they were cowards. They basically admitted that there was no good reason why I should change it, but that they get complaints about this stuff from various homophobic parents and would rather avoid the headache, and couldn’t I just drop it?”

“We probably had 6 or so conversations about it. It’s one of the only times I had a face to face meeting with the censors…but despite my greatest efforts it finally came down to ‘change the scene or we’ll cut it out of the episode ourselves,’” he went on to say.

Gravity Falls ran from 2012 to 2016.

One Disney star just came out as bisexual this week.