Conservatives Slam Disney+ for High School Musical's Gay Romance

Right-wing media types are losing it over the recent episode of High School Musical: The Musical: The Series that featured a budding gay romance.

The series "unfortunately seems to be continuing its sad decline into liberal propaganda," Lindsay Kornick wrote on Newsbusters, referring last to Friday's episode of the Disney Plus show. In the installment, "Homecoming," Carlos (Frankie Rodriguez), the choreographer of the school musical, asks cast member Seb (Joe Serafini) to be his date for the homecoming dance. Seb at first appears to have stood Carlos up, but eventually he arrives and the two do a slow dance together.

"The only thing worse than the horribly dull and pandering plot is the media glorifying it," Kornick continued. She mentioned a Los Angeles Times article in which Rodriguez, costar Sofia Wylie, and creator Tim Federle took pride in the show's LGBTQ representation. Wylie had talked about the series normalizing same-sex relationships, leading Kornick to comment, "Hollywood will stop at nothing to normalize any degeneracy, and it looks like Disney+ is just another platform to do it."

On CBN.com, the website for Pat Robertson's Christian Broadcasting Network, Steve Warren called the episode "the latest blatant example of children's media producers pushing an LGBTQ agenda on children." He also mentioned a same-sex wedding on the PBS animated series Arthurand the brief gay moment in Disney's live-action version of Beauty and the Beast. "Disney and other Hollywood elites have gone out of their way to embrace the LGBTQ agenda," Warren wrote.

The show's team, Kornick observed, "assumes that people beyond Hollywood degenerates are clamoring for kids to talk about sexual orientation," which "couldn't be more wrong." Of course, she neglects the fact that heterosexuality is a sexual orientation and that the vast majority of relationships portrayed in entertainment media are heterosexual. But even a little LGBTQ representation is more than the right wing can stand.