If you haven’t heard by now, two married women kiss in Lightyear. This, the tiniest scrap of queer representation, has a handful of people up in arms. Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and the 89er Theatre in Oklahoma. Over the weekend, the movie theater in Kingfisher, Oklahoma, posted a sign promising/warning everyone attending Lightyear screenings that they would attempt as best they could to make sure nobody saw the kiss.
“Attention Parents: The management of this theatre discovered after booking Lightyear that there is a same-sex kissing scene within the first 30 minutes of the Pixar movie,” the sign read. “We will do all we can to fast-forward through that scene, but it might not be exact.”
So maybe you’d miss an important piece of dialogue, but that’s the cost of not seeing something totally normal. At the very least, you’d get a quick jolt of cartoon characters in triple time manically kissing. At the worst, the rest of the movie would stay on fast-forward because absolutely no human is good at clicking back to normal speed at the right time. Fortunately, for whatever reason, the theater confirmed that the sign was taken down and no showing got the flyby treatment. Unfortunately, someone thought putting up the sign (and presumably committing to the plan) was a good idea in the first place.
This kind of thing may seem silly, but it comes during an era of increasingly violent rhetoric against the LGBT+ community. As a group, they’re four times more likely to be victims of violent crime, threats are getting more brazen as they’re mainstreamed through a major political party, and two women can’t even kiss in a movie without it becoming “A Thing.”
The voice of Buzz in the new film, Chris Evans, put it bluntly, saying that the people who had a problem with the kiss are “idiots.”
