The Shot That Made Me Gay: Hercules

This column entry appears in Issue 1 of The Metrograph, our award-winning print publication. Explore more of Issue 1 and newer editions here. 

AS A TOTEM OF QUEER sexual awakening, Heracles is obvious to the point of cliché. He was muscled, he was Greek, and his Wikipedia page boasts a lengthy subsection about his romantic encounters with men. Plutarch, in Erotikos, even states that Heracles’s male partners were too numerous to count. I have no doubt that many an old queen visiting the Met’s Greek and Roman art galleries has declared the same thing.

But the Heracles of ancient Greece is not who made me gay. Instead it was the young twink Hercules of Disney’s 1997 animated musical film, whose enormous hands, calves, and feet, toned and tanned skin, nipple-revealing toga, and puppy-dog clumsiness made me want to smell and kiss him.

The particular shot I have in mind is twink Hercules’s disastrous visit to the town square. In an effort to fit in with his peers, he attempts a diving catch of a discus that is thrown in his direction. But despite his best intentions, his superhuman strength launches him into one of the Greek columns holding up the shops that hawk food and ceramics, causing the columns to collapse, domino-like, and the square to be leveled. Hercules is shamed, and more or less banished as a result.

When I was growing up, Herc’s pubescent awkwardness made him sympathetic to me; when I watch this movie as an adult, however, there is little doubt in my mind that my minor obsession with twink Hercules at least began with his feet, which are about the size of his entire head. This is inherently, undeniably erotic. His monster feet are anchored by calves the size of watermelons, and when contrasted with his slim waist and bony shoulders, it’s almost like a separate body has been stapled on below. Then there are his gargantuan hands, which, with their vast surface area, are more like frying pans. And you know what they say about animated god/twinks with big hands and big feet? It’s a miracle his toga covers it all. His goofy schoolboy exuberance screams “I’m ready to be corrupted.” The best word I have for him is “virile.”

What the hell was going on when twink Hercules was conceived? Who let this happen? What faggot hijacked the Disney storyboard and why did he leave such an impression on my still-forming brain? Maybe it’s because sex appeal aside, twink Hercules’s characterization is a grab bag of gay tropes. He feels different from everyone else but doesn’t know why. He’s made fun of. He has a destiny and dreams that are bigger than his small town, and even sings an incredibly sentimental musical theater number about it (relisten to “Go the Distance,” it still works). He goes on a hero’s journey to find his true self. He is, in his untapped potential, raw physicality, social isolation, and gangly beauty, the stuff of canonical gay coming-of-age material. Everyone from Jean Genet to Alan Hollinghurst would’ve had a field day with him. The cherry on top is his inevitable transformation into a muscled circuit queen when he grows up. Someone, somewhere, knew what they were doing. Hercules is a queer text and I refuse to argue about it.

Twink Hercules’s yearning, in its physicality and existentialism, is the gay experience wrapped in one sweaty animated goofball with calves the size of basketballs and a very pinchable nipple. I’ll never forget you, Herc—you made the dreams I didn’t know I had come true.