Aside from the fact that neither the creators nor characters use any of the contemporary LGBTQ labels or language used in America, all their queerness is complicated by the decades-old sex and gender politics of two different cultures and a variety of entertainment mediums dominated by men.
Of course, in many of these cases, it's hard to definitively declare exactly which Pride flag the characters themselves would identify with. Many (like myself) will also gladly die on the hill that even main protagonist Usagi is actually a bi-con for the ages - despite that pesky character flaw of having eternal heterosexual love for Tuxedo Mask.
#SAILOR MOOM FULL#
In my experience of the show, there's heaps of teasingly non-platonic intimacy exchanged between all the Scouts, full of moments where the girls who get it can clearly pick up on something very LGBTQ happening. In the manga at least, Sailor Mars (Rei) and Venus (Minako) openly flirt with the idea of giving up boys for each other. Oscar Isaac sang 'Gay' in call for Disney to oppose 'Don't Say Gay' billīut honestly, there's pretty strong canonical evidence indicating that all the Sailor Scouts probably land somewhere on the not-so-straight side of the Kinsey Scale. Thankfully, when Hulu became Sailor Moon 's streaming home in 2014, it released all 200 episodes uncut and uncensored, even working with Viz Media on re-dubs that reinstated many of the LGBTQ plot lines erased from the initial North American release. A whopping 34 episodes of Season 5 were never even released in English, altogether erasing the Sailor Starlights, who are characters that present as male while in their regular human forms yet are then revealed to be biologically female during magical transformations (oh, and one of them is hot for Sailor Moon). But there were also the same-sex gay lovers who were main villains in Season 1, Kunzite and Zoisite - the latter of whom the American dub gave female pronouns instead.įish Eye, a central baddie of Season 4, presents with a gender-fluidity befitting their original fish form, mostly identifying by masculine pronouns yet also very often in femme-presenting clothes. Most famously, Sailor Uranus (Haruka) and Sailor Neptune (Michiru) went from being romantic partners to being very disturbingly intimate cousins who shower together and kiss on the mouth, since normalizing incest to children is apparently far better than the evil of lesbians. Because America, being America, ensured that all of the gay was censored out of the English dub.īut let's recap just some of the LGBTQ representation from the show's original Japanese run that young, queer, North American millennial children were robbed of thanks to their country's blatant queer-phobia. But it's not your fault if you can't remember any of those pioneering queer animated stories from the version of Sailor Moon you watched as a kid. The queerness of the anime's original 1992 Japanese release was extremely explicit, with outright gay, lesbian, genderfluid/non-binary, and non-cis characters and relationships with majorly significant plots. Disney's laughably underwhelming " exclusively gay moments" or first gay Pixar characters strategically kept in the background pale in comparison to Sailor Moon 's illustrious history of LGBTQ representation. This decades-old anime show was eons ahead of modern-day Disney (which only just recently started regretting its corporate funding of the legislators behind Florida's so-called Don't Say Gay bill after immense public pressure to do so). And I'm not talking about characters merely coded as queer, or LGBTQ fans with popular queer head canon, or even the inherent gayness of an astrologically-obsessed group of girls who collect crystals to ward off bad vibes together. To those in the know, the revolutionary queerness of Sailor Moon was never much of a secret. Watching Sailor Moon right now feels like chicken soup for the queer soul. In a moment when hateful forces of evil seem to once again threaten to shroud our world in darkness, Sailor Moon shines as a beam of moonlight - an unbeatable beacon of hope fighting for love and justice, no matter how impossible the odds seem. Then, as I witnessed some of the most violently regressive anti-LGBTQ bills (often targeting children) get passed into law again and again and again over these past couple weeks, it hit me. But inexplicably, I found the light-hearted, fun, optimistic anime from my '90s childhood was constantly bringing me to near tears. A few months back, something compelled me to start rewatching Sailor Moon in its entirety for the first time ever.
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