OK, once again I start with a confession. I spent a few hours this weekend watching the Disney Channel's ridiculously popular original movie High School Musical, and the new sequel, High School Musical 2, or HSM2 as its rabid tween fanbase calls it. Hey, I'm on vacation, I was bored, and I noticed the first film was on - so sue me. Even though I pretty much hate musicals, I was strangely curious about it, given how successful the film has been, and by the amount of buzz its lead, Zac Efron, has been generating from his breakthrough role in Hairspray (though I haven't seen it). But this isn't a posting speculating on Efron's much-speculated upon sexuality.

I was really surprised to find amongst the ensemble teen cast one character who is so obviously coded as gay that you'd have to be blind to not realize. In a Disney Channel movie! Ostensibly, the character, Ryan Evans, is one of the "villains" of the first movie, together with his bitchy sister Sharpay, but it's Disney - everyone is reunited in the final dance numbers. HSM2 finds Ryan turning against his sister and joining the side of the angels - but again, everyone's singing and dancing by the end.

Ryan is ostentatiously stylish, wearing a different hat and outfit in every scene, often clad in stereotypically gay colors like pink, is musically inclined, and is pointedly never paired with a girl in the first film, aside from his sister. In the second film, he is sometimes paired up with a secondary female character for the dance numbers, but never has a romantic object. Online, some fans argue about his sexuality, while others write explicitly gay fan fiction.

In HSM2, Ryan has what amounts to a duet - with another male character - where he shows off his athletic and dance skills on the baseball diamond in an attempt to get the jocks to join his talent show musical number. While parts of it evoke the Sharks vs the Jets in a West Side Story kind of way, there's a strange flirtatiousness to it informed by his queer coding. Watch the scene below - Hey Batter Batter, Hey Batter Batter, swing... [YouTube removed the original video, here's another one:]

I find it remarkable that the creators would go as far as to include even a coded gay teen character in a Disney Channel production. What does this say about today's young audience, and their perception, awareness, and/or acceptance of different sexualities? Everything in both films is ridiculously chaste - a running gag in the sequel is that the two leads, Gabriela and Troy, are always interrupted right before they share a kiss - so it's not like Disney is showing America's tweens anything suggestive or controversial. Instead it's a refreshing inclusion of diversity and a small representation of reality for high school aged kids - even if presented in a completely unreal genre like the musical.