Disney’s newest “first openly gay character” is… a beaver voiced by lesbian icon Fortune Feimster

Get up, girls, Disney has another first openly gay character!

This week, the House of Mouse revealed their official cast portraits for the sequel to Zootopia — you know, that animated buddy cop film set in an animal metropolis starring a low-key sexy fox, that randomly features a Shakira banger?

How about we take this to the next level?

Subscribe to our newsletter for a refreshing cocktail (or mocktail) of LGBTQ+ entertainment and pop culture, served up with a side of eye-candy.
Subscribe to our Newsletter today

Well, the queen of Latin music is back, alongside stars like Jason Bateman, Ginnifer Goodwin, and lesbian comedian Fortune Feimster, who’s playing… a beaver???

The jokes write themselves!

OK, OK, to be fair, we don’t know if Feimster’s beaver character, Nibbles Maplestick, is canonically a lesbian in the film.

And anyone who’s followed LGBTQ+ news over the past decade knows that Disney has used the “first openly gay character” tagline in too many press cycles to count.

Still, the idea of a queer woman playing a beaver was hilarious enough that Gilly, a.k.a. @itsgibbing, had to point it out to Gay Twitter X in a post: “Disney’s first openly gay character, a beaver played by a lesbian.”

He later clarified, “This is just a joke about a beaver being played by a famed lesbian Fortune Feimster btw. I have no idea if the beaver is actually gay.”

But it was too late, the post reached nearly 1 million views, and discourse was sparked!

the cycle continues pic.twitter.com/4VtYNj0B38— trader hoe’s (@ouioui_faguette) November 17, 2025

We're at Disney's fifth first openly gay character— Donny M (@DanielVarg81627) November 17, 2025

The “Disney’s first openly gay character” meme

To be fair, Mickey and his pals brought this all upon themselves.

It began when the media hyped up Disney’s apparent “first-ever gay moment” in 2017’s live-action remake of Beauty and the Beast. (It was, like, two seconds between Josh Gad’s character, LeFou, and Luke Evans’ Gaston, and if you blink, you’ll miss it.)

Then, there was an unnamed lesbian couple in Finding Dory, a gay man grieving his husband for two seconds in Avengers: Endgame, and a kid who had two mommies (but not a connection to the plot) in Toy Story 4 — all of which were billed as groundbreaking, first-of-its-kind LGBTQ+ representation moments for Disney.

So, by the time we got an animated LGBTQ+ character who actually had a name — Lena Waithe‘s one-eyed cyclops cop Specter in 2020’s Onward — the gays were fatigued, to say the least.

Of course, it didn’t help that just a year later, Disney released 2021’s live-action Cruella, featuring, you guessed it, another “first gay character.”

At least Emma Stone got to wear some truly iconic lewks.

It became enough of a thing that Know Your Meme devoted an entire page to Disney’s First Gay Character, all of whom — noticeably — take up just enough space that they can easily be wiped to play in foreign markets.

Later, it was parodied by Drew Tarver’s character in The Other Two, who gets cast as Globby, the first-ever openly gay animated character whose queerness boils down to the fact that he’s a blob in bed with another blob that’s definitely also a boy blob.

Who is Disney’s actual first animated gay character?

All roads lead back to Zootopia.

While Feimster playing a beaver in the sequel could just be a hilariously queer-coded casting choice, Zootopia does have a leg up on its other “first gay character” competitors.

In the original film, which hit theaters in 2016 — a year before Beauty and the Beast — filmmakers subtly included the first explicitly gay couple in an animated Disney feature.

Of course, it’s two antelopes that live in the same building as Judy Hopps, make a lot of noise, and their relationship is mostly just implied. (Although the movie’s credits list them as Bucky Oryx-Antlerson and Pronk Oryx-Antlerson, so at least we know Zootopia allows gay marriage.)

Jared Bush, the screenwriter of Zootopia, even clarified the matter on social media, writing at the time, “They are a gay married couple. But they don’t yell at each other because they’re gay, they yell because they’re real.” Good to know!

So, no, Disney’s first openly gay character is not a beaver played by a lesbian.

But piece by piece, LGBTQ+ characters are continuing to take up more space in the House of Mouse’s filmography, and that’s worth celebrating — although we don’t need to keep saluting them for giving us the bare minimum.

Now, if only they would listen and give us Disney’s first gay dad in Inside Out 2.

Zootopia 2 hit theaters on November 26.

Sign up for the Queerty newsletter to stay on top of the hottest stories in LGBTQ+ entertainment, politics, and culture.