The mermaid has often been used as a symbol of queer identity in art and storytelling, writes Sacha Coward in this edited extract from his book

I can picture myself at seven years old, sitting down in front of the small television in my parents’ cigarette-stained living room on a Saturday morning, remote in hand. I was watching, rewinding and rewatching a particular section of my well-worn VHS tape of Disney’s The Little Mermaid. Although this was my favourite Disney film, starring Ariel as the titular mermaid, the particular scene that enthralled seven-year-old me featured Ursula, the large and vivacious cecaelia.

Years later I would learn that a cecaelia is a half-human, half-octopus hybrid; it is a mermaid spinoff. The sea witch of the original fairy tale was written as a traditional mermaid with a fishtail, but the Disney writers and animators wanted Ursula to be something more sinister and visually different from Ariel. Ursula therefore appears as an enormous spiky-haired woman with six curling black tentacles instead of human legs. [… She] is a mermaid with a camp gothic twist; a mermaid in drag.

The scene I watched over and over again depicts Ursula as she gloats about stealing Ariel’s voice in exchange for granting the mermaid legs. Ursula belts out ‘Poor Unfortunate Souls’ with feigned empathy to mock all the lives that she, shrewd businesswoman that she is, has ripped off and destroyed. This one musical sequence had such a strange impact on me, watching it to the extent that the tape began to stretch, so that while playing the tape back in 1994, lines of black and white static would occasionally cut through the footage and the sound would warp and burble.

In my early twenties I would go to my first live drag show at the currently closed Black Cap bar in London’s Camden Town. In this intimate venue, a six-foot-tall drag queen, bedecked in silver sequins and fake pearls, performed on the small beer-soaked stage. To a sweaty room full of drunk gay and bisexual men, she gave an impassioned baritone rendition of ‘Proud Mary’: a song covered by Tina Turner.

The sweat flying from her wig sparkled in the stage lights. It was only then that I realised this vision of gender-ambiguous confidence and glamour reminded me of something else. Of someone else, in fact. This drag queen was a powerful figure clutching a feather boa to her heaving rubber bosom, with the very same feel and stage presence as the sea witch in the Disney film. In the film Ursula uses her two eel sidekicks as boas, thrusting and gyrating as she sings suggestively about ‘the power of body language’.

Also, she is far from the frail old crone depicted in many European fairy tales, from the likes of the Brothers Grimm. Hans Christian Andersen, who wrote the original story, gave no specific description of the witch beyond her ugly laugh and hideous dwelling made out of the bones of drowned sailors (although Andersen has his very own place later in this story).

Original sketches by Disney show that the concept for Ursula was of a wizened, frail, fishtailed hag, and this was later changed due to the animators deciding on a very different direction for her. Instead, Ursula is a full-bodied, unapologetic and commanding figure. Her lipstick is bold cherry-red and her eyelids a rich and vibrant purple.

Earlier in the scene we watch her put her makeup on in a large ornate mirror, not unlike watching a drag performer put on their face. Much of this sequence is more Dorian Corey, 1980s drag queen from the New York ‘Ball Room’ scene featured in the documentary Paris Is Burning, than children’s bedtime story. Although this is a Disney film created primarily for children and based on one of the classic fairy tales of all time, sequences such as Ursula’s can be directly compared to a drag show.

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Recently, depictions of mermaids have appeared on the worldwide television reality-show sensation RuPaul’s Drag Race. In season ten, an entire runway fashion challenge, ‘The Mermaid Fantasy’, was devoted to mermaids, inspired in part by Bette Midler and her performance as ‘the Divine Miss M’, a mermaid in a wheelchair. In an episode of Holland’s Drag Race, Ivy-Elise arrives dressed as a hybrid of Ariel and Ursula, quoting, ‘You poor unfortunate souls!’ in her entrance. Ivy-Elise and two other contestants, Miss Abby OMG and season-two winner Envy Peru, all belong to the Mermaid Mansion, a ‘house’, or collective of drag queens.

Mermaids are a universal symbol that contemporary queer people use to express themselves in all forms of art and literature. At Tate St Ives, enshrined in a glass cabinet is a burnished red teapot depicting two canoodling mermen entitled The Mermen of Zennon, by gay artist Simon Bayliss. […]

So why is this the case? Why are mermaids a symbol that is so instantly recognisable and remixable by queer people? The obvious answer is the mermaid is a glittery, camp and effeminate creature which is just appealing to gay and bisexual men. While there is a grain of truth in this it doesn’t go nearly deep enough and leaves out the powerful connections with other queer identities such as trans women, lesbian women and nonbinary people. No, the story of why mermaids are a totem for queer people and the real reason why mermaids appear at Pride parades around the world is a far more ancient one.

This is an edited extract from Queer as Folklore: The Hidden Queer History of Myths and Monsters (Manchester University Press, £10.99) by Sacha Coward. Buy a copy from bookshop.org here.

Or buy a copy from Blackwell’s here.

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A Drink with the Idler

Sacha Coward is our guest on “A Drink with the Idler” this Thursday when he’ll be chatting to Tom Hodgkinson about queer folklore – the unsung heroes and villains of storytelling, magic and fantasy.

Mark Vernon will also present a new Thought for the Week.

That’s Thursday 21 May, 6pm-7pm.

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