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.