Disney Channel has come a long way since the 1980s, when the channel began. On Friday, October 27th, the Disney Channel original series Andi Mack will have one of their main characters come out as gay and admit he has feelings for a fellow male character on the show. The character, Cyrus Goodman, will be one of the few characters that have been revealed to be gay on Disney Channel. On the second to last episode of Good Luck Charlie, there was a subplot featuring two female characters being married and having a child together who was friends with one of the character’s, Charlie. On Disney’s UK show The Lodge, it was revealed very nonchalantly that a character named Josh liked guys and not girls. Andi Mack, though, seems to be the first Disney Channel show that will explore more into a character’s sexuality and coming to terms with it.
Andi Mack is a Disney Channel show that premiered in 2016 and was created by Terri Minski, who also created Lizzie McGuire. The show is about a young middle schooler named Andi Mack whose life gets turned upside down after she discoveries that the woman she thought all her life was her sister, is actually her mother. The show also features the ups & downs she has with her friends, Cyrus and Buffy, her new home life and situation, and a crush she has on a boy named Jonah Beck. While the gay representation in the show is important, the show also has a large amount of diversity in other aspects of its cast. Andi Mack features an Asian American lead actress, a biracial couple in Andi’s grandparents, an African American female character, & a Jewish and now confirmed gay character. Besides the diverse characters, Andi Mack also touches on storylines like past teen pregnancy, individuality, family dynamics, first love, and now coming to terms with your sexuality.
I hope that those watching this show when it airs will be touched and supportive of this character’s journey and the story that they will be portraying. According to Deadline, the show has been screened by PFLAG and GLADD to help make sure that the story they will be portraying is both accurate and supportive of the gay community. I think this shows great progress in our media and I hope, as I am sure many others do, that this will be an accurate, respectful, and overall good representation of a young character in the gay community.