The Proud Family: Louder and Prouderpremiered on Disney+ just a few weeks ago and from its first few episodes, its attempts to live up to the “Louder and Prouder” part of its name is already clear. The original series was not one to shy away from discussing social issues, but Louder and Prouder is taking it to another level. The show is tackling issues like cancel culture and introducing characters like Maya who brings activism into the narrative. It also introduces the series’ first explicitly queer character. Enter: Michael Collins. In the first 3 episodes of Louder and Prouder, he’s gotten more screen time than he did in the entire first season of The Proud Family.
His role was bumped up significantly from being an occasionally relevant gag character to a part of Penny’s core friend group. Additionally, his character (who in the original series had been portrayed as effeminate and a fan of fashion but otherwise left ambiguous due to the time of airing) was made explicitly gay as we see him gush over boys with Penny’s friends. This elevation of his character is a welcome one. LGBT+ characters are growing more common in all forms of media, but it’s still slow-going when it comes to cartoons and other content aimed primarily at kids. Michael is one of the first black gay characters on television with Benson from Kipo and the Age of Wonderbeasts being the only other animated example at this time. With all this in mind, there's a lot of weight on Michael’s shoulders and of what we’ve seen so far, the results are mixed. The problem with Michael is that by making his ambiguous homosexuality canon, his character at this point only sits in the realm of stereotype.
Michael has more screen time in Louder and Prouder but aside from his sexuality, there’s little else we’ve learned about him that wasn’t already present in his character in The Proud Family. In the first episode, “New Kids on the Block” we see his revised design which is much more fashionable than his original design which essentially left him in workout clothes the whole time. Now he’s stylish with pink hair and his soft voice has been replaced with a more energetic tone. We see him in this episode help Penny avoid her father’s attempts at a military makeover by restyling her outfits for her. Michael says this is because his own father has a similar distaste for Michael’s own fashion sense, so he is used to making due.
And here we get the first potential problem. Fashion was an element of Michael’s character in the original series, so it makes sense to keep incorporating it as he becomes a more central character however this love of fashion combined with his effeminate nature leaves his character as it is feeling like something of a stereotype. The effeminate gay fashionista is a tired trope by this point and Louder and Prouder does little to elevate this trait beyond its stereotypical origins. Perhaps later we’ll learn how Michael came to love fashion but for the moment it's left in the realm of stereotype. There’s also the line about his own father doing similar to Penny’s. This, again, is an element from the original series with Michael’s father not accepting his son's effeminate nature as a manly man type. When Michael was an ambiguously gay side character, this was one thing but with him now being explicitly gay the unaccepting father transforms into another part of the stereotype. These implications were less harsh when Michael was a minor character and his sexuality still had plausible deniability but with the clarification there comes a demand for more nuance.
In the third episode, “It All Started With An Orange Basketball”, we see that Michael is the star of the basketball team before he is swiftly injured, and the episode moves on without him. This felt like a missed opportunity to give him a little more nuance and swiftly move beyond the stereotypical parts of his personality by fleshing out other aspects of his character. But because the episode so quickly moves past him for other characters, he’s left in the dust with only the vague sense that there’s more to explore here. Making him the basketball team's star player is a great start, but we only get to see that part of him in the episode’s cold open and thus the fashionable effeminate gay character is still the dominating sentiment viewers are likely to take away from Michael. This could’ve been solved with a single scene or line allowing Michael to interact with the team or Penny but alas the episode had other places it wanted to go. It’s just unfortunate that what could’ve been a piece of solid character building for Michael was left incomplete.
There are positives as well, naturally. As stated, there are very few black gay characters in animation, and putting him in contrast with Benson from Kipo and the Age of Wonderbeasts leaves us with a more satisfying outlook. They’re both very different people and getting to see a contrast to Benson with a more effeminate gay character is surely refreshing for some. There’s also the issue of black gay men being underrepresented in general as well as how black men are stereotypically portrayed as very masculine. Michael is a nice counter to that, offering a type of character we don’t get to see much elsewhere. Sure, stereotypical depictions of white gay men have been on television for decades, but black gay men rarely get the same spotlight thus the impact is not quite the same. Michael’s character cannot be so simply reduced to a good or bad portrayal of a black gay character, but it can still be critiqued for a lack of nuances.
Of course, there are still many episodes to come for The Proud Family: Louder and Prouder and with that room for many improvements and developments to be made. A handful of episodes is only enough to detect a trend, not to offer a full judgment. With any luck, the writers will give Michael (and all of Penny’s friends) room to develop multifaceted personalities and challenge some reductive characterizations from the original series. Michael has the potential to be a fantastic stand-out character as one of the first black gay characters in children’s media. He bears an unfortunate amount of weight as this is still largely unexplored territory. We certainly can’t expect perfection, but we can go forward with the hopes that Michael is allowed to develop into a complex character with more to him than gay stereotypes and vague elaborations on traits he possessed in the original series. There’s still plenty of time to let Michael, and the whole cast, be fantastically realized three-dimensional characters and stand loud and proud.
