“Anyone who knows me and my long-term boyfriend know we meet a lot of our friends online these days,” Ashley Gill says in a Dec. 21 video, showing a photo of her and her friend and collaborator, Grant Gibbs, taking a sultry selfie with Pluto. She’s wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with the image of Remy, the rodent culinary whiz from Ratatouille, while Gibbs is wearing mouse ears and a T-shirt with Cars protagonist Lightning McQueen.
The two proceed to plug an app called Swingers Upon Main, touting it as “for swingers, by swingers….that love Disney!” They go on to outline their favorite swinging locales, including Cinderella’s Castle and the swank Grand Floridian resort, before introducing the app’s tagline: “Sometimes Mickey wants to take Daisy for a spin!”
Of course, Swingers Upon Main isn’t real, and neither is the ad: if the overly sexualized tagline isn’t a dead giveaway (particularly given the Disney corporation’s notorious unwillingness to have its brand associated with anything sexual), then Gill’s goofy giggle at Gibbs’ Mickey impression surely is. Gill and Gibbs are the comedic minds behind A Twink and a Redhead, a TikTok account with more than 288,000 followers where they pretend to be, among other things, a pair of deeply in love heterosexual Disney adults. (Gibbs is gay, as evidenced by, among other things, the channel’s title.)
But these obvious indicators of satire didn’t stop the video from going viral on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, where it was immediately received as gospel by legions of irate Disney-adult haters, racking up 10.5 million views at the time of publication. “So many people online make fun of Disney adults,” Gill tells Rolling Stone. “I think this was just like the perfect fodder for that.”
“People were sending us death threats, telling us we need to die,” Gibbs adds. “I saw someone say, ‘They need to stand up on Space Mountain.’” (Space Mountain, for the non-Mouse-brained, is a notoriously fast, bumpy, and low-ceilinged roller coaster.)
The phenomenon of videos going viral divorced of their original context on one platform, then being widely misinterpreted on another, is nothing particularly new. But Gill and Gibbs’ experience is somewhat unusual in that it converged with two separate discourses: the ongoing media frenzy over polyamory (though it’s worth noting that the poly and swinger communities are two distinct entities), and the eternal hatred of the Disney adult.
As previously reported by Rolling Stone, Disney adults (who range widely in age, sex, and racial background, but are primarily represented in the public imagination by white millennial women), have garnered intense opprobrium on the internet, with many viewing them as cringe consumerists trapped in a state of perpetual adolescence. “There’s a real moralistic judgment of Disney adults,” one academic specializing in fandom previously told Rolling Stone. “It’s like, ‘How dare you, instead of putting all this money into buying a house or raising a family, put [it] into fleeting experiences?’
To some extent, A Twink and a Redhead’s content capitalizes on such perceptions. The two, who have been best friends since sixth grade, regularly make content satirizing Disney adults, with their love of the fandom becoming an integral part of their lore. (In one video, Gill belts out “Hakuna Matata” in front of the Animal Kingdom’s Tree of Life, while Gibbs grins at the camera and claps his thighs together in rhythm.)
But unlike the irate X users hoping they’d be decapitated on Space Mountain, Gibbs and Gill say their satirical content is actually borne of a genuine love for the fandom. Gibbs says his entire YouTube homepage is “all just Disney vloggers,” and Gill says while she considers herself more of a “Disney adult ally” than a Disney adult herself, she finds fans’ ardor for the brand “very endearing.” “I love that adults can love something so much,” she says. “People make fun of them, but I love their passion.”
The Disney Swingers video was inspired by a TikTok promoted video for a real Disney adult networking platform: Meet Upon Main, which launched in the fall of 2022 and boasts the slogan, “Find your magical match.” In an interview with Rolling Stone, the co-creators of the app, Robby Scharfeld and Kaity Rabinovitch, said they initially intended for it to be a dating app targeted at members of the Disney, Star Wars, and Marvel fandoms, but it has since evolved into a general networking platform for those looking to befriend fellow theme park aficionados. It is not a swingers app, though there are married couples on the website looking for (platonic) vacation buddies, they say.
“One of our core values as a company is inclusion, so even though [Disney singles] was the population we originally had in mind, anyone is welcome on the site,” Rabinovitch says.
Last fall, Rabinovitch and Scharfeld posted a paid ad on TikTok featuring an earnest Disney-loving married couple in complementary mouse ears, telling the story of how they met (according to the video, she was Disney-bounding, or essentially cosplaying, Ariel from The Little Mermaid in her profile photo, while he was Disney-bounding Prince Eric). The original ad for Meet Upon Main went marginally viral, garnering about 82,000 views, including from Gibbs and Gill. “The second I saw it, I was like, we have to recreate this,” Gibbs says.
Gibbs and Gill posted a parody video in December, settling on a swingers-themed app because, Gibbs said, the original, staid-looking couple in the video looked like they were “probably having some wild sex” behind the scenes. (For what it’s worth, there does not appear to be an app specifically targeted at swingers who love Disney, though the phenomenon is not unheard of: on Reddit, there are posts from people looking to meet up with amorous couples on upcoming Disney cruises.)
When Rabinovitch and Scharfeld saw the parody, they took it in stride: “from a marketing point of view, I kind of had an idea of how it would grow and benefit [Meet Upon Main],” Rabinovitch says, adding that the website has racked up more than 1,000 new signups since the Disney Swingers parody video.
Others, however, were not as gracious, particularly those who thought the Disney Swingers ad was the real deal. “Jail, straight to jail,” reads the caption on the original viral tweet, with another replying, “this might be the most cringe awful shit I’ve ever experienced.” Those unfamiliar with the duo’s brand threw in a dash of homophobia for good measure. “People were calling me out for being gay, as if it’s some big math equation that they’re solving that I’m gay,” says Gibbs. “There’s literally a hot pink neon sign behind us [in the video] that says ‘A Twink and a Redhead.’”
The reaction was so vociferous that Gibbs says he’s developed newfound empathy for Disney adults in general. “I think the people who hate them hate themselves,” he says. “These people aren’t bothering anyone. Maybe they think it’s weird, but I think they just hate seeing people happy.”
Gill says the whole experience has given her a new perspective on how quickly misinformation travels online, and how lacking many X users are in media literacy. Indeed, a handful of Disney blogs have pounced on their video, reporting on it with headlines like “Disney’s “Swinger” Community: Adults Find Controversial Community in an Unlikely Place.”
“It’s really opened my eyes to how people get into more dangerous rabbit holes and believing insane things like conspiracy theories,” she says. “If they believe Disney swingers exist, there’s an app for them, and that we’re a couple? I’m like, yeah, it makes sense people get sucked down [rabbit holes].”
While the two pondered making a follow-up video clarifying the video was a parody, they ultimately decided against it. “Those who get it, get it,” says Gibbs. Their latest Instagram post, featuring the two on their knees with light sabers, has the caption: ” If there is another thing we love more than each other and Disney, it’s SWINGING! If we love anything else more than those two things, it’s SWINGING AT DISNEY!”
As for whether the experience of going accidentally viral for being the face of the Disney adult swinging community has taught them anything about that community, or even raised their interest in becoming a part of it? “We’ve gotten a few comments,” says Gibbs. “And you know what? We’re open to it.”
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