Featured Essays Elio The Loneliness of Elio: Growing Up Queer in the American Military Rewrites and studio pressure may have stripped Elio of its personality, but there are still glimpses of truth throughout… By Sarah Welch-Larson | Published on March 11, 2026 Credit: Disney/Pixar Comment 0 Share New Share Credit: Disney/Pixar It’s a miracle any of us can understand each other. What’s meant isn’t always what’s understood, even if it was said with the best of intentions. If there’s no one to receive the message, we might as well be setting our words adrift, like the Voyager probe broadcasting its “hello” into a possibly empty universe. It’s an act of faith, an open hand extended toward the possibility of other beings who might not be friendly, even if they exist. If we’re lucky, we find moments of connection and understanding, even in surprising places. Despite its recent Oscar nomination, Disney/Pixar’s Elio might as well have been a shout into empty space. It set the record for Pixar’s worst opening weekend, and most of the conversation about the film was about the departure of director Adrian Molina after the studio demanded significant rewrites that stripped the film’s protagonist of his queerness and personality (a response to Florida’s Don’t Say Gay laws). The story we received is not the one the original writers intended to tell. It’s garbled, like a scratchy transmission on a ham radio, but I still heard it: You’re not alone. The titular Elio (voiced by Yonas Kibreab) is an eleven-year-old boy being raised by his Tía Olga (voiced by Zoe Saldaña) after his parents died in a car accident. Olga is a major in the Air Force working long hours to track space debris, a far cry from the career as an astronaut that she wanted, but had to give up in order to raise her nephew. Elio, too, feels as though a chunk of his life is missing; he’s a classically lonely child whose longing manifests as attempts to get aliens to come and take him away. Despite their similarities, Elio and Olga are incapable of understanding each other. With a lot of determination and the help of a ham radio, Elio gets the attention of a collective of aliens called the Communiverse, who assume he’s the leader of the planet Earth and enlist him to help them with a diplomatic crisis of their own. They’re afraid of dealing with a warlike race of aliens called Hylurgians who wish to conquer everyone in their path. In a fit of childish optimism and out of a need to be accepted, Elio offers to negotiate with the warlords. The original story is reported to have been personal to Molina, who is gay, Latinx, and a child of someone who served in the military. The version that was released (under the co-directorship of Domee Shi and Madeline Sharafian) is mostly benign, a gently sweet adventure film that is incapable of maintaining a cohesive core beyond the standard “be true to yourself” messaging of most animated children’s fare. It follows the Pixar formula to the letter: a problem grounded in dissatisfaction, driven by its characters and presented using technically brilliant animation, with a climax in which everyone gets what they need instead of what they thought they wanted. It shouldn’t work; it certainly doesn’t hold together the same way Up or Wall-e do. It still knocked me back on my heels: I saw glimpses of myself in the film. Like Elio (and Molina), I grew up on a military base. From a child’s perspective, the experience isn’t much different from growing up in a gated community, albeit one guarded by soldiers. Military children tend to make friends quickly—you have to find your people, or else be left out of the loop until the next time your family has to pick up and move. You have to be used to at least one of your parents being gone for months at a time, sometimes on short notice, sometimes longer than originally planned. Loneliness is a threat, though it’s not always a given. You can either retreat inward or push yourself toward other people. Elio retreats inward, though his gaze is perpetually turned up toward the stars in an obsession that remains his only coherent character trait. (Flashes of humor hint at the more rounded version of the character who was buried under script rewrites, but those flashes feel incongruous alongside the single-minded determination of the boy we spend our time with.) Elio sketches pleas in the sand on the beach for aliens to come and take him away, dismissing the other children on base because he thinks they wouldn’t understand his mission. In return, a handful of them bully him, pushing him away because they perceive he’s different. Children have always done this. It’s a human reaction: stick close to like-minded others and reject those who don’t belong. If everyone implicitly agrees on the same things, so much the easier; no need to talk about it. I grew up during the era of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, a policy in which queer service members were permitted to remain in the military so long as they also remained closeted. I didn’t meet anyone who was openly gay until I left for college. I assumed there were no queer service members, and that all my peers growing up were straight, too. Talking politics was also verboten. It felt as though everyone around me was conservative, especially after 9/11. I remember the tense feeling in the air, the tight-lipped desire to keep OPSEC. It used to be possible to order delivery pizza on base, but after the Twin Towers fell, every gate sprouted concrete serpentine barriers, and anyone over the age of ten had to have their ID checked to get on base. There was a bristling that I didn’t recognize until years later, because it at the time, it was just the waters I swam in. Not the braggadocio of patriotic country songs or the vocally angry posturing of conservative talk radio (though I heard that, too). It was a hardening all the same. Every child on the playground told the same ugly jokes about ending terrorism. I can’t say how any of our parents felt; we didn’t really talk about it. The message I implicitly received was conformity. I didn’t question it. We didn’t understand the weight of the things we said. We took them at an abstracted sort of face value anyway. Every joke, every defensive measure, every decision to tighten security all built up into an almost-insurmountable mountain of acceptance. Some of them were more innocuous than others; some of them truly did save lives. All of them together had the effect of drawing everyone into line. Taking the small changes in stride made accepting the big shifts—like invading Iraq—that much easier to accept. I first felt my conscience twitch a few years later when news broke about CIA black sites and waterboarding and “enhanced interrogation techniques.” It hadn’t occurred to me till then that war could mean atrocity, and that atrocities could be committed by my side. Before that point, it was all abstract, words on a page, action happening elsewhere, even though half the adults I knew would deploy for months on end. The language and the reality didn’t quite match up. When Elio reaches the Communiverse, he offers to negotiate a peace deal with the warlike Hylurgians, an attempt to earn the trust and acceptance of the other aliens that he so desperately craves. Elio’s offer is one of the many incongruities in the film; up till being brought into the Communiverse, he’s turned away from conflict, choosing instead to send one-sided pleas into space. His offer to negotiate doesn’t reflect who we understand him to be. The peace talks fail immediately—eleven-year-olds aren’t great at bargaining with warlords—but they do lead Elio to meet Glordon (voiced by Remy Edgerly), the cheerful son of the Hylurgian emperor. Despite their cultural and physical differences—Elio is human, Glordon is an eyeless alien with a toothy smile who looks like a cross between a tardigrade and a puppy—the two recognize themselves in each other, developing a swift friendship with the easy, innocent trust that only a lonely preteen can give. They become friends in swift montage, careening throughout the Communiverse as if it’s a theme park and as though they’ve been friends forever. The film skips through the getting-to-know-you stage at a speed I remember from my childhood: acceptance of the other children living on base first, fill in the details later. When the two bond, Elio admits to Glordon that he “thought Earth was the problem,” but after spending time in the Communiverse, he wonders, “What if it’s me?” Here the cracks in the film are most obvious: Elio is an inert character, his reasons for wanting to leave Earth in the first place left fuzzy, a cipher that can only be cracked by metatextual knowledge about the movie’s development. Pixar’s executives didn’t want the script asking questions about the character’s sexuality, so the movie doesn’t tell, and as a result, the boy conforms to the shape of every other generic coming-of-age protagonist. Elio is a child questioning his place in the universe without even a satisfying reason prompting him to ask. If it weren’t for Glordon, the film would fall apart entirely. He, too, is drawn in broad strokes: the child of the leader of a warlike race of aliens who live to conquer everyone else, a fuzzy gray character who comes from a people who view the universe only in black and white terms. I used to bristle at the military being described with language I thought was over-simplistic and un-subtle. I lost a friend my freshman year of college when he called the American military “butchers” and refused to take it back. At the same time, I was troubled by yellow ribbons and calls to support the troops from people who didn’t actually know anyone in the military. The language felt like abstract fetishism, a declaration of ideals that didn’t understand the weight of what those words actually stood for, the blood and injury and loss of life. Glordon doesn’t question his circumstances either, at least at first. His character arc mirrors the one that seems to be missing from Elio’s life: something’s wrong, and he can’t understand it until his horizons are widened. He describes his impending coming-of-age ceremony with enthusiasm to Elio, telling him, “I can’t wait to be installed [into my armor]!” (A disproportionate number of American military children end up joining the military themselves.) Glordon is soft, vulnerable; the adults around him live in spiked carapaces of armor that make them perfectly suited for war. He accepts constant conflict as a fact of life: his mother is away “fighting in the Blood Wars,” and his father is emotionally absent. “To expose your soft flesh is to bring great shame on your family for all eternity,” he tells Elio, who to this point has only ever seen Glordon as a gentle being, someone who hasn’t learned how to put on any armor, emotional or literal. The cognitive dissonance goes unremarked-upon, a rare moment of subtlety in the film. Things come to a breaking point. They always do. Half the friends I made in college came out of the closet—some while we were at school, some afterward. We find each other, even when we don’t know what exactly we’re searching for at first, even when we don’t yet have the language to communicate it. Learning to let go of my unquestioning trust in American exceptionalism took longer, a slow erosion of the belief that the system works for anyone willing to conform. It took me too long to accept that we’ve spent too much time at war, and that the wars we’ve fought since World War II have done more harm than good. Even saying that out loud feels like breaking ranks, like entering potentially hostile territory… like coming out. But I can’t be silent any more. We have no business bombing fishing boats and schools. There’s no good reason for us to go to war, and even if there were, the collateral damage reveals an appalling lack of respect for life, and we as a nation will never be able to wash the blood off our hands. I had to learn to be vulnerable before I could learn how to accept that I’ve been wrong about this before. What I want is perfect agreement. What I need is to be honest—a poetic irony, a reversal of wants and needs that fits the Pixar formula. I need a level of vulnerability I admire in others and fear for myself. I’m still learning how to do this. Vulnerability means opening up to the possibility of attack—and to deeper understanding. When I first told my mother I was queer, I suspect it was a confirmation of something she’d somehow always known, even though we’d never have discussed it unless I brought it up myself. Don’t ask, don’t tell. Putting up walls and defenses is the safe thing to do; harden yourself and you can’t get hurt. To expose the soft flesh of your heart is to be vulnerable… and to bring the possibility of understanding. I never intended to come out publicly. But if I can’t be honest about who I am, how can I speak the truth fully? Elio was never intended to be a coming-out story, even before the rewrites. Glordon’s character arc ends in a coming out of sorts anyway. He tells his father what he’s only just realized for himself: “I don’t want to be a war machine.” Edgerly’s delivery is simple, almost embarrassed; a line reading that gets at the truth of Glordon’s vulnerability and fear of rejection. He’s seen what the isolation of an armored carapace means; now that he’s encountered others, he understands that he wants something different for himself. To overcome loneliness, you have to meet other people; to make a change in the way things are, you have to imagine and communicate the possibility for a different world. I don’t want to be a war machine. I want my heart to remain tender. The film handles Glordon’s coming-out clumsily, as though it’s a one-time revelation that leads to perfect understanding and acceptance. Nor does the movie question the role of the Air Force as part of the United States’ military apparatus; it’s just another job, albeit one that gives Elio access to the equipment he needs to make first contact. Elio is a movie for children who need the simple reassurance of happily ever after, who might not be tuned in to the finer points American foreign policy. Those issues are for us to wrestle with after the movie ends and we pick up the threads of the rest of our lives. In reality, coming out is an ongoing process, an eternal practice of vulnerability. It requires honesty, and communication; if we’re lucky, it means a deeper connection, an opportunity for greater understanding, a chance to tear down the walls and start to build something new.[end-mark] The post The Loneliness of <i>Elio</i>: Growing Up Queer in the American Military appeared first on Reactor.