Snoop Dogg is responding to the backlash he’s received after he criticized the LGBTQ representation in Disney‘s 2022 animated movie Lightyear.
The Grammy-winning rapper and hip-hop icon recently wrote in the comments of a Hollywood Unlocked Instagram post, which featured Ts Madison calling him out, “I was just caught off guard and had no answer for my grandsons.”
“All my gay friends [know] what’s up, they been calling me with love. My bad for not knowing the answers for a 6-yr-old. Teach me how to learn. I’m not perfect,” Snoop added.
Last week, the “Gin and Juice” rapper shared on the It’s Giving Podcast that he was taken by surprise when he took his grandchildren to see Pixar’s Toy Story spinoff, as it featured a montage of two women sharing a kiss and raising a child together. He said this led to a whole bunch of questions from his grandchildren about same-sex couples that he said, “I don’t have an answer for.”
“They’re like, ‘She had a baby — with another woman,’” Snoop recalled on the podcast, which appeared to remove his comments on the matter from the YouTube episode. “Well, my grandson, in the middle of the movie is like, ‘Papa Snoop? How she have a baby with a woman? She’s a woman!’”
The “Drop It Like It’s Hot” artist remembered thinking at the time, “Oh shit, I didn’t come in for this shit. I just came to watch the goddamn movie.” Snoop said he tried telling his grandson, “Hey man, just watch the movie,” but that he just kept firing off questions: “‘They just said, she and she had a baby — they’re both women. How does she have a baby?’”
“It fucked me up,” Snoop added. “I’m like, scared to go to the movies now. Y’all throwing me in the middle of shit that I don’t have an answer for. It threw me for a loop. I’m like, ‘What part of the movie was this?’ These are kids. We have to show that at this age? They’re going to ask questions. I don’t have the answer.”
Lightyear, the origin story of the human Space Ranger Buzz Lightyear, included an LGBTQ relationship between Buzz’s best friend and commander, Alisha Hawthorne (voiced by Uzo Aduba), and her wife, Kiko, with glimpses of their life as a couple and an onscreen kiss.
Following Snoop’s critique of the animated pic, screenwriter Lauren Gunderson defended her decision to include the queer couple in the film.
“I was one of a few writers they had on it over the years, which is very common for screenwriting of course. I had very little to do with the final script,” she wrote on Instagram. “But I was proud to see a happy queer couple (even for a few seconds) onscreen. I know they got a lot of shit for this inclusion, but stuff like this matters because beautiful love like this exists.”
Gunderson continued, “It’s *not* fiction. What IS fiction is Zurg and lightspeed space travel and murderous aliens and a talking robot cat (long live Sox).”