We’ve come a long way since Disney first “exclusively gay moment” when the studio made a big deal about LeFou in their live action Beauty and the Beast— mostly ua a depressingly big old circlenow back to House of Mouse shortening LGBTQ+ stories from his media to appeal again to conservative parents. But now, nearly eight years later, the star at the center of that back-patting furor is speaking out about how shocked he was to see Disney go overboard.
“I certainly didn’t feel like LeFou was the one the queer community was looking forward to,” Josh Gad said of his role as LeFou in the film, writing in his new memoir We believe in Gad (through Entertainment Weekly). “I can’t quite imagine a Pride celebration honoring a ‘cinematic watershed moment’ that involves a quasi-villain Disney sidekick dancing with a man for half a second. I mean, if I were gay, I’d definitely be pissed.”
And yet, that’s essentially what Disney tried to do back in 2017, when it Beauty and the BeastDirector Bill Condon teased the moment—where LeFou dances with a male partner during the film’s climactic celebration sequence—as a big step for Disney’s on-screen LGBTQ+ efforts, describing it (now infamously) as an “exclusively gay moment” in an interview with Paragraph. But according to Gad, the moment was barely discussed on set as an explicitly intentional moment and was never intended to be considered more than a silent nod.
“Since I was a supporting character, I didn’t want to suddenly throw the weight of sexuality on this character who wasn’t driving the movie in any way,” Gad writes. “But the moment (as described to me) seemed harmless enough – a fun blink and you’ll miss it little moment.”
Instead, Condon’s framing of the moment turned it into a media firestorm, with fanatics furious at the thought of two men dancing together (which certainly had never happened before in a Disney film), and the studio itself eagerly seized on the possibility of having a tiny speck of queer representation on big screen. It wouldn’t be the first time in the next few years, either, as Disney has seemingly managed to repeat that it’s doing its “first openly gay character” for multiple news cycles, even as the studio and its major subsidiaries could hardly walk with queer characters and their presence outside these one-time recognitions.
“If the audience had defined it as a sweet exclusively gay moment, I would have been delighted,” concludes Gad, “but as soon as we pointed it out and seemingly congratulated ourselves, we invited hell and fury.”
The more things change, the more they stay the same—although now Disney is inviting hell and fury for own cowardicemore than anything else.
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