We’ve come a long way since Disney’s first “exclusively gay moment” when the studio made a big to-do about LeFou in its live-action Beauty and the Beast—mostly in a depressingly big ol’ circle, now we’re back to the House of Mouse cutting LGBTQ+ storylines out of its media to appeal to conservative parents again. But now nearly eight years later, the star at the center of that back-patting furor is speaking out on just how shocked he was to see Disney blow it out of proportion.
“I for one certainly didn’t exactly feel like LeFou was who the queer community had been wistfully waiting for,” Josh Gad said of his role as LeFou in the film, writing in his new memoir In Gad We Trust (via Entertainment Weekly). “I can’t quite imagine a Pride celebration in honor of the ‘cinematic watershed moment’ involving a quasi-villainous Disney sidekick dancing with a man for half a second. I mean, if I were gay, I’m sure I’d be pissed.”
And yet, that’s essentially what Disney tried to do back in 2017, when Beauty and the Beast‘s director Bill Condon teased the moment—where LeFou dances with a male partner during a climactic celebratory sequence in the film—into a major step for Disney’s on-screen LGBTQ+ efforts, describing it (now infamously) as an “exclusively gay moment” in an interview with Attitude. But according to Gad, the moment had barely been discussed on-set as an explicitly deliberate moment, and was never intended to be seen as more than a quiet nod.
“Because I was a side character, I didn’t want to suddenly throw the weight of sexuality on this character that in no way was driving the film,” Gad writes. “But the moment (as described to me) seemed harmless enough—a fun blink-and-you’ll-miss-it little beat.”
Instead, Condon’s framing of the moment turned it into a media firestorm, with bigots furious at the thought of two men dancing together (a thing that’s certainly never happened in a Disney movie before) and the studio itself to eagerly capitalize on being able to have a tiny speck of queer representation on the big screen. It wouldn’t be the first time either over the next few years, as Disney seemingly managed to regurgitate that it was doing its “first openly gay character” for multiple press cycles, even as the studio and its major subsidiaries barely took steps with queer characters and their presence beyond these throwaway acknowledgements.
“Had the audience defined it as a sweet exclusively gay moment, I would have been delighted,” Gad concludes, “but the second we pointed it out and seemingly congratulated ourselves, we had invited hell and fury.”
The more things change, the more they stay the same—although now Disney is inviting the hell and fury for its own cowardice, more than anything else.
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