Beauty and the Beast to Feature First Gay Disney Character

Disney revealed that their live-action Beauty and the Beast remake will include an explicitly gay character. But we wouldn’t celebrate just yet.

For most of its history, Disney captured young imaginations with tales of princesses being saved from hardship by handsome, altruistic princes. In recent years, the company has made an attempt to modernize its gender politics. Movies like Brave, Frozen, and Moana put romance on the back burner, their heroines less interested in true love than family and empowerment. Snow White and the Huntsman turned its titular beauty into a sword-wielding warrior, and Maleficent re-imagined Sleeping Beauty from the villain’s point of view.

Disney is far from perfect, however. As a matter of fact, in some ways, it remains as strait-laced as ever. For one, it has yet to feature an openly LGBTQ character, let alone a same-sex romance (no, those throwaway moments in Frozen and Finding Dory don’t count).

Beauty and the Beast aims to change that. Director Bill Condon revealed in a March 1 interview with Attitude that his remake of the beloved 1991 animated film will include Disney’s first-ever explicitly gay character – LeFou, played by Josh Gad.

LeFou is the sidekick of Luke Evans’s Gaston, the narcissistic hunter obsessed with wooing our heroine Belle (Emma Watson). In the original movie, he served mostly as comic relief, but here, he will have a subplot of his own:

"“LeFou is somebody who on one day wants to be Gaston and on another day wants to kiss Gaston,” reveals Condon. “He’s confused about what he wants. It’s somebody who’s just realising that he has these feelings… And that’s what has its payoff at the end, which I don’t want to give away. But it is a nice, exclusively gay moment in a Disney movie.”"

There’s no doubt that Condon has good intentions here. The filmmaker is openly gay and has explored queer sexuality in his work before, with Gods and Monsters and Kinsey. But if Disney expects applause for this move, they’re going to be disappointed.

Representation in and of itself is insufficient; it has to be positive. That doesn’t mean all LGBTQ characters must be saints, though Hollywood has a long, troubling history of linking queerness to villainy. More importantly, LGBTQ characters should be depicted as complex human beings, not stereotypes or jokes. Assuming Beauty and the Beast adheres to its animated counterpart, LeFou is not only a villain but a caricature, a bumbling, simpering dunce whose name literally translates to “the fool”. He’s about as revolutionary as Mr. Smithers.

We may be desperate for representation, but we’re not that desperate. Try harder, Disney.

Beauty and the Beast opens nationwide on March 17.