Josh Gad Is Still Mortified About Disney Making Beauty And The Beast’s ‘Exclusively Gay Moment’ A Big Deal

We’ve come a long way from Disney first “exclusively gay moment” when the studio made a big deal about LeFou in his live-action Beauty and the Beast– especially in a depressingly big ol’ circlenow we are back at the Mouse House cut LGBTQ+ plots out of their media to appeal again to conservative parents. But now almost eight years later, the star at the center of that backlash is talking about how shocked he was to see Disney blow it out of proportion.

“I for one certainly didn’t feel like LeFou was exactly what the queer community had been looking forward to,” Josh Gad said of his role as LeFou in the film, writing in his new memoir. In God We Trust (via Entertainment Weekly). “I can’t imagine a Pride celebration honoring the ‘movie moment,’ which involves an almost-bad Disney dude dancing with a guy for half a second. I mean, if I were gay, I’m sure and I was angry.”

However, that is essentially what Disney tried to do in 2017, when Beauty and the BeastDirector Bill Condon teased the moment — where LeFou dances with a male partner during a climactic celebratory sequence in the film — as a major step for Disney’s LGBTQ+ efforts on screen, describing (now infamous) 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 who was in any way driving the film,” Gad writes. “But the moment (as described to me) seemed innocuous enough – a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it fun one.

Instead, Condon’s framing of the moment turned it into a media firestorm, with bigots furious at the thought of two men dancing together (something that certainly has never happened in a Disney film before) and the studio himself to capitalize greedily to be able to have. a small kind of queer representation on the big screen. It would not be the first time nor in the next few years, since Disney seems to have managed to regurgitate that he made his “first openly gay character” for several press cycles, even as the studio and its main subsidiaries. just took steps with queer characters and their presence beyond these throwaway recognitions.

“If the audience had defined it as an exclusively gay sweet moment, I would have enjoyed it,” concludes Gad, “but the second we pointed it out and apparently congratulated ourselves, we invited hell and fury.”

The more things change, the more they stay the same, even if now Disney invites hell and fury their own cowardicemore than anything else.

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