Popular Culture Review Vol. 16, No. 1, Spring 2005 | Page 129

Yep, Gaston’s Gay:
Disney and the Beauty of a Beastly Love
Once upon a time in a land not far away a young prince lived in a shining castle.
Although he appeared to have everything his heart desired, the prince was unfulfilled. Then, one
winter’s night a woman came to the castle and offered him “her flower* in return for his agreeing to
marry her, take her in, and protect her from the bitter cold. Uninterested and even somewhat
repulsed by her feminine form, the prince sneered at “the gift" and turned the woman away. But
she warned him not to reject society’s norms. And when he dismissed her again, the woman left,
and in her place appeared all of the townspeople, angry and judgmental. The prince tried to explain
himself, but it was too late, for everyone had seen that there was no lust for women in his heart.
And as punishment they indicted him, labeling him a hideous beast—an abomination to nature—
and agreed to shun him and all who would call him friend. Ashamed of his monstrous urges, the
Beast concealed his desires as he concealed himself in his castle at the margins of society, looking
from afar, longing for a magic cure: to see himself transformed to mirror society’s ideal. Sexual
union with a woman, though, was the only thing so enchanted—it atone had the power to make him
into a real man up until his twenty-first year. If he could learn to love a woman and earn her love in
return by the time he entered adulthood, the curse would be lifted and he could rejoin society. If
not, he would be doomed to be seen as a beast for all time. As the years passed he fell into
despair and tost all hope. For who could ever learn to love a beast?1
***
Little towns full of little people can be notoriously judgmental and
conservative. It is no surprise, really, that Belle—the heroine of Walt Disney’s
Beauty and the Beast—fears suffocating in her poor, provincial, French village.
Like Gaston, her hyper-masculine suitor, she is different. And the last time
someone was different in these parts, the townspeople cursed him, labeled him a
beast, and forced him into exile. They would undoubtedly do the same to the
next neighbor to come out. What options, then, are left for survival?
Disney’s version of Beauty and the Beast is, in the end, a story about
neither. As such, the true focus of the narrative is Gaston, with both Beauty and
the Beast serving as tragic foils, reflections of Gaston in a twisted magic mirror.
Seen anew, the film at heart is a tale of the persecution of gays, the “curse of
heterosexuality,” and the struggle to come to terms with sexual preference in a
world in which “socially-acceptable,” “normal,” and “morally good” are thought
to be interchangeable. Inevitably, the main characters, each at different stages of
awareness and acceptance of their own sexuality, find that throughout it all there
is only one constant—the immoral and violent treatment by society of those
labeled “different.” Though the movie ends in marriage for Beauty and the
Beast, it ends in death for Gaston; the trappings of the classic conceptions of
comedic and tragic narrative conclusions are thus both present. As this is
Gaston’s story, though, the drama is without doubt, and in a strikingly non-
Disney way, a tragedy.