Popular Culture Review Vol. 16, No. 1, Spring 2005 | Page 137

Yep, Gaston’s Gay
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his body in communion. The Beast is, for a moment, not trying to be an
idealized version of the excessively heterosexual man he thinks he needs to be in
order to win over Belle and break the curse. And Belle takes this moment to put
all the pieces together, to see what is truly going on—to see that the Beast has
been pretending all along. As she comes to the realization, she wonders how she
could have missed it for so long: “And so I’m sure! I wonder why I didn’t see it
there before.” The hints were dropped, the show tunes were sung, the truth—and
the Beast—were out there from the start. Ducking behind a tree to collect her
thoughts and compose herself, Belle is struck by the irony of it all. Will she, as a
lesbian, marry a gay man? With a new look of determination, she sings how it is
“new and a bit alarming—who’d have ever thought that this could be?” (The
castle staff agrees: “It’s so peculiar!”) But Belle knows that this is the answer to
all of her problems: “True . . . he’s no Prince Charming, but there’s something in
him that I simply didn’t see.” The Beast is gay, and thus Belle need not sacrifice
as much as she had thought. She can have her prince without having to have him
too. And in the end, the curse will be broken, the scheming Beauty will get what
she wants without resorting to sleeping with a man, and die Beast will succeed
in his desired transformation, losing his fur and gaining a beard in the process.
Lefou I’m Afraid I’ve Been Thinking
But there are complications. There is Gaston. And if he has his way,
there will be no broken curse and no false union.
The character of Gaston is a new addition to the story of Beauty and the
Beast—a Disney addition. We should, then, pay special attention to his presence
in the film. No minor character, this is Gaston’s story at heart. And as such, it is
a tragic recounting of a man forced deep into the closet, an intolerant society
that keeps him there, and a final misguided burst of repressed emotion exploding
scattershot in the end, dooming the hero to wrong action and death.
Yes, Gaston is the hero—or at least on the way toward being the hero.
And for the narrative to fall together he must be seen as such, though he acts
without courage at the final moment of choice and crisis. But before
condemning Gaston we need to understand him, for he has been generally
misunderstood, taken to be the epitome of selfishness and egotism rather than
oppression and despair.8
Like the Beast, Gaston is gay. Unlike the Beast, Gaston has seen how
society deals with those who are labeled as such; consequently, he is determined
to avoid the cursed fate. To ensure he will not be marginalized and
dehumanized, Gaston adopts an outward appearance of extreme hetero-
masculinity, hence his macho behavior and souped up XY physique. Early test
sketches by the animators had Gaston drawn with a powdery white wig and
somewhat openly gay affectations—a far cry from the character that made it to
the screen. Indeed, supervising Gaston animator “Andreas Deja [initially] drew a
Gaston who was far more foppish than he later became,’ but this would not do