Alabama Theater Cancels ‘Beauty and the Beast’ Screenings Due to Gay Character
The Henagar Drive-In Theatre in DeKalb County has canceled its screenings of “Beauty and the Beast” because the film will feature Disney’s first openly gay character.
Director Bill Condon recently told Attitude magazine that Josh Gad‘s LeFou — villain Gaston’s (Luke Evans) eccentric sidekick — will be Disney‘s first-ever LGBTQ character — a way of honoring the original 1991 animated film’s late lyricist Howard Ashman.
“Josh Gad, incidentally, plays Gaston’s worshipful stooge LeFou as maximally silly and fawning, but I must have missed the memo where that spells ‘gay,'” Variety chief film critic Owen Gleiberman wrote in his review.
The announcement follows the Alabama theater’s change in ownership. “When companies continually force their views on us, we need to take a stand. We all make choices and I am making mine,” a statement on the northeast Alabama theater’s Facebook page read. “If we cannot take our 11-year-old granddaughter and 8-year-old grandson to see a movie, we have no business watching it. If I can’t sit through a movie with God or Jesus sitting by me, then we have no business showing it.”
It doesn't seem as though LeFou actually does anything overtly homosexual in the movie, so apparently the very existence of a gay character in a Disney film is a heinous affront.