Beauty and the Beast and Power Rangers both have had headlines talking about
how they have the first openly gay Disney character and superhero that has ever existed.
Hmm.
Amazing if true.
You brought me down the rabbit hole on this that we start with headline: "Openly gay character ." Read the article, and it's questioning.
And then see the movie, and it's nothing.
So LeFou the character...
[long pause]
Is played....
V-very gayly.
And that's the—that's the problematic movie stereotype, like this is if someone had a gun to your head
and it was the '90s, and they were like, "Act gay."
You would know what that meant in the vocabulary of movies.
Not how—
He's really effeminate. He speaks French.
Very, very effeminate—
He's the only one to speak French, even though the movie takes place in France.
It just like stops short of the finger snap.
Yes.
Just barely.
Yeah. Absolutely.
And at the end of the movie
He holds a man in a dance, and they look at each other like,
"There might be something here
that wasn't there before."
And that's it. [laughter]
At that point, I just—I was like briefly—my brain checked, "Oh yeah, he just danced with a guy."
That could either be a development in his character, or just another joke about how he's gay.
Because earlier in the movie, Gaston says to him, "How come a woman hasn't snatched you up?"
And he's like, "I don't know. They say I'm clingy."
He says, "I'm told I'm clingy."
He doesn't say, "Oh, Gaston, it would be a boy who snatches me up because, as you know I'm openly gay."
"Because we're—we're friends, and there's nothing wrong with it."
"And you don't have a problem with—"
"Gaston, you forget that I'm the first openly gay Disney character."
Right. Yeah.
"There was a lot—there was a lot of press about this."
But also, the dance that lasted like two seconds—
Yeah
was an accident.
They didn't give him any agency of just like, "Hey, maybe I'll dance with another man because I like men."
It was like, "Oh! Well, I'll just, I guess, go along with this because secretly, I like it."
That's not "openly" gay.
There's another problem with it: The guy that he ends up dancing with, he's one of the villagers attacking the castle.
And a wardrobe attacks three men by dressing them all up as as women
And two of them are like, "BWAAA!" and they run away.
And this guy was like
"Nice job."
Because as we all know—
Because the movie conflates men who like to dress up as women with gay men.
Those are the same things in Disney's logic. [chuckling]
Or that you can become gay by a magic wardrobe dressing you—
As a woman.
—which might...
might be true.
[mumbles] magic thing
I don't...
I don't know how magic works.
The other example, obviously, is Power Rangers, which did the exact same thing that Beauty and the Beast did,
which is the headline is: "Power Rangers openly gay character."
But you go and you read it, and it's a producer in this case, I think, saying,
"Yeah, one of the characters, Trini, is questioning. She hasn't quite figured things out yet."
Which is an accurate description.
In Power Rangers, I thought, it was a pretty good handling of the subject.
They're like, "All the Power Rangers are having difficulty with their parents, and Trini's issue partly is that she is—"
In her words, "figuring herself out," Or doesn't know what's going on with her
and that's causing friction between her and her parents.
Decidedly not an openly gay moment.
No.
An important thing to have in a movie that is aimed at teenagers, many of them probably exactly like her,
is like, "I don't know what I want right now, and I'm—and my parents aren't helping me figure that out."
That speaks to a lot of people, and you can put that in your headline about your progressive Power Rangers movie.
But you can't say, "Here is this openly gay character" when they literally don't know what their situation is.
Right. You can't be openly gay if you don't know that you're gay.
They don't have an openly gay character. They do have an openly autistic character
that is a well-executed part of his character, and it's like a positive portrayal of someone on the spectrum.
It's—yeah—he's certainly the heart of the film, as well. And not in a way that—
I liked a lot of the spectrum stuff they did with Abed on Community,
but he was sort of evolved into like a messianic figure on that show.
Like, "This character is different, and they're like perfect because of it."
Which is how diversity used to be handled in a lot of old things, and this guy was the heart of the film
but not like, "He's autistic! And we want to prove how normal it is by making him like the perfect smartest, sweetest guy that everyone loves."
He was just a good, likable character who happened to be autistic.
There's a part in the movie where all the characters are going around.
They're discussing their secrets to get to know one another because they could become Power Rangers
and Billy, his thing is not that he's autistic. It's dealing with his dead father
and not know if he's dealing with it correctly.
I think that, like, in general, Hollywood has a problem with balancing that between like,
making it, like, "This is the gay character," or "this is the autistic character"
versus, like, having it just completely incidental, like:
Oh, we say it once, and it's never a part of their personality at all again.
Yeah. I feel like the people doing it wrong aren't necessarily the filmmakers.
Well, in Beauty and the Beast, yeah, they didn't do that well.
But like for everything else, it's not like the people making the movies screwed up.
Hollywood's weird—
Like...
"LOOK AT HOW OK WE ARE WITH OPENLY GAY PEOPLE"
"WE'RE PUTTING THEM IN EVERYTHING!"
It's like any reference to homosexuality is like, "WE DID IT THERE TOO!"
Yeah.
It's like, "No. Calm down."
[laughter]
To go back to the Power Rangers, I do feel like the autistic character was more unique and more cool.
That's newsworthy.
And more newsworthy than Trini having—
—being a teenager who's questioning her sexual identity like so many teenagers.
You know what movie I think handles homosexuality really well, and it might surprise you:
Moonlight.
Hmm.
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