Beauty and the Beast controversy latest in history of attacks

Jamie Portman

Was Bambi having it off with Flower the skunk?

And what’s with Pinocchio, with his desire to become a “real” boy? Were Disney animators actually sending out a coded message more than 70 years ago — giving us a closeted young gay yearning to come out?

And might Tinker Bell soon return to the screen — this time in a lesbian relationship with Snow White?

Or is it simply that the silly season is back upon us — especially when it comes to Hollywood and the U.S. right wing’s frenzied response to the revelation that Disney’s new live-action remake of Beauty and the Beast features a character who may actually — gasp — be gay.

The son of legendary evangelist Billy Graham has urged a nation-wide boycott of the new movie. An Alabama drive-in has moved quickly to announce it will not be showing the film. In Vladimir Putin’s homophobic Russia, no one under the age of 16 will be allowed to see it. And the film has been shelved entirely in Muslim Malaysia.

If you Google the movie’s name, screen after screen will pop up  with outraged protests from such diverse bodies as One Million Moms and the neo-Nazi website Storm Trooper. It’s all in response to director Bill Condon’s recent disclosure that this latest incarnation of Beauty and the Beast features the Mouse House’s “first exclusively gay moment.” It’s provided by LeFou, fawning manservant to the swaggering Gaston, a Disney villain for whom LeFou apparently nurses a love that dares not speak its name.

“They’re trying to push the LGBT agenda into the hearts and minds of your children,” he said.

This has been sufficient to rekindle the religious right’s paranoia about the secret liberal agenda it has long believed the film industry to be levelling at unsuspecting children and their parents in the name of family entertainment. And given the toxic conspiracy culture permeating the highest levels of the Trump administration, should we really be surprised that it’s happening now?

Only days after Donald Trump’s newly appointed attorney general signed off on a curtailment of LGBT rights, evangelist Franklin Graham was declaring war on Disney for seeking to “normalize” gay lives. “They’re trying to push the LGBT agenda into the hearts and minds of your children,” he said.

Guardians of traditional family values have long been vigilant, often to a nutty degree, when it comes to family entertainment. We have seen Sesame Street’s Bert and Ernie under suspicion because they live together. Barney the dinosaur has been attacked as a gay tool of Satan. The late Jerry Falwell, an immensely influential evangelist, claimed to have outed Tiny Winky of Teletubbies fame as gay. And is it really appropriate, some ask, for SpongeBob SquarePants to be seen holding hands with his friend Patrick?

But it’s Disney that has been most consistently under attack. And the hostility has intensified in more recent years, partly because its dominant position in family entertainment automatically makes it the primary target, partly because of its support of LGBT rights within its own organization.

Three years ago, Disney’s animated hit Frozen came under fire because of the affection between snow queen Elsa and her feisty younger sister — gay incest, anyone? And did the character of Kristoff have a thing for his reindeer, Sven? A National Catholic Register critic seemed to think so, accusing Frozen of gay themes and tolerating indecent relations between man and beast.

Meanwhile. an article in the Guardian newspaper has Guy Lodge, British film critic for Variety, mischievously suggesting that Disney animation has “a long history of LGBT coding, intended and otherwise” and that some audience members have been assigning gay identities to Disney characters for decades.

“Speculating in this manner can be superficial, stereotype-dependent fun,” says Lodge, as he proceeds to cite Pinocchio’s yearnings and the friendship between Bambi and Flower, as well as reminding us of Timon and Pumbaa in The Lion King, the single status of Baloo the Bear in The Jungle Book and the now-acknowledged fact that the animated Sea Witch in The Little Mermaid was based on real life drag queen Divine.

But should any of this really matter in a year when Moonlight, a movie with patently gay themes, was named best picture at the Oscars? Well, it apparently does to Fox News columnist Todd Starnes, who considers America in peril from an LGBT agenda.

“When it comes to the entertainment industry, nothing is sacred in its quest to indoctrinate American children,” he said on March 1. “So don’t be surprised if the next Disney animated classic documents Tinker Bell’s torrid lesbian affair with Snow White while a gender-questioning Peter Pan crushes on Pinocchio, who just got out of a gender-fluid relationship with one of the seven dwarfs.”

Other commentators, however, may be bold enough to say — bring it on. Three years ago, CNN’s Sally Kohn was suggesting that Frozen didn’t go far enough. “Ain’t it finally time for a kids film in which a princess finally marries a princess?” she tweeted.