Beauty and the Beast but they’re lesbians
And the Beast is still this 8 foot tall hulking monster with horns and massive claws and fangs and when she turns back into human she’s still buff as shit and her girlfriend is small and they open a library together also the candle and the clock are gay
This is what people mean when they talk about the “gay agenda” if you want a story about gay people make your own don’t steal someone elses idea
Alright, listen up you sorry excuse for a burnt crepe
The animated version of Beauty and the Beast is dedicated “To our friend Howard, who gave a mermaid her voice and a beast his soul, we will be forever grateful.”
Why?
Because the lyricist for the movie was Howard Ashman, a gay man who died of AIDS, only a few months before the release of the movie.
The version of the story you love has always had queerness in it.
It’s a story written by a gay man dying of AIDS, of someone who was cursed, whose time was running out and their death was coming, and the world wanted to hasten it along instead of helping, instead of loving him and understanding that he was never truly a monster.
It’s never belonged to you, not all the way. The soul of the Beast is queer.
“Oh, but the original version of the fairy-tale”
Fine, fuck you.
Gay version of the Little Mermaid, then.
You know, the one which was written by Hans Christian Andersen, a gay man who watched the love of his life marry a woman.
The original version story ends in tragedy, but with the idea that while the mermaid could not be with the man she loved, she does eventually gain a soul and find peace, when he was a gay man in a time when that felt denied to him.
Disney changed the ending of the Little Mermaid, the lyrics of which were also written by Howard Ashman, and gave her a true happy ending.
Now, let’s honour the inherent queerness of the story and acknowledge that we are in a time when gay people can be happy, they can be with the ones who we love, and make that the story.
Damn right that’s part of gay agenda. Gays in space. Gay mermaids. Gay Beasts. Gays goddamn everywhere there’s a good story, because it’s about damn time.
Watch as we take over every story that you thought belonged to you and make them delightfully, blatantly, queer, just to fuck with you, specifically.
Happily ever after.
Also:
Fairy tales and Shakespeare cannot be stolen. (An argument can be made, given the way Shakespeare magpied his way through folklore, given the way his narratives have slithered into Western consciousness, that at this point, they’re the same thing.) They are works transformed by the telling.
Would you tell Disney they stole all their stories? How about Robin McKinley? Stephen Sondheim? Me? All the people who work in fairy tales, who use them as building blocks, as common ground to set a stage, we’re not stealing, we’re continuing a grand and human tradition.
This isn’t “the gay agenda.” If anything, this is “the straight agenda.” Laying claim to a thing that human nature itself says has to change and shift and flux and grow to survive, and saying “oh, no, if you change this one thing, this load-bearing thing, the story is destroyed.”
Fuck that. Ain’t nobody strong enough to kill these stories.
The straight agenda: aggressively make everything straight and then accuse everyone else of being the ones with an agenda
