Alternate Way of Reading Disney's _Beauty and the Beast_

A couple of days ago I came across this alternate way of reading Beauty and the Beast  -- and I thought it was really cool. It's a quasi-Queer Reading of the film -- influenced by that fact that the composer Howard Ashman was a gay man -- and proposes that the film rejects bullying and lauds the bullied and celebrates difference.

Personally, I loved the movie as a kid -- namely because Belle was a brunette bookworm -- but revisiting it as I've gotten older, I've found it increasingly problematic. A lot of the critical arguments  which read the relationship between Belle and Beast as an abusive one are really convincing -- particularly the idea that if you simply love a man enough, he'll change for you. It was nice to read a positive interpretation of the film.