The upcoming live-action remake of Beauty and the Beast will feature Disney’s first gay character, according to the film’s director.

Speaking to Attitude Magazine, Bill Condon has said that he and the movie’s writers and producers have developed the admiration felt by sidekick LeFou (played by actor Josh Gad) for Gaston, one of the film’s male leads. LeFou’s gradual reconciliation with his sexuality acts, says Condon, as a way of increasing LGBT visibility on screen.

“It’s somebody who’s just realising that he has these feelings,” he said. “And Josh makes something really subtle and delicious out of it. And that’s what has its pay-off at the end, which I don’t want to give away. But it is a nice, exclusively gay moment in a Disney movie.”

On Wednesday, Gad tweeted that he was “beyond proud” to be playing such a groundbreaking role, which is a tribute to the 1991 original’s lyricist Howard Ashman, who died before the film opened.

Condon has explained that Ashman saw the Beast’s circumstances as a “metaphor for Aids. He was cursed, and this curse had brought sorrow on all those people who loved him, and maybe there was a chance for a miracle and a way for the curse to be lifted. It was a very, very concrete thing that he was doing.”

Whether the affection between LeFou and Gaston is consummated has not been revealed. Gaston is the Beast’s rival suitor for Belle, the young girl played by Emma Watson. The Beast is played by Downton Abbey’s Dan Stevens; Gaston by The Girl on the Train’s Luke Evans.

The film, which Watson has said she would have been unwilling to sign on for had it not been a feminist reinvention of the fairytale, is released next week. Evans is one of the few openly gay leading actors; Condon – whose previous credits include Dreamgirls, The Fifth Estate and the final two Twilight movies – is also gay.

The trailer for Beauty and the Beast, which is one of the most eagerly anticipated films of the year, was watched more than 130m times in its first 24 hours when it was released last year. Other cast members include Ewan McGregor, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Kevin Kline and Stanley Tucci.

Attitude magazine editor Matt Cain described the scene promised by Condon as “a long time coming, but a watershed moment for Disney … It will hopefully help to change attitudes and bring about real social progress.”

Many had hoped that Finding Dory, the studio’s 2016 sequel to lost-fish hit Finding Nemo, would feature a same sex couple after two women appeared to be romantically involved in the trailer. However, the film failed to bear this out.

Eagle-eyed viewers noticed that two male antelopes in last year’s Zootopia – which won the best animation Oscar at the 2017 awards – shared a double-barrelled surname, but their exact relationship was never made explicit.

Disney’s most profitable ever movie, Frozen (2013), attracted the ire of some in the US for what some felt to be an unusually close friendship between strapping hero Kristoff and his reindeer Sven, who is officially described as his “pet, best friend and business partner”. Sauna owner Oaken was also suspected to be gay by some viewers.

Theorising about Frozen, talkshow host Kevin Swanson said satan had infiltrated the studio in the mid-1980s with the intention of indoctrinating preschoolers in homosexuality and bestiality.