So, obviously the whole thing is one big surreal allegory for the queer experience and homophobia, but it's deliberately ambiguous what any given thing literally means. With that in mind, I'm taking a drunken stab at it:
The first thing: literal, explicit romantic love is used as an allegory for platonic friendships or one-sided unrequited crushes on friends. It's the socially acceptable relationships and a subversion of the trope where queer relationships have to be dealt with euphemistically. A clear example is the relationship between Kureha's mother and Yurika, which is portrayed with unambiguous romantic terms and symbolism but is narratively clearly not an actual romantic relationship despite Yurika wanting it to be, with Reia clearly seeing her as a friend and having an (unseen) straight relationship which is a driving factor in the story's overall conflict.
Second: the bears are an allegory for openly queer people.
Third: literal death is an allegory for the fear of ostracization or for that ostracization itself. When the bears eat someone, that's fear. When the hunters kill a bear, that's ostracization.
Fourth: all the "exclusion" and social acceptability stuff is 100% literal and not allegorical at all, it's the story textually and explicitly portraying homophobia and the pressure to conform, just in a slightly stylized and more honest form.
Fifth: the ending is Kureha coming out and being ostracized for it, but her open act of resistance emboldened others to follow suit.
There's a lot more to unpack but that's all I've got. I'm not qualified to pick it apart in any greater detail than that though I have the strong suspicion that there's a lot of references or wordplay that I'm just not getting.
The court is so weird that I'm not even sure what to make of it. I'd hesitate to say that it's patriarchy or male gaze outright, because it seems to be more an internal conflict: the prosecutor is popularity/social acceptance, the defense attorney is some ideal of liberation or hedonism, and the judge is... something, I'm not sure there, while what it's asking of the defendants is a matter of repression and what they'll sacrifice to be themselves. There's also the aspect that what Kureha is charged with in it is wanting her friend/crush to conform instead of being out, and the court itself evaporates away when the internal conflict is resolved and she decides to come out. The weirdly horny sequences that follow seem more like a red herring than anything, since they're such a nonsequitur to the whole "will you live in the closet, or will you be yourself?" question that it always hinges on. If some of it is about male gaze then that's just one facet of an obnoxiously tangled bit of allegory.
Fuck I just realized it's dialectic, isn't it? You've got the thesis: Life Cool, arguing for social acceptability and propriety; the anti-thesis: Life Beauty, arguing for unbridled liberation and hedonism; and the synthesis: Life Sexy, trying to create some kind of middle ground where maybe if you sacrifice this or that you can get enough to be happy while still being accepted. And then the real answer in the end is "fuck this, actually, I'm going to be open about everything no matter the consequences," which destroys the court and its balance.
With the anime I was laughing at the flashback scene at the lily bed because it was such an on the nose "vehement declarations of love in a scene steeped in queer symbolism, ending with an affirmation of friendship" kind of scene and then it seamlessly transitioned into Yurika being bitter and hurt because Reia had a kid, and she's clearly so pained in that scene while Reia is completely oblivious to it that the only way I can interpret it is we're seeing Yurika's perspective and how she'd interpreted the earlier scene and how that conflicts with what actually happened, how her feelings weren't returned.
What I read about the manga while trying to look up what the characters' names actually were since the version of the anime I found had multi-audio but no subtitles makes it sound like a radically different story overall from the anime.