making Straightening Up the House
Jun. 30th, 2018 12:18 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
eruthrosI often write up some notes after I make a vid, partly as a reminder to me and partly because I enjoy reading other people's process notes. But this one got … kind of excessive? So I subdivided it a bit, but there is still a lot here.
First, the link: this is about straightening up the house, a vid about queer erasure when Marvel comics are translated to Marvel films.
Process notes:
This started as a multi-canon vid idea many years ago – I've been screencapping Marvel comics posts for years, but also posts about Dumbledore and Constantine and Wonder Woman. For a while I thought it would largely be about the translation of comics to live-action media (and, like, characters like Dumbledore might be a side note, or characters being straightened in comics might be a part of it). This was at the "vague idea for a vid" stage, where I hadn't planned out anything, and part of my reasoning was that the first thing I'd mention to people when I told them about this vid idea was Constantine, who didn't get to be bi on tv or in films. I was so incredibly mad about all the "not important to his character" bullshit around the Constantine tv show.
But here's the thing: DC films are still not doing queer characters. I still wish we could have Harley/Ivy in a movie. But there aren't nearly as many recent DC films as there are Marvel films; DC for me lives in tv shows. And I'm watching Legends of Tomorrow right now and Constantine's on it and they're making a real effort to make it clear that he and Sara are bi. Sara has a girlfriend and before that she got to make out with various people throughout time. Black Lightning exists and Anissa is amazing. I can count queer main characters on so many DC shows, queer superheroes, queer badasses with powers and without powers. And I wish Constantine had been bi on his own tv show. And I wish everyone who talked about the show hadn't been a jerk about it, hadn't pretended that no true fans would care about it. DC still has a long way to go. But when DC got a do-over, they fixed it.
And here's the other thing: I was a Marvel kid. I read some Justice League, but X-Men comics were really where I grew up. I read the X-Men metaphors for difference sitting in bookstores and libraries and comics shops and borrowing comics from my friends. When I started actually trying to structure the vid, rather than just screencapping things that made me mad, I realized that I could make a list off the top of my head of so many Marvel comics characters who were queer, many of whom were really important to me, and many of whom I had sought out specifically for their queerness. My off the top of my head list included all these characters from comics I didn't read – I didn't read Guardians of the Galaxy or other cosmic Marvel but I could tell you about Phyla-Vell. I didn't like Alpha Flight but I could tell you about Northstar. Because Marvel was where I went for queer superhero comics and queer-metaphor superhero comics, both as a kid and as an adult. And there are so very many Marvel films: the MCU, the X-Men franchise, the millions of hours of Wolverine films that seem to exist, the Blade films that made the MCU possible. And all of these characters who were so important to me hadn't existed for even a flash of a second in any of those films.
(This is, it turns out, a bit of a lie, or well really it's one of those hey-but-in-the-director's-commentary lies, because it turns out that Anole is in X3. I found out when I was doing research for this vid. He's the unnamed lizard-like character who sticks to the bottom of the water tower and then is shot with the mutant cure and falls out of frame. He's credited as Lizard Man. How could I have missed him, that fan-favorite character depowered without having any lines! But he's there, or at least Brett Ratner swears that he's there in a post-film retcon. Phat's there, too: he walks into a meeting and sits down between two other characters. Meanwhile Mystique's entire backstory is removed so that she can be young and impressionable when she meets Magneto. Representation!)
When I was first structuring the vid, I wanted to think about Marvel's work generally – because I didn't want to imply that comics were perfect. But I couldn't simultaneously make an argument about erasure in comics and erasure in films in four minutes, so I ended up leaving out all of the "and also these comics editors are terrible" even though I'd screencapped a bunch of it. Like, a lot of the older characters in the end section of the vid had to be slipped past Jim Shooter's no-homosexuals-in-Marvel-comics policy when he was Editor in Chief, and that is also a problem, but it's not a problem I could make a coherent argument about. Andthingswithwings reassured me that the vid didn't read as saying the comics were perfect. But wow I was deeply annoyed to have to pay for Marvel Unlimited to make a vid about how these characters who comics creators already had to fight for were left out of Marvel's money-making films.
I ended up deciding not to do the Marvel tv shows for similar reasons, because they don't have anywhere near the distribution of the films, and because I knew I couldn't make this vid if I was trying to keep up with Agents of SHIELD at the same time; it was difficult enough to try to vid a critique about representation when a Marvel film comes out every two minutes and every Marvel film has nine million hours of interviews. (There are some queer characters on Marvel tv shows, though: Jeri Hogarth, Nico and Karolina, Joey Gutierrez, and some minor background characters. Nico and Karolina existing on Runaways is part of why I didn't include much Runaways in the vid.)
One of the things I was really worried about was making arguments about erasure that I could support, and only using characters and arguments in the main section that films could have actually included: like, Iceman is now gay, but he wasn't gay in comics in 2000, and so X2 didn't leave out his gayness. (Though he also hasn't been in and isn't slated to be in an X-Men film since he came out in comics.) So I checked the dates carefully on everything that I paired with film shots, to make sure I was giving the films enough time to include the comics canon; like, I know Phyla-Vell and Moondragon were in the GotG volume that the films were based on, the X-Men films had like thirty years of prep time if they'd wanted to include Mystique and Destiny, and Captain America could have included Arnie any time since 1984, but several other characters are much more recent. I wouldn't have included Loki (who shapeshifted but wasn't explicitly genderfluid until post-Thor 1) if Marvel hadn't reportedly shut down Al Ewing talking about comics Loki during MCU marketing. And I thought there was no way that Black Panther could incorporate Ayo and Aneka and was assuming that the most recent Black Panther and World of Wakanda comics had been released too late for the film, until I saw the early set-tour Vanity Fair article about Ayo's flirtation with Okoye. I guess I was overestimating the lead time necessary? But it meant that I am pretty confident that Marvel films could have included all of my main comparison-to-film characters, and that they chose not to. Or, in the case of some writers and directors, they never even knew they existed.
There are a couple of things I have mixed feelings about in this vid; one is having to use Thor Ragnarok and Black Panther. It's hard to vid absence, and so I ended up using two of my favorite MCU films, because both almost included queer characters and then removed them in the final edit. It is true that this happened and that it's fair to critique these films for it, but it's also true that both of these films are more interesting and much more inclusive than The Avengers or its sequels. But The Avengers and sequels didn't include a single character who was queer in comics and not queer in the films. And in all honesty Avengers comics are pretty straight, too – I read a million comics for this vid and, like, three of them were issues of The Avengers - so it's not even like they left out a major queer character. And I needed comparison or textual evidence in order to vid absence. (It's possible that the relative straightness of Avengers comics is part of what made it a more desirable film property to found the MCU on than e.g. GotG. But I couldn't make that argument visually either.) It's not like Thor Ragnarok or Black Panther didn't cut these scenes, but also, like, they filmed them in the first place – and the tentpole films of the MCU never bothered. On the one hand it hurts to get close to even a tiny bit of representation and then have it left on the cutting room floor, but on the other hand The Avengers never gave a single shit about this. But I could only critique the Avengers implicitly by critiquing the whole MCU, while I had to name check Black Panther and Thor Ragnarok specifically. So, mixed feelings, and I hope it did come off as "a problem with Marvel films generally" and not "a problem with only these films."
The other thing I feel bad about is using Florence Kasumba's interview to talk about Ayo and Aneka. Florence Kasumba did say this, and that sucks, but there's a reason her interview is the one I could use – other people's PR teams and Marvel's interview rules meant I couldn't have a response to this question from anyone who actually had power over whether this scene was removed. I don't have a Ryan Coogler response to this question. I don't have a Kevin Feige response to this question. They haven't had to justify cutting a brief flirtation. They have probably never even been asked the question in an official interview – if they ever were, I couldn't find it. The only person who has had to answer this question is an actor who isn't part of the main cast and who didn't go on the press tour with them. And one of the film's co-writers, Joe Robert Cole, also answered this question, and the response is terrible, but it's terrible in that coached-response-to-a-difficult-question way where the answer rambles for so long that a single sentence doesn't have any content and so it couldn't be quoted.
Marvel's PR machine is pretty amazing - and not just at keeping certain topics out of interviews. The vast majority of outlets that quoted Kevin Feige's "maybe you can have a gay character in ten years" response to a question in an interview quoted it approvingly. Like, "Kevin Feige says a gay character is definitely coming! Woohoo!" Even though it was a "maybe" with no definitive date. I found, like, three comics sites that felt the way I did about it. Which is: "fuck this shit! As if you're going to pretend that queerness is a recent invention and then you want props for vague promises." Get back to me when you can name ten pre-2000 queer characters in your own comics, asshole.
The end section of this vid isn't a complete record of queer characters in Marvel comics – this is due to me not having time to read all the comics I had access to, to the patchy availability of old comics, to characters I didn't know to look for, and to the amount of song I had to work with and the rhythm of it. There's also some stuff in here that is probably listed with the wrong dates - sometimes it's hard to figure out exactly when a character was first queer in comics, especially since I was putting these in order myself because most of these characters aren't on the big timelines - and some where I mixed various comics panels to get enough visuals, so a single character image in the vid actually reflects several issues. A lot of the new to me 80s to early-90s footage in this vid comes from histories of lgbt comics and from Gay League; the more recent stuff comes from the Marvel wikia. There's an unfortunate gap in the middle that unfortunately also coincides with when I stopped reading comics; I attempted to bridge it using references, but I definitely still missed many characters - unfortunately any wiki is going to miss people especially in less popular comics, and Gay League stopped doing the same kind of detailed write-ups once there started to be more queer comics characters. There are also a lot of butterfly-meme "is this queer?" characters in Marvel comics, most of whom I left out since I had plenty of footage.
The end section of the vid also contains a lot of characters who aren't actually queer in the main 616 Marvel universe: Mary Jane Watson and Beast and Bucky and Sunfire (Exiles), James Howlett and Hercules (X-Treme X-Men), Angel (1602), Colossus (Ultimates), Felicia Hardy (Spider-Girl time travel and/or alternate universe), and Leah and Magik (Siege). This is a small selection – there are many more Exiles characters who could have been included here. Marvel reportedly now has a policy of not making other-universe versions of characters queer unless they are queer or will be queer in 616; this ended a period of everyone who wrote Exiles or other universe-hopping comics casually queering some major character all "hey I can do this because it's ALTERNATE UNIVERSE Mary Jane Watson." I would not be surprised if this happened after fans got mad at Axel Alonso for this response to an interview about Hercules: "Hercules and James Howlett's relationship in 'X-Treme X-Men' took place in a unique alternate universe, similar to how Colossus was gay in the Ultimate Universe, but is straight in 616. Same goes for Hercules here." (This is one of the things I wanted to include about straightening up the comics. Fuck you Axel Alonso.)
I didn't include Paradox, Razor, and Ice in the above paragraph – they are all from Earth 80324 (Marvel Preview/Bizarre Adventures) and don't have 616 equivalents at all. Though later Paradox ends up working with Wolverine in 616 due to reasons.
I wanted to get a lot more into the vid than I did, but I was totally overestimating how much still footage and text you can fit into a line of the song – like, I had all these lofty goals to fit in some thematic scenes to the lyrics, but I had to scrap all of them. So, for example, I was picking out characters for "Quentin Crisp and Rita Mae" and thinking that I'd use the end of every verse or the choruses for a direct comparison to films and the beginning of every verse for some fun characters and comics moments I couldn't draw those direct comparisons for. But I had that plan when I thought I could do film/still comparisons that paired a film scene and the matching stills from comics – like, here's the power walk from GotG on the bottom of the screen and a shot of the comics team on the top, and here's Thor leaping at Angela on the left and Thor leaping at Hela on the right, and here's Mystique running up the stairs to check on Rogue on the left and Rogue's anonymous het parent from the film checking on her on the right – places where the films and the comics are so closely paralleled but one is missing the queer characters. Pairing them would have made it super clear when I was doing which comparisons. But when I tried this in practice, my eye just could not look at both things at once; no matter how much motion I added to the still I always looked at the film and didn't even notice that the comics panel existed. And since that didn't work, I had to make those comparisons take longer, and do the comics panels and film shots sequentially, which also that meant that the division between "fun characters I'm just using stills of because they match the lyrics" and "characters I'm drawing this direct comparison for" was invisible. So I restructured this the way it is now, with all the direct comparisons first (regardless of lyrics) and then a mix of footage as the song slowed down. It definitely made a stronger argument, but it's also why I'm sad about a whole bunch of footage I clipped that didn't make it into the vid. (thingswithwings was like "are you telling me you read like a hundred issues of Alpha Flight for three panels?" And I was like "yes and I'm bummed about it but also let me tell you about this super interesting arc where, okay, for REASONS Northstar is in Saskatchewan and ...." I spent a long time where every day I'd be like "so let me tell you about this interesting thing I read from 1994 that won't go in the vid!")
The song is by Romanovsky and Phillips, a gay duo who released several albums throughout the 80s and 90s. I came across it completely by accident – I had heard some Romanovsky and Phillips songs, but not this one, and I hadn't thought of them in years. But I do this thing at work when I'm bored where I go through lists of queer musicians and try to listen to them on Spotify, and I was completely astonished to find this amazingly perfect song for this anger I already had that I had thought was unviddable. I think I tweeted about how it should be a vid about ten minutes after I first heard it, at which point I had probably already put the song on repeat. It's perfect because it's light, and funny, and has good rhythm, and this intense emotional underpinning of love and devotion which has some excellent tempo and instrumentation changes, but underneath it is all this anger, this tearing down of something wonderful. The song is from Emotional Rollercoaster, their 1988 album, so it predates the MCU by twenty years. It predates Blade by ten years! But here we are. JD Doyle interviewed them and collected some pictures for his March 2003 Queer Music Heritage show and their website is still up if you'd like to check out their music or their photo albums. Other highlights include be political, not polite.
Endings this vid almost had:
1. (this paragraph contains references to rape) "There are X references to queerness in Marvel films. All of them are rape jokes." I didn't do this one because a) Deadpool 2 was going to come out after I clipped but before WisCon, and I hoped Shatterstar would be gay in it (haha damnit) as well as the rumored NTW/Yukio romance b) I hadn't watched all of the incredibly boring Wolverine films - thoughthingswithwings attempted to do this so I could make a stronger argument which was AMAZING and SO HELPFUL c) based on blocking, I thought it was arguable that Taserface slept with a dude in GotG2 even though there's no dialogue about it - later James Gunn made it clear that he didn't intend this, but at the time I was dithery about it d) I wasn't sure whether to count the short films / Blu-Ray extras and e) I have really complicated feelings about Deadpool. The rape jokes are: GotG 1 (prison rape joke), Deadpool 1 (the only reference in the first film to Deadpool's interest in dudes), and, depending on how you feel about MCU special features, the Justin Hammer bit in All Hail the King (also a prison rape joke).
2. (this paragraph contains discussion of Bryan Singer) "Bryan Singer got me to do this film by saying, mutants are like gays." This is from an Ian McKellen interview several years ago, back when Ellen Page came out. The fact that Bryan Singer used this line on McKellen, gave Bobby that "coming out as a mutant" scene in X2, gave Mystique her amazing response to Nightcrawler's "why don't you look like a human all the time?" - "because I shouldn't have to" – and then ERASED ROGUE'S COMICS CANON BACKSTORY, is infuriating to me. FUCK THIS SHIT. Fuck using us as a metaphor and erasing the actual canon queer text so that we are only visible to those who recognize the reference. (I remember having a conversation about Bobby's mutant coming out with a straight friend I'd just seen the movie with, who, despite hanging with a crowd of almost exclusively queer people, hadn't recognized that as a coming out scene, and how much that made me despair at the time. That this was such an explicit metaphor and yet it would still miss even queer-aware straight people. That it felt so clear to me but still wasn't actually in the text.) I didn't use this because I didn't want to reference Bryan Singer for such a small payoff. But this is why the whole vid is MCU except for Mystique and Destiny because I cannot get over Mystique and Destiny being left out of two separate iterations of X-Men films FUCK EVERYTHING ABOUT THIS.
3. (this paragraph contains misogynistic slurs) "Chris Claremont included an archaic word in Marvel Comics in order to get Mystique and Destiny's relationship past editorial and the Comics Code Authority. Joss Whedon included an archaic word in The Avengers in order to get a misogynistic slur past the MPAA." I didn't go with this because it's too specific, hard to convey quickly, and I wanted to make a point about Marvel films and not just Joss Whedon. But I keep thinking about this. Joss Whedon was so fucking proud of himself for this, so delighted in his daring, so thrilled to get "mewling quim" past the MPAA. Out of the mouth of a shapeshifting trickster god. And back in 1990, Chris Clarement used "leman" to describe Mystique's relationship with Destiny – an archaic term for a lover outside of marriage, which made it past editorial in part because it was archaic and in part because Destiny was already dead. Claremont finally had a way to convey this and by god he was going to do it even if he had to put the line in another character's mouth and even if Destiny had been dead for two years. I mean. Claremont was far from perfect. But it doesn't take much to make Joss Whedon look bad.
4. The rainbow Disney Mickey Mouse ears. I didn't do this because I couldn't find good footage of them where it was clear that this was part of Disney's official merchandise – all the footage was from fans - so I put it in the middle of the vid instead. If I had had something official though, something with the rainbow ears fading into one of the Disney logos, that would have been such a great end to this vid.
5. The James Gunn interview that starts the vid. Initially I was going to end this vid with Gunn's "we just don't know who the queers in the mcu are yet" because I thought it made the most sense after the long list of queers in comics – like, we DO know, you're just not putting them in. Butthingswithwings told me in beta that I needed to front-load the concept of the vid more, so people would see what I was doing before we got halfway through the song.
Some stories I now love:
1. I found Northstar sooooo boooooring when I tried to read Alpha Flight in the 90s, after he came out, when I desperately wanted queer characters. At the time I found him disappointing – in part because no single character can be representation for all queer people. But it turns out that it's mostly Alpha Flight that's boring. In retrospect I now really appreciate Northstar's not-giving-a-fuck gayness. His "I don't care if people don't like me" memoir. His "I'm not joining the x-men because I'm not sure I believe in your vision, Xavier" "I want you to be a mentor to the young gays, actually" "oh, interesting" gayness. His attempts to mentor Anole that sometimes work, and sometimes fail because Anole is a lizard boy with one giant arm and Northstar looks like a movie star. His criticism of superhero politics that he can make in part because he doesn't give a fuck and he's not joining a team. There's also this amazing moment where Northstar's boyfriend Kyle is brainwashed by a super-conservative Canadian political party (reasons), and Kyle denounces Northstar live on tv. People on Alpha Flight assume Northstar is terribly hurt by this; they're like "oh no, Northstar, don't worry, that's not really Kyle" and Northstar is like "obviously it's not Kyle, Kyle would never have that haircut, that is a brainwashed by conservatives haircut." Northstar is kind of a dick and so egotistical that he never doubted this and, you know, I've been missing queers getting to be assholes but still fighting for the side of light.
2. Jessie Drake! Possibly Marvel's first human trans character! (note comics ableist representations of mental illness in this paragraph) So Jessie only appears in two Marvel Comics Presents comics with terrible art BUT. It's beautiful and it totally made me <3 her. Typhoid Mary, a super-villain with "multiple personalities" as a result of sexual assault and trauma, is in a mental institution being studied by dude scientists when she is recruited by Wolverine to save some mutant children. Mary has a Typhoid Mary persona who is "lustful" and a sex object for dudes, and a Bloody Mary man-hating persona who tries to kill dudes. Mary starts to rescue Jessie, is in the process of taking her to a women's shelter, and then goes "fuck you're a dude" and changes to Bloody Mary to kill her. Jessie is like "actually I'm a girl" and Mary goes "oh! Okay! Sorry!" and stops trying to kill her. Then Jessie is like "so look, it seems like both of your personas are in response to men, right? Whether it's about pleasing them or killing them? There's a better non-dude-focused you in there." And then Typhoid Mary becomes Mary and walks off into the sunset with Jessie, leaving a crowd of men asking them questions behind; they save each other. Later Marvel retcons all of this of course. But, like, Mary is Jessie's mentor! Mary's superpower is necessarily about gender and her superpower recognizes Jessie as a girl. Writing a trans girl character next to a character whose superpower is about responding to men is a giant fuck-you to TERFs. And they walk into the sunset hand in hand, aaaaah.
3. Paradox! Paradox is an anti-gravity dancer in a futuristic space empire with lots of income inequality and genetically engineered "servant species." He himself has been non-consensually genetically engineered to be a shapeshifter, and is an undercover agent for the oppressive Interplanetary Security Agency (basically space CIA), which aggressively pursues rebels etc. (One of the things I found most interesting about this is that the ISA is super uncomfortable with him – there are some gay slurs directed at him from people with power, and also people going "what, him, I don't want to be protected by that guy" or "he must be really good or they wouldn't employ a guy like him." He is too queer for the ISA.) He ends up leading an ISA strike team that's trying to investigate a colonial rebellion. I was super shocked when it turned out that actually Paradox is part of the colonial rebellion – he helps to kill his own strike team even though they seem to be friends (they bonded!), takes one of their forms, and then KILLS THE EMPEROR. Way to be a beautiful dangerous gengineered queer fighter for justice, Paradox! ILU you shape-shifting space bi. AMAZINGLY someone brought him into modern comics and the 616 universe in Wolverine: The Best There Is in 2011 – before that he was last in comics in 1982! (This Wolverine comic is terrible and you should not read it but I'm happy that Paradox is in it, shapeshifting his way around the 616 universe and wearing his 1980s leather pants and white flowy shirt and black vest and leaning dramatically against walls.)
4. Phyla-Vell and Moondragon! I always found cosmic Marvel pretty boring, so I was delighted to discover that when I read the "I'm only here for the queer characters" version it was a good time. Like, whatever Peter Quill, sure, fine, Rick Jones, y'all have fun but I'm just skimming through this until my faves return. How could I have found them boring! Phyla-Vell and Moondragon are so into each other even while they're fighting super powerful dudes, so much in love in a kind of codependent coming-back-from-the-dead-for-each-other way, and also they work really well together. And also Moondragon TURNS INTO A DRAGON and then she CAN'T CHANGE BACK and is like "I understand if this ends our relationship" and Phyla is like "no Heather I still love you to pieces" and then they are still queer and still amazing and Phyla RIDES MOONDRAGON INTO BATTLE. Also later the dragon consumes Moondragon due to reasons, and Phyla searches for her (and so does Drax because Heather is his daughter - she's maybe already dead or not present in his tragic backstory in the GotG films). When Phyla finds Moondragon imprisoned / consumed by the dragon she dives into the dragon's mouth and cuts her way out and emerges with Moondragon because COMICS NONSENSE CANNOT SEPARATE THEM. They've been dead like nine times each and there they still are being in love in new bodies or in spirit form or in dreams or hey back from the dead. Heavens.
Some panels I'm SUPER SAD didn't make it into the vid:
1. Homosexual Homo Superior Homo Everything (note homophobia here). This is something Bobby's dad says to him when Bobby comes out to him; it's part of a really terrible response from his parents. BUT it's also the sort of thing I want to take and make into a slogan. I do want there to be more homosexual homo superior homo everythings around.
2. Nick Fury: We don't give gays any grief. (For reference, this panel was published in November 1993, at a moment when "can gay people serve in the military or should they be banned" was a topic of contentious debate.)
3. Northstar and Hector, two known gays, sunbathing together in the 1995 Marvel swimsuit special. Caption: "Northstar and the Pantheon's Hector find a secluded spot near one of Madripoor's ancient temples to engage in their favorite kind of worship." Welllll I meaaaaaan. This is from Northstar's very very long no-canon-relationships-or-even-passing-mention-of-his-gayness phase in comics after he came out, but in the same period he also flirted with Hector in an Incredible Hulk comic so, you know, I ship it.
4. Odin calls his children my son, my daughter, and my child who is both. This took way too long to read even after I rearranged it, and it distracted from the actual panels of Loki, so I had to take it out of the Loki section or it would have been the only thing here but. It's great.
5. Sera putting the crown of Hel on Angela. I love this! But the silhouette looked like nothing at vid speed.
6. Loki joining the matriarchy of Heven (where Angela, who doesn't know she's their sister at this point, lives). I titled this "Thor chained to a pillar yikes" because wow, Loki, way to go, absolutely you are choosing the fun side here. Also this page where Angela and Loki talk and call each other sister.
7. Jisa and Nata's first meeting! They're in the end section holding hands, but this is how they meet - sadly in a mini in 2002 and I don't think they've appeared since. But still, A+.
8. Bobby Drake (young) flirts with a guy and then freaks out so much he accidentally ices over. This goes with this page of Ultimate Colossus clanking into his metal form when Northstar flirts with him, which is in the vid, but you can't tell what's happening in the part I used, sigh.
9. These two shots of queer mutants trying to use online dating sites: Riot (who is stuck at the time in her insectoid carapace form) and Iceman (who spends a whole issue trying to figure out what to write and ends up with something short).
10. Iceman comes out to Anole. This is lovely because the X-Men have always had a mentorship system, and Northstar and Karma both mentored Anole when he was a young gay mutant. And that's usually the way it goes in X-Men comics: adults who can teach teenagers about emotions and superpowers and also about how to deal when your exes attack the school and and so on. And so it's super lovely to have it work the other way here: Anole is the young mutant, he's just joined the team, but he's Bobby's mentor here.
That end section isn't anywhere near all the queer characters in Marvel! Some queers not appearing in the end section, an incomplete list:
Note: these are characters I chose other characters over for a variety of reasons; sometimes that's an inability to find the comic or a comic that's only available in terrible resolution and sometimes that's because I had so many recent characters, but sometimes it's due to unhappy endings for queer characters, rape, straightwashing, kinds of villainy I wanted to avoid if I could (serial killers, HYDRA), my hatred for Joe Quesada, and other yikes nope reasons.
I. Queer superheroes and villains
1. Brian Falsworth/Roger Aubrey (Union Jack/Destroyer) (2002)
These characters are really important to a lot of people and when Marvel finally confirmed that they were lovers it was a big deal for comics fans. But the comic where they are outed is Citizen V and the V Battalion The Everlasting, in a half-sentence in a flashback to right after Brian dies. Like the actual line is "Halloway – I just watched my lo – my … friend … die in my arms!" (Ellipses are where queerness lives. The queerest comics punctuation.) And the art is SO BAD and so grey. It's so bad that Roger and Nigel literally walk through a Pride parade at the beginning of the comic and I couldn't use it in my section about queer community because it looked nothing like Pride. It looked like the attendees were being murdered. And it looked like that before the Nazi vampires attacked. Sorry, Roger and Brian. I hope you get some brightly colored comics about your superheroic Nazi-punching love in the future. (Some comics histories say that there are some panels where Brian comes out in the late 1980s, but nobody listed issues and I couldn't find it. Cite your gays, people!)
2. Nigel Clowes (2005)
Nigel is also part of the V-Battalion and he gets together with Roger after Brian dies. But I felt bad putting Nigel/Roger in but leaving Brian/Roger out.
3. Nico Minoru (Sister Grimm) who reportedly tried to kiss Karolina in Runaways v5 5 (March 2018)
Nico reportedly tried to kiss Karolina in Runaways 5.05! They've been playing this unrequited on Karolina's side for like 12 years! So I wish I'd known about this in time to get it in.
4. Jennifer Kale (Witch Woman) who has a girlfriend in a vision in Ghost Rider #92 (1997)
Marvel hired gay Latino comics writer Ivan Velez Jr, who had previously written for Gay Comix, to write this run of Ghost Rider! Super cool! But I couldn't find this issue.
5. Toni Ho/Aikku Jokinen (2016)
I accidentally crossed Toni and Aikku off of my list when I read the Aikku intro in Avengers (before I'd clipped New Avengers) and so I missed them in the end section and I'm bummed about it. Toni is Yinsen's daughter, and she is an engineering genius who makes a Rescue suit and ends up becoming Supreme Leader of AIM (after it was no longer evil) and renaming it RESCUE and she falls in love with Aikku. Aikku is a regular human who ends up bonded to an alien AI armor and ends up wearing it all the time so that the AI (named Pod) can develop, because whenever she takes it off the AI resets. Together they fight AIM crime.
6. Johnny Bart (Rawhide Kid) who was gay in volume 3 of his self-titled comic (2003 maybe?)
The Rawhide Kid was a long-time Marvel character who was revealed as gay in volume 3 (which was rated as a Max comic despite containing no sex). Later he was left out of the Marvel Western event so they wouldn't have to rate that Max. Also later the Marvel Official Handbook seemed to say that he was actually straight and this was just "an eccentric persona apparently intended to confuse others." Then later he was gay again. I decided I didn't want to deal with this and figuring out what date to list.
7. Curtis Doyle (Freedom Ring), a new character Marvel super talked up and bragged about (2006)
Sooooo Freedom Ring. I'm still so mad about this and I don't even care about him. Joe Quesada was like "Freedom Ring is our new amaze gay superhero! He's awesome! Everyone focus on him!" Then they killed him literally one month later. By impaling him on spikes. Fuck this shit. He lasted from May – September 2006. I think he appeared more in Joe Quesada interviews than he did in actual comics. I didn't feel like I could include Curtis without changing the title card to be like "fuck Joe Quesada" which seemed like it would distract from the point of the vid? But fuck Joe Quesada. Here's a geeksout post on the subject..
8. Amalia and Elena, America Chavez's moms (2013)
I used the best shot of them in the intro and this section at the end was the most full :(
9. Akihiro (Daken) (????)
Daken basically only ever has sex with anyone if he wants to get something out of it or manipulate them; comics readers agree that he's bi or pan or queer, but he doesn't ever say that because Marjorie Liu thinks he's "past that kind of identification." Everything I found when I was first looking was dubcon or noncon, whether it was sex or dancing or kissing – he has pheromone control powers and since he uses sex to get things, like, yikes. I felt bad about this for a while because a lot of people love him but thenisagel told me she'd never heard of him and I was greatly relieved to get to stop looking for a panel I could use.
10. Maxwell Dillon (Electro) (2004)
This is a Max Millar comic and it does a prison rape -> bisexuality thing. Pass.
11. Mephisto (1994)
Mephisto is pure evil; at one point he shapeshifts into Nova, a dead woman that Silver Surfer worked with and loved. As Nova, Mephisto tricks the Silver Surfer into surrendering his soul. Oops. Silver Surfer is like "I surrendered my soul under false pretenses! This doesn't count!" Mephisto is like "uh it totally does." Also pass. (Although if this is a dynamic you're into, WOW are Silver Surfer 3.99 and 3.100 for you. Liiiiike: "You exist for my amusement … to do and be anything I desire … take any shape … serve any purpose. It is mine to deem you slave … or lover … or nothing.")
12. Sybil Dvorak (Skein) (2003?)
The internet swears to me that Sybil comes out in Thunderbolts 1.75 but I read that comic like four times and I swear that the only thing that happens is that someone else assumes that Sybil is making a pass; it just didn't feel that clear to me.
13. Val Ventura (Flatman) (2005?)
The internet tells me that Val comes out in the same set of comics as Living Lightning, who I did find and who is in the end section? But I missed it somehow.
14. Perry Webb/Frank Cortez (American Ace/Captain Flame) (2011)
Perry and Frank are both part of a squad of enhanced soldiers in WWII; they reportedly make out in an alley in All-Winners Squad, but I couldn't find a copy of it. Perry was created in 1939 and is one of the characters on this list with the longest intro-to-outing gap: he was in 3 comics in in 1939 and 1940, and then he wasn't in any comics again until two issues in 2011 in flashbacks. This makes Perry (along with Brian Falsworth and Roger Aubrey) some of the earliest in-internal-chronology queer human characters in Marvel comics. Frank was created for All-Winners Squad so he's newer. Also, Perry was married to a woman while he was having sex with Frank, and Frank was blackmailed by his squadmate Slo-Mo Jones for his homosexuality and possibly killed by Slo-Mo. Also Slo-Mo was created as a minstrel stereotype and Marvel "updated" him to make him less offensive … by making him a homophobic blackmailer and maybe murderer. Yikes.
15. Ned Campbell (2005)
A disabled mutant who was married to a woman but having astral projection sex with a dude. He gets killed in his astral projection form so his body dies. This manages to be ableist AND a terrible closeted-gay-dudes-ruin-lives story at the same time. Yikes, Peter David, yiiiikes.
16. Percival Pinkerton (2002ish/1964)
One of Nick Fury's howling commandos. Semi-outed retroactively a la Dumbledore by word-of-god when Stan Lee was asked about Rawhide Kid; in my reading this does not appear in the actual comics and it feels like the usual Stan Lee retcon. Scans-daily has some comments on this subject. I declined word-of-god gays especially vague-forty-years-later word of god gays.
17. Katrina Luisa Van Horn (Amazon / Man-Killer) (2000)
Katrina is mentioned on some lists of lesbian comics characters, and I can totally see how people interpret it that way – she's a feminist terrorist who goes by Man-Killer – but everything she says on the subject is vague; like, she says things to dudes who flirt with her like "I call myself Man-Killer, how do you think I really feel about you?" Which is "not into dudes" but doesn't necessarily imply "into ladies" so unless there's something I missed I wish people would put her on lists of queer characters instead of specifically lesbian characters – like, she could be ace. Anyway I left Katrina out because she also worked for HYDRA. Also this is yet another terrorism narrative on this list that ties disability and queerness together.
18. Victoria Hand (2009)
Victoria Hand is in a relationship with another SHIELD agent, Isabelle … in a flashback in one comic that is incredible badly framed and dark and surrounded by speech bubbles everywhere. I recall reading other comics that referenced her queerness, but I couldn’t remember which ones, and I didn't find anything else on a quick skim.
19. Stacy-X and Sugar Kane (2011)
Stacy-X and Sugar Kane and Ultimate Nullifer have a threesome in the terrible Vengeance comic that was only good for introducing America Chavez.
20. Benjamin Deeds/Nathaniel Carver (Morph/Hindsight) (2018)
Benji and Nathaniel are in the new X-Men comics; Benji is a shape-shifter and Nathaniel has psychometry. Benji revealed as gay (to the reader) earlier in the comics, and has some hesitance about revealing his feelings for Nathaniel, but then it turns out Nathaniel is also gay and has had a boyfriend before, and then they kiss and because Nathaniel has psychometry he sees Benji's past in the kiss. A+ combination of power+feelings. C- panel arrangement. I had planned for this to be the most recent panel in the end section for a while but then I yanked it out at the last minute for the much better framed (and by Wiscon GOH Saladin Ahmed) Valkyrie/Bucky kiss.
21. Romeo (2016)
Romeo is one of the Inhumans and young time-traveling Bobby Drake's boyfriend, but I ended up using just one Bobby shot in the final section (original Bobby/Judah) because I didn't have room for both Bobbys and their boyfriends.
22. Jessica Drew (Ultimates) (2014)
There's a set of panels in All New Ultimates where Jessica is like "I'm into Jewish redheaded women because I'm Peter Parker's clone." Weird biological determinism but I might've used it if the layout wasn't just impossible to get into 16:9.
23. Karl Coven (Coven) (2003)
A serial killer who nonconsensually kissed Rick Jones. Peter David sometimes gives you gems, and sometimes he gives you Karl Coven or Ned Campbell.
24. Doop (2012-ish)
Doop is omnisexual! But I also find Doop and Doopspeak incredibly annoying and I didn't wanna.
25. Ian Soo (Telekinian) (2016)
Ian is an Inhuman who tried to rob an armored truck, gets stopped by Patsy Walker, and then becomes friends with Patsy. I totally forgot this Hellcat comic existed and thus missed him.
26. Raz Malhotra (Giant-Man) (2016)
The internet tells me that Raz had a boyfriend! But I couldn't find a good panel for it.
27. Alana Jobson (Jackpot) (2008)
Alana is in a bummer of a story. Sara Ehret is the original Jackpot, but she doesn't want to be a superhero; Alana pays Sara to take over Jackpot and uses MGH to get powers. Also Alana is attracted to Sara. Then Alana dies and the queer death is a ~lesson~ for Sara in how great power means great responsibility and you can't opt out of superheroing in a Spider-Man comic. Pass.
28. El Brujo (1991)
El Brujo is a bi Mexican superhero! … in the comic Captain Confederacy, an AU where the Confederates won the Civil War. By W*ll Sh*tterly. Soooooo I didn't go find this. (Hilariously every time I ran into it somewhere I had this outraged BUT I BLOCK W*LL SH*TTERLY reaction even though I was on, like, someone's blog.)
29. Deadpool (????)
My feelings about Deadpool are reaaaaaaallly complicated.
II. Humans with no powers who don't work with supers
I mostly didn't include non-supers or non-heroes except for Arnie in the main section, since he's so egregiously left out of Captain America.
1. Arnold Astrovik (1994)
Arnold is Vance Astrovik's father; Vance is a mutant, and Arnold beats him and calls him a freak. Vance kills Arnold accidentally. Later, Vance goes back in time for $reasons, and learns that Arnold was gay and beaten by his own father for it; Arnold decides that his only option is to leave his boyfriend and get married and have the life his dad wants. So it's a story about the cycle of violence and also another piece in the gay mutant metaphor. What I find interesting about this is that Vance tries to stop his grandfather's violence against his father with violence, and fails and is upset at his own violence; then he also tries to encourage his father to stay with his boyfriend, even though he might erase his own existence. Vance already ends the cycle of violence by being an out mutant and not a violent abuser, but also he tries to intervene in it in the past. This is some fucking queer time travel. I only wish it had actually worked, that Vance had successfully intervened with his father via compassion. (Though at the same time the story perpetuates stereotypes about closeted dudes that comics are super into. Plus the immigrant homophobia stereotype.) I find this story really really interesting but I didn't include it because a) non-super b) people familiar with Vance's backstory might find this distressing and c) my decent version download of it didn't complete in time. But for real look at this two-page spread.
2. Ultimate Jarvis (sometime between 2002 – 2006)
Jarvis (Tony's butler) is gay in Ultimates, but I was never an Ultimates fan, the internet was not helpful in indicating when exactly this happens in those comics, and he's not a superhero so I didn't try too hard to find it.
3. Curtis Moss (2002)
A closeted gay dude married to a woman; Jessica Jones investigates him for his wife, who thinks he's cheating on her. It's like the Ned Campbell story, but earlier and less ableist but also less mutant-y.
4. Rebecca Cross (2002)
Another Jessica Jones investigation! Rebecca runs away from home and her parents hire Jessica to find her; Jessica thinks she's a mutant. But it turns out that Rebecca ran away because she felt "different" in a queer sense - she starts dating a woman in the town she runs away to.
5. Jack Casey (2010)
A Daily Bugle reporter; his homosexuality comes out after he's dead.
6. Christian Frost (2003)
Christian is Emma Frost's brother; he left his family and defied his asshole of a father to be with his boyfriend Dante. Buuuuuut then his dad had Dante deported and then Christian was depressed and then his dad institutionalized him sooooo I passed on this.
7. Colt Varney (1993)
Colt technically appears in the panel from the early 90s drag bar from Nomad 2.11 that's in the vid, which is part of why he's not in the end list. He's just a one issue character, but he helps Nomad find a murderer preying on the drag bar. He was also discharged from the military because he was gay. Nomad v 2 also features several other queer characters: Henry Greider, Robert Thaldron, Robert's unnamed secretary.
8. Tyler Lang/Jefferson Wolfe (1991)
AIDS narrative, but also Tyler is the son of a crime boss and has to be protected by the Hulk. Tyler dies, Jefferson doesn't (but also never appears again).
9. Rebecca Bergier (1995)
Rebecca works for Worldwatch, a non-profit that investigates humans rights abuses. James Rhodes ends up running Worldwatch; someone attempts to blackmail the org with Rebecca's lesbianism and instead she comes out to Rhodey. Rebecca is in several War Machine and Iron Man comics but then all of Worldwatch just stops being a part of the War Machine comics and they never really follow up on Rebecca or any of the other employees.
10. Kaycee (2013)
Kaycee kisses Anabelle Riggs in Fearless Defenders (when Anabelle and Valkyrie are sharing a body); she's Anabelle's ex. But there are already two different Anabelle kisses in the vid: one with Valkyrie in the main section, and one with new Inhuman Ren in the end section.
11. Adam Keith (2009)
A gay lawyer who defends Mille Collins.
12. Chili Storm (2009)
Chili has been in almost 250+ Marvel comics! In the models / comedy / non-supers line to start with. She's a supporting character to Millie the Model starting in 1948, and in a Models Inc comic in 2009 she is casually interested in women and it's lovely.
13. Molly von Richthofen (1999)
Molly is a lesbian policewoman who has to deal with rejecting the police commissioner when he hits on her! They give her a problem case to punish her but she cracks it (with some other characters). She's a minor non-super but she appears in 15 whole comics … but they're all issues of Punisher.
14. Steve Southall/Clark (2003)
Steve is a sheriff; Clark is the son of a weapons dealer. Together they don't fight crime, but dream of a better life together. But this is a Punisher comic, so instead Clark dies in a terrible bloody way and Steve is strung up on a building to slowly die in a terrible hate-crime martyr way; he's cut down by Punisher but he still dies of his injuries. Hard pass. I went to find this based on a character list and it suuuuuper bummed me out.
15. William Rawlins (2005)
Oh look another character from Punisher who really bummed me out! A corrupt bisexual CIA agent who in his most noteworthy act pushes his wife out of a helicopter and leaves her behind to be raped forever in an also super racist arc. He has sex with Nicky Cavella, a gay dude in the mob, a bunch of times.
16. Lisa (1993)
Lisa is a lesbian who went to Hell because she had so much guilt about being a lesbian. Fun! Then she gets resurrected into a reanimated corpse and it's all very complicated and might be a demonic plan. Hellstorm comics. Idk.
17. Lisa Halloran (2015)
Lisa is dating America Chavez! I would have used the America/Lisa relationship instead of America/Mags (which went wrong) but unfortunately I couldn't get Avengers 6.0 and everything I saw later was framed really badly.
18. Zoe Zimmer (2016)
Zoe is a Ms Marvel supporting character who has a giant crush on Nakia Bahadir.
19. Max Modell/Hector Baez (2012)
Max is Peter Parker's boss (briefly), and he casually references his relationship with his bf Hector Baez. Nice!
III. Characters who aren't in the end section in part because queerness gets complicated in comics, especially in cosmic Marvel
1. Monark Starstalker (2011)
Monark is Paradox's lover when Paradox comes to 616! However, Paradox is a shapeshifter and we only ever see Monark kissing Paradox when Paradox is shapeshifting. (They also bang while Paradox is shapeshifting and Monark is in glowing nanite cloud form. If that's a thing you're into.) There's a super confusing conversation that they have at one point that seems to indicate that Monark isn't into dudes? But he is kissing Paradox, who is a dude even when he is shapeshifting? But the various wikis don't list Monark as queer/bi/wev? But maybe that's because Wolverine: The Best There Is was such a terrible comic that nobody remembers it? Or maybe it's because he identifies as straight elsewhere and since it's not in this comic I missed it? So anyway this seemed complicated and I didn't want to deal with it or read a million other Monark comics for context.
2. Erik Josten (Atlas) (2001)
Atlas ends up dead and then shares his girlfriend's body (so they're two people in her body). Trans metaphor, but does he belong in this set of queer characters? Also he worked for Nazis so nope.
3. Christina Carr (Captain Power) (1999)
Christina is exposed to the same radiation as Doc Ock, but her superpower is to turn into super-strong and invulnerable Captain Power. Captain Power is male-bodied. Again, trans metaphor or genderfluidness possibly? But it's totally unexplored in the comics.
4. Anthony Druid (Dr. Druid) and Jillian Woods (Sepulchre) (1994)
Anthony and Jillian have been linked lovers through multiple past lives; in previous incarnations Jillian was a dude and Anthony was a woman. Gay League includes them in their list of trans characters, possibly because this felt way more like representation in 1994, but reincarnation feels different to me.
5. Ayesha/Kismet/Her/Paragon (1980)
In comics, Adam Warlock was made by the Enclave as a super-soldier. When he declined to stick around, the Enclave made Kismet; Kismet, like Adam, was made in a male-bodied form (originally called "Paragon" and a self-described paragon of mankind). Paragon destroyed the Enclave, escaped, learned about Adam Warlock, decided that as two perfect and unique beings they were destined to have babies, and emerged from a chrysalis female-bodied and using the name (and the pronoun) Her. Unfortunately, Adam had died while Her was in the chrysalis and so she went around trying to have babies with a other super-dudes. Also unfortunately for Her, her solution to procreation was to make incubation pods and put them in the super-dudes, and none of them wanted to be incubators for her babies. (I find this super interesting – like the comic does the body-change-for-procreation thing but she doesn't try to get pregnant herself.) Eventually Quasar was like "biology isn't destiny" and Her renamed herself Kismet and went off to protect the universe. For some reason this backstory and changing-gender didn't happen in Guardians of the Galaxy 2? And instead she was just an obsessed-with-bodily-perfection golden person? I would have included this since I've read trans comics fans talking about how important this was to them - a lot of characters in comics have accidental, unwanted body changes / brain transfers / etc but Her's is a chosen transformation - but unfortunately the most important scenes happened in a Marvel 2-In-1 and I couldn't find it and have only ever seen them in a super-blurry crops.
6. Aleta Ogord (Starhawk II) (1992)
This is a SUPER complicated Guardians of the Galaxy story: Aleta and her brother Stakar discover the statue of god, Aleta accidentally triggers it and turns into pure energy, ends up in Stakar's body, they share the body (when one of them is using it, the body shapeshifts to their form, and the other person is in limbo). Then they explore space together for a while, get bored and lonely, and ask the god to separate them. They "mate" and have kids (this is the point at which the wikis all capslock about ADOPTIVE SIBLINGS ADOPTIIIIIIIIVE) and then re-merge, and Aleta does all the childrearing while Stakar gets increasingly bored in limbo because god forbid he help with the kids. So then he steals the body and goes off into space, the kids end up dead because they aren't there to protect them, Stakar joins the Guardians, Aleta and Stakar get separated again and Aleta divorces Stakar because he's a jerk and gets engaged to Vance Astro instead. But then! Stakar noncon absorbs Aleta into his body again because he's a terrible person, and this time even when she's in control she looks like Stakar. (This is the source of this amazing panel.) Then they split bodies again. *does butterfly meme is this queer gesture* Stakar is a supporting character in GotG2, played by Sylvester Stalone, laughing about how he divorced that bitch. (SHE divorced YOU, asshole.) I could be misremembering, but I think Aleta is never actually named in the film, though she does appear in one tiny mid-credits scene (played by Michelle Yeoh). But for some reason there's no hint of shared-body shape-shifting.
7. Xavin (2005ish)
My feelings about Skrull gender are complicated.
8. Noh-Varr (2014)
My feelings about Kree sexuality are also complicated. And also of all the Young Avengers he's the most boring.
Some places to read more:
Prism Comics: a comics advocacy group! They have an annual grant for comics of interest to LGBTQ readers, they do profiles of queer creators of comics, they exhibit at Comic-Con. They also talk about homophobia in the industry. Also they sell "homo superior" tote bags if that's a thing you're interested in.
Gay League: a site run by lgbt comics fans; their news section is really good at what's released and upcoming. Gay League has been around since 1997, but they were hacked and offline for a while, and are back now! They also do some lgbt comics history that includes indies as well as mainstream comics. I appreciate putting Hothead Paisan and Northstar in the same list!
Autostraddle's Drawn to Comics: This is Autostraddle's tag for print and web comics, and it includes reviews of some recent Marvel comics.
Homosexuality in Comics on CBR: this is an interview series with various comics creators about queer themes in comics that talks about their formative comics, where they think the industry is, etc. It dates to 2007 so it's super dated now but interesting as a historical document. Especially because it interviews both queer creators like Allan Heinberg, Terrance Griep, and Devin Grayson, and creators like Mark Millar and Alan Moore who have written/drawn queer themes but aren't queer themselves.
Gay Comics List: a long list of reviews of comics with queer themes, including indies. No longer updated as far as I know.
First, the link: this is about straightening up the house, a vid about queer erasure when Marvel comics are translated to Marvel films.
Process notes:
This started as a multi-canon vid idea many years ago – I've been screencapping Marvel comics posts for years, but also posts about Dumbledore and Constantine and Wonder Woman. For a while I thought it would largely be about the translation of comics to live-action media (and, like, characters like Dumbledore might be a side note, or characters being straightened in comics might be a part of it). This was at the "vague idea for a vid" stage, where I hadn't planned out anything, and part of my reasoning was that the first thing I'd mention to people when I told them about this vid idea was Constantine, who didn't get to be bi on tv or in films. I was so incredibly mad about all the "not important to his character" bullshit around the Constantine tv show.
But here's the thing: DC films are still not doing queer characters. I still wish we could have Harley/Ivy in a movie. But there aren't nearly as many recent DC films as there are Marvel films; DC for me lives in tv shows. And I'm watching Legends of Tomorrow right now and Constantine's on it and they're making a real effort to make it clear that he and Sara are bi. Sara has a girlfriend and before that she got to make out with various people throughout time. Black Lightning exists and Anissa is amazing. I can count queer main characters on so many DC shows, queer superheroes, queer badasses with powers and without powers. And I wish Constantine had been bi on his own tv show. And I wish everyone who talked about the show hadn't been a jerk about it, hadn't pretended that no true fans would care about it. DC still has a long way to go. But when DC got a do-over, they fixed it.
And here's the other thing: I was a Marvel kid. I read some Justice League, but X-Men comics were really where I grew up. I read the X-Men metaphors for difference sitting in bookstores and libraries and comics shops and borrowing comics from my friends. When I started actually trying to structure the vid, rather than just screencapping things that made me mad, I realized that I could make a list off the top of my head of so many Marvel comics characters who were queer, many of whom were really important to me, and many of whom I had sought out specifically for their queerness. My off the top of my head list included all these characters from comics I didn't read – I didn't read Guardians of the Galaxy or other cosmic Marvel but I could tell you about Phyla-Vell. I didn't like Alpha Flight but I could tell you about Northstar. Because Marvel was where I went for queer superhero comics and queer-metaphor superhero comics, both as a kid and as an adult. And there are so very many Marvel films: the MCU, the X-Men franchise, the millions of hours of Wolverine films that seem to exist, the Blade films that made the MCU possible. And all of these characters who were so important to me hadn't existed for even a flash of a second in any of those films.
(This is, it turns out, a bit of a lie, or well really it's one of those hey-but-in-the-director's-commentary lies, because it turns out that Anole is in X3. I found out when I was doing research for this vid. He's the unnamed lizard-like character who sticks to the bottom of the water tower and then is shot with the mutant cure and falls out of frame. He's credited as Lizard Man. How could I have missed him, that fan-favorite character depowered without having any lines! But he's there, or at least Brett Ratner swears that he's there in a post-film retcon. Phat's there, too: he walks into a meeting and sits down between two other characters. Meanwhile Mystique's entire backstory is removed so that she can be young and impressionable when she meets Magneto. Representation!)
When I was first structuring the vid, I wanted to think about Marvel's work generally – because I didn't want to imply that comics were perfect. But I couldn't simultaneously make an argument about erasure in comics and erasure in films in four minutes, so I ended up leaving out all of the "and also these comics editors are terrible" even though I'd screencapped a bunch of it. Like, a lot of the older characters in the end section of the vid had to be slipped past Jim Shooter's no-homosexuals-in-Marvel-comics policy when he was Editor in Chief, and that is also a problem, but it's not a problem I could make a coherent argument about. And
thingswithwings reassured me that the vid didn't read as saying the comics were perfect. But wow I was deeply annoyed to have to pay for Marvel Unlimited to make a vid about how these characters who comics creators already had to fight for were left out of Marvel's money-making films.I ended up deciding not to do the Marvel tv shows for similar reasons, because they don't have anywhere near the distribution of the films, and because I knew I couldn't make this vid if I was trying to keep up with Agents of SHIELD at the same time; it was difficult enough to try to vid a critique about representation when a Marvel film comes out every two minutes and every Marvel film has nine million hours of interviews. (There are some queer characters on Marvel tv shows, though: Jeri Hogarth, Nico and Karolina, Joey Gutierrez, and some minor background characters. Nico and Karolina existing on Runaways is part of why I didn't include much Runaways in the vid.)
One of the things I was really worried about was making arguments about erasure that I could support, and only using characters and arguments in the main section that films could have actually included: like, Iceman is now gay, but he wasn't gay in comics in 2000, and so X2 didn't leave out his gayness. (Though he also hasn't been in and isn't slated to be in an X-Men film since he came out in comics.) So I checked the dates carefully on everything that I paired with film shots, to make sure I was giving the films enough time to include the comics canon; like, I know Phyla-Vell and Moondragon were in the GotG volume that the films were based on, the X-Men films had like thirty years of prep time if they'd wanted to include Mystique and Destiny, and Captain America could have included Arnie any time since 1984, but several other characters are much more recent. I wouldn't have included Loki (who shapeshifted but wasn't explicitly genderfluid until post-Thor 1) if Marvel hadn't reportedly shut down Al Ewing talking about comics Loki during MCU marketing. And I thought there was no way that Black Panther could incorporate Ayo and Aneka and was assuming that the most recent Black Panther and World of Wakanda comics had been released too late for the film, until I saw the early set-tour Vanity Fair article about Ayo's flirtation with Okoye. I guess I was overestimating the lead time necessary? But it meant that I am pretty confident that Marvel films could have included all of my main comparison-to-film characters, and that they chose not to. Or, in the case of some writers and directors, they never even knew they existed.
There are a couple of things I have mixed feelings about in this vid; one is having to use Thor Ragnarok and Black Panther. It's hard to vid absence, and so I ended up using two of my favorite MCU films, because both almost included queer characters and then removed them in the final edit. It is true that this happened and that it's fair to critique these films for it, but it's also true that both of these films are more interesting and much more inclusive than The Avengers or its sequels. But The Avengers and sequels didn't include a single character who was queer in comics and not queer in the films. And in all honesty Avengers comics are pretty straight, too – I read a million comics for this vid and, like, three of them were issues of The Avengers - so it's not even like they left out a major queer character. And I needed comparison or textual evidence in order to vid absence. (It's possible that the relative straightness of Avengers comics is part of what made it a more desirable film property to found the MCU on than e.g. GotG. But I couldn't make that argument visually either.) It's not like Thor Ragnarok or Black Panther didn't cut these scenes, but also, like, they filmed them in the first place – and the tentpole films of the MCU never bothered. On the one hand it hurts to get close to even a tiny bit of representation and then have it left on the cutting room floor, but on the other hand The Avengers never gave a single shit about this. But I could only critique the Avengers implicitly by critiquing the whole MCU, while I had to name check Black Panther and Thor Ragnarok specifically. So, mixed feelings, and I hope it did come off as "a problem with Marvel films generally" and not "a problem with only these films."
The other thing I feel bad about is using Florence Kasumba's interview to talk about Ayo and Aneka. Florence Kasumba did say this, and that sucks, but there's a reason her interview is the one I could use – other people's PR teams and Marvel's interview rules meant I couldn't have a response to this question from anyone who actually had power over whether this scene was removed. I don't have a Ryan Coogler response to this question. I don't have a Kevin Feige response to this question. They haven't had to justify cutting a brief flirtation. They have probably never even been asked the question in an official interview – if they ever were, I couldn't find it. The only person who has had to answer this question is an actor who isn't part of the main cast and who didn't go on the press tour with them. And one of the film's co-writers, Joe Robert Cole, also answered this question, and the response is terrible, but it's terrible in that coached-response-to-a-difficult-question way where the answer rambles for so long that a single sentence doesn't have any content and so it couldn't be quoted.
Marvel's PR machine is pretty amazing - and not just at keeping certain topics out of interviews. The vast majority of outlets that quoted Kevin Feige's "maybe you can have a gay character in ten years" response to a question in an interview quoted it approvingly. Like, "Kevin Feige says a gay character is definitely coming! Woohoo!" Even though it was a "maybe" with no definitive date. I found, like, three comics sites that felt the way I did about it. Which is: "fuck this shit! As if you're going to pretend that queerness is a recent invention and then you want props for vague promises." Get back to me when you can name ten pre-2000 queer characters in your own comics, asshole.
The end section of this vid isn't a complete record of queer characters in Marvel comics – this is due to me not having time to read all the comics I had access to, to the patchy availability of old comics, to characters I didn't know to look for, and to the amount of song I had to work with and the rhythm of it. There's also some stuff in here that is probably listed with the wrong dates - sometimes it's hard to figure out exactly when a character was first queer in comics, especially since I was putting these in order myself because most of these characters aren't on the big timelines - and some where I mixed various comics panels to get enough visuals, so a single character image in the vid actually reflects several issues. A lot of the new to me 80s to early-90s footage in this vid comes from histories of lgbt comics and from Gay League; the more recent stuff comes from the Marvel wikia. There's an unfortunate gap in the middle that unfortunately also coincides with when I stopped reading comics; I attempted to bridge it using references, but I definitely still missed many characters - unfortunately any wiki is going to miss people especially in less popular comics, and Gay League stopped doing the same kind of detailed write-ups once there started to be more queer comics characters. There are also a lot of butterfly-meme "is this queer?" characters in Marvel comics, most of whom I left out since I had plenty of footage.
The end section of the vid also contains a lot of characters who aren't actually queer in the main 616 Marvel universe: Mary Jane Watson and Beast and Bucky and Sunfire (Exiles), James Howlett and Hercules (X-Treme X-Men), Angel (1602), Colossus (Ultimates), Felicia Hardy (Spider-Girl time travel and/or alternate universe), and Leah and Magik (Siege). This is a small selection – there are many more Exiles characters who could have been included here. Marvel reportedly now has a policy of not making other-universe versions of characters queer unless they are queer or will be queer in 616; this ended a period of everyone who wrote Exiles or other universe-hopping comics casually queering some major character all "hey I can do this because it's ALTERNATE UNIVERSE Mary Jane Watson." I would not be surprised if this happened after fans got mad at Axel Alonso for this response to an interview about Hercules: "Hercules and James Howlett's relationship in 'X-Treme X-Men' took place in a unique alternate universe, similar to how Colossus was gay in the Ultimate Universe, but is straight in 616. Same goes for Hercules here." (This is one of the things I wanted to include about straightening up the comics. Fuck you Axel Alonso.)
I didn't include Paradox, Razor, and Ice in the above paragraph – they are all from Earth 80324 (Marvel Preview/Bizarre Adventures) and don't have 616 equivalents at all. Though later Paradox ends up working with Wolverine in 616 due to reasons.
I wanted to get a lot more into the vid than I did, but I was totally overestimating how much still footage and text you can fit into a line of the song – like, I had all these lofty goals to fit in some thematic scenes to the lyrics, but I had to scrap all of them. So, for example, I was picking out characters for "Quentin Crisp and Rita Mae" and thinking that I'd use the end of every verse or the choruses for a direct comparison to films and the beginning of every verse for some fun characters and comics moments I couldn't draw those direct comparisons for. But I had that plan when I thought I could do film/still comparisons that paired a film scene and the matching stills from comics – like, here's the power walk from GotG on the bottom of the screen and a shot of the comics team on the top, and here's Thor leaping at Angela on the left and Thor leaping at Hela on the right, and here's Mystique running up the stairs to check on Rogue on the left and Rogue's anonymous het parent from the film checking on her on the right – places where the films and the comics are so closely paralleled but one is missing the queer characters. Pairing them would have made it super clear when I was doing which comparisons. But when I tried this in practice, my eye just could not look at both things at once; no matter how much motion I added to the still I always looked at the film and didn't even notice that the comics panel existed. And since that didn't work, I had to make those comparisons take longer, and do the comics panels and film shots sequentially, which also that meant that the division between "fun characters I'm just using stills of because they match the lyrics" and "characters I'm drawing this direct comparison for" was invisible. So I restructured this the way it is now, with all the direct comparisons first (regardless of lyrics) and then a mix of footage as the song slowed down. It definitely made a stronger argument, but it's also why I'm sad about a whole bunch of footage I clipped that didn't make it into the vid. (
thingswithwings was like "are you telling me you read like a hundred issues of Alpha Flight for three panels?" And I was like "yes and I'm bummed about it but also let me tell you about this super interesting arc where, okay, for REASONS Northstar is in Saskatchewan and ...." I spent a long time where every day I'd be like "so let me tell you about this interesting thing I read from 1994 that won't go in the vid!")The song is by Romanovsky and Phillips, a gay duo who released several albums throughout the 80s and 90s. I came across it completely by accident – I had heard some Romanovsky and Phillips songs, but not this one, and I hadn't thought of them in years. But I do this thing at work when I'm bored where I go through lists of queer musicians and try to listen to them on Spotify, and I was completely astonished to find this amazingly perfect song for this anger I already had that I had thought was unviddable. I think I tweeted about how it should be a vid about ten minutes after I first heard it, at which point I had probably already put the song on repeat. It's perfect because it's light, and funny, and has good rhythm, and this intense emotional underpinning of love and devotion which has some excellent tempo and instrumentation changes, but underneath it is all this anger, this tearing down of something wonderful. The song is from Emotional Rollercoaster, their 1988 album, so it predates the MCU by twenty years. It predates Blade by ten years! But here we are. JD Doyle interviewed them and collected some pictures for his March 2003 Queer Music Heritage show and their website is still up if you'd like to check out their music or their photo albums. Other highlights include be political, not polite.
Endings this vid almost had:
1. (this paragraph contains references to rape) "There are X references to queerness in Marvel films. All of them are rape jokes." I didn't do this one because a) Deadpool 2 was going to come out after I clipped but before WisCon, and I hoped Shatterstar would be gay in it (haha damnit) as well as the rumored NTW/Yukio romance b) I hadn't watched all of the incredibly boring Wolverine films - though
thingswithwings attempted to do this so I could make a stronger argument which was AMAZING and SO HELPFUL c) based on blocking, I thought it was arguable that Taserface slept with a dude in GotG2 even though there's no dialogue about it - later James Gunn made it clear that he didn't intend this, but at the time I was dithery about it d) I wasn't sure whether to count the short films / Blu-Ray extras and e) I have really complicated feelings about Deadpool. The rape jokes are: GotG 1 (prison rape joke), Deadpool 1 (the only reference in the first film to Deadpool's interest in dudes), and, depending on how you feel about MCU special features, the Justin Hammer bit in All Hail the King (also a prison rape joke). 2. (this paragraph contains discussion of Bryan Singer) "Bryan Singer got me to do this film by saying, mutants are like gays." This is from an Ian McKellen interview several years ago, back when Ellen Page came out. The fact that Bryan Singer used this line on McKellen, gave Bobby that "coming out as a mutant" scene in X2, gave Mystique her amazing response to Nightcrawler's "why don't you look like a human all the time?" - "because I shouldn't have to" – and then ERASED ROGUE'S COMICS CANON BACKSTORY, is infuriating to me. FUCK THIS SHIT. Fuck using us as a metaphor and erasing the actual canon queer text so that we are only visible to those who recognize the reference. (I remember having a conversation about Bobby's mutant coming out with a straight friend I'd just seen the movie with, who, despite hanging with a crowd of almost exclusively queer people, hadn't recognized that as a coming out scene, and how much that made me despair at the time. That this was such an explicit metaphor and yet it would still miss even queer-aware straight people. That it felt so clear to me but still wasn't actually in the text.) I didn't use this because I didn't want to reference Bryan Singer for such a small payoff. But this is why the whole vid is MCU except for Mystique and Destiny because I cannot get over Mystique and Destiny being left out of two separate iterations of X-Men films FUCK EVERYTHING ABOUT THIS.
3. (this paragraph contains misogynistic slurs) "Chris Claremont included an archaic word in Marvel Comics in order to get Mystique and Destiny's relationship past editorial and the Comics Code Authority. Joss Whedon included an archaic word in The Avengers in order to get a misogynistic slur past the MPAA." I didn't go with this because it's too specific, hard to convey quickly, and I wanted to make a point about Marvel films and not just Joss Whedon. But I keep thinking about this. Joss Whedon was so fucking proud of himself for this, so delighted in his daring, so thrilled to get "mewling quim" past the MPAA. Out of the mouth of a shapeshifting trickster god. And back in 1990, Chris Clarement used "leman" to describe Mystique's relationship with Destiny – an archaic term for a lover outside of marriage, which made it past editorial in part because it was archaic and in part because Destiny was already dead. Claremont finally had a way to convey this and by god he was going to do it even if he had to put the line in another character's mouth and even if Destiny had been dead for two years. I mean. Claremont was far from perfect. But it doesn't take much to make Joss Whedon look bad.
4. The rainbow Disney Mickey Mouse ears. I didn't do this because I couldn't find good footage of them where it was clear that this was part of Disney's official merchandise – all the footage was from fans - so I put it in the middle of the vid instead. If I had had something official though, something with the rainbow ears fading into one of the Disney logos, that would have been such a great end to this vid.
5. The James Gunn interview that starts the vid. Initially I was going to end this vid with Gunn's "we just don't know who the queers in the mcu are yet" because I thought it made the most sense after the long list of queers in comics – like, we DO know, you're just not putting them in. But
thingswithwings told me in beta that I needed to front-load the concept of the vid more, so people would see what I was doing before we got halfway through the song.Some stories I now love:
1. I found Northstar sooooo boooooring when I tried to read Alpha Flight in the 90s, after he came out, when I desperately wanted queer characters. At the time I found him disappointing – in part because no single character can be representation for all queer people. But it turns out that it's mostly Alpha Flight that's boring. In retrospect I now really appreciate Northstar's not-giving-a-fuck gayness. His "I don't care if people don't like me" memoir. His "I'm not joining the x-men because I'm not sure I believe in your vision, Xavier" "I want you to be a mentor to the young gays, actually" "oh, interesting" gayness. His attempts to mentor Anole that sometimes work, and sometimes fail because Anole is a lizard boy with one giant arm and Northstar looks like a movie star. His criticism of superhero politics that he can make in part because he doesn't give a fuck and he's not joining a team. There's also this amazing moment where Northstar's boyfriend Kyle is brainwashed by a super-conservative Canadian political party (reasons), and Kyle denounces Northstar live on tv. People on Alpha Flight assume Northstar is terribly hurt by this; they're like "oh no, Northstar, don't worry, that's not really Kyle" and Northstar is like "obviously it's not Kyle, Kyle would never have that haircut, that is a brainwashed by conservatives haircut." Northstar is kind of a dick and so egotistical that he never doubted this and, you know, I've been missing queers getting to be assholes but still fighting for the side of light.
2. Jessie Drake! Possibly Marvel's first human trans character! (note comics ableist representations of mental illness in this paragraph) So Jessie only appears in two Marvel Comics Presents comics with terrible art BUT. It's beautiful and it totally made me <3 her. Typhoid Mary, a super-villain with "multiple personalities" as a result of sexual assault and trauma, is in a mental institution being studied by dude scientists when she is recruited by Wolverine to save some mutant children. Mary has a Typhoid Mary persona who is "lustful" and a sex object for dudes, and a Bloody Mary man-hating persona who tries to kill dudes. Mary starts to rescue Jessie, is in the process of taking her to a women's shelter, and then goes "fuck you're a dude" and changes to Bloody Mary to kill her. Jessie is like "actually I'm a girl" and Mary goes "oh! Okay! Sorry!" and stops trying to kill her. Then Jessie is like "so look, it seems like both of your personas are in response to men, right? Whether it's about pleasing them or killing them? There's a better non-dude-focused you in there." And then Typhoid Mary becomes Mary and walks off into the sunset with Jessie, leaving a crowd of men asking them questions behind; they save each other. Later Marvel retcons all of this of course. But, like, Mary is Jessie's mentor! Mary's superpower is necessarily about gender and her superpower recognizes Jessie as a girl. Writing a trans girl character next to a character whose superpower is about responding to men is a giant fuck-you to TERFs. And they walk into the sunset hand in hand, aaaaah.
3. Paradox! Paradox is an anti-gravity dancer in a futuristic space empire with lots of income inequality and genetically engineered "servant species." He himself has been non-consensually genetically engineered to be a shapeshifter, and is an undercover agent for the oppressive Interplanetary Security Agency (basically space CIA), which aggressively pursues rebels etc. (One of the things I found most interesting about this is that the ISA is super uncomfortable with him – there are some gay slurs directed at him from people with power, and also people going "what, him, I don't want to be protected by that guy" or "he must be really good or they wouldn't employ a guy like him." He is too queer for the ISA.) He ends up leading an ISA strike team that's trying to investigate a colonial rebellion. I was super shocked when it turned out that actually Paradox is part of the colonial rebellion – he helps to kill his own strike team even though they seem to be friends (they bonded!), takes one of their forms, and then KILLS THE EMPEROR. Way to be a beautiful dangerous gengineered queer fighter for justice, Paradox! ILU you shape-shifting space bi. AMAZINGLY someone brought him into modern comics and the 616 universe in Wolverine: The Best There Is in 2011 – before that he was last in comics in 1982! (This Wolverine comic is terrible and you should not read it but I'm happy that Paradox is in it, shapeshifting his way around the 616 universe and wearing his 1980s leather pants and white flowy shirt and black vest and leaning dramatically against walls.)
4. Phyla-Vell and Moondragon! I always found cosmic Marvel pretty boring, so I was delighted to discover that when I read the "I'm only here for the queer characters" version it was a good time. Like, whatever Peter Quill, sure, fine, Rick Jones, y'all have fun but I'm just skimming through this until my faves return. How could I have found them boring! Phyla-Vell and Moondragon are so into each other even while they're fighting super powerful dudes, so much in love in a kind of codependent coming-back-from-the-dead-for-each-other way, and also they work really well together. And also Moondragon TURNS INTO A DRAGON and then she CAN'T CHANGE BACK and is like "I understand if this ends our relationship" and Phyla is like "no Heather I still love you to pieces" and then they are still queer and still amazing and Phyla RIDES MOONDRAGON INTO BATTLE. Also later the dragon consumes Moondragon due to reasons, and Phyla searches for her (and so does Drax because Heather is his daughter - she's maybe already dead or not present in his tragic backstory in the GotG films). When Phyla finds Moondragon imprisoned / consumed by the dragon she dives into the dragon's mouth and cuts her way out and emerges with Moondragon because COMICS NONSENSE CANNOT SEPARATE THEM. They've been dead like nine times each and there they still are being in love in new bodies or in spirit form or in dreams or hey back from the dead. Heavens.
Some panels I'm SUPER SAD didn't make it into the vid:
1. Homosexual Homo Superior Homo Everything (note homophobia here). This is something Bobby's dad says to him when Bobby comes out to him; it's part of a really terrible response from his parents. BUT it's also the sort of thing I want to take and make into a slogan. I do want there to be more homosexual homo superior homo everythings around.
2. Nick Fury: We don't give gays any grief. (For reference, this panel was published in November 1993, at a moment when "can gay people serve in the military or should they be banned" was a topic of contentious debate.)
3. Northstar and Hector, two known gays, sunbathing together in the 1995 Marvel swimsuit special. Caption: "Northstar and the Pantheon's Hector find a secluded spot near one of Madripoor's ancient temples to engage in their favorite kind of worship." Welllll I meaaaaaan. This is from Northstar's very very long no-canon-relationships-or-even-passing-mention-of-his-gayness phase in comics after he came out, but in the same period he also flirted with Hector in an Incredible Hulk comic so, you know, I ship it.
4. Odin calls his children my son, my daughter, and my child who is both. This took way too long to read even after I rearranged it, and it distracted from the actual panels of Loki, so I had to take it out of the Loki section or it would have been the only thing here but. It's great.
5. Sera putting the crown of Hel on Angela. I love this! But the silhouette looked like nothing at vid speed.
6. Loki joining the matriarchy of Heven (where Angela, who doesn't know she's their sister at this point, lives). I titled this "Thor chained to a pillar yikes" because wow, Loki, way to go, absolutely you are choosing the fun side here. Also this page where Angela and Loki talk and call each other sister.
7. Jisa and Nata's first meeting! They're in the end section holding hands, but this is how they meet - sadly in a mini in 2002 and I don't think they've appeared since. But still, A+.
8. Bobby Drake (young) flirts with a guy and then freaks out so much he accidentally ices over. This goes with this page of Ultimate Colossus clanking into his metal form when Northstar flirts with him, which is in the vid, but you can't tell what's happening in the part I used, sigh.
9. These two shots of queer mutants trying to use online dating sites: Riot (who is stuck at the time in her insectoid carapace form) and Iceman (who spends a whole issue trying to figure out what to write and ends up with something short).
10. Iceman comes out to Anole. This is lovely because the X-Men have always had a mentorship system, and Northstar and Karma both mentored Anole when he was a young gay mutant. And that's usually the way it goes in X-Men comics: adults who can teach teenagers about emotions and superpowers and also about how to deal when your exes attack the school and and so on. And so it's super lovely to have it work the other way here: Anole is the young mutant, he's just joined the team, but he's Bobby's mentor here.
That end section isn't anywhere near all the queer characters in Marvel! Some queers not appearing in the end section, an incomplete list:
Note: these are characters I chose other characters over for a variety of reasons; sometimes that's an inability to find the comic or a comic that's only available in terrible resolution and sometimes that's because I had so many recent characters, but sometimes it's due to unhappy endings for queer characters, rape, straightwashing, kinds of villainy I wanted to avoid if I could (serial killers, HYDRA), my hatred for Joe Quesada, and other yikes nope reasons.
I. Queer superheroes and villains
1. Brian Falsworth/Roger Aubrey (Union Jack/Destroyer) (2002)
These characters are really important to a lot of people and when Marvel finally confirmed that they were lovers it was a big deal for comics fans. But the comic where they are outed is Citizen V and the V Battalion The Everlasting, in a half-sentence in a flashback to right after Brian dies. Like the actual line is "Halloway – I just watched my lo – my … friend … die in my arms!" (Ellipses are where queerness lives. The queerest comics punctuation.) And the art is SO BAD and so grey. It's so bad that Roger and Nigel literally walk through a Pride parade at the beginning of the comic and I couldn't use it in my section about queer community because it looked nothing like Pride. It looked like the attendees were being murdered. And it looked like that before the Nazi vampires attacked. Sorry, Roger and Brian. I hope you get some brightly colored comics about your superheroic Nazi-punching love in the future. (Some comics histories say that there are some panels where Brian comes out in the late 1980s, but nobody listed issues and I couldn't find it. Cite your gays, people!)
2. Nigel Clowes (2005)
Nigel is also part of the V-Battalion and he gets together with Roger after Brian dies. But I felt bad putting Nigel/Roger in but leaving Brian/Roger out.
3. Nico Minoru (Sister Grimm) who reportedly tried to kiss Karolina in Runaways v5 5 (March 2018)
Nico reportedly tried to kiss Karolina in Runaways 5.05! They've been playing this unrequited on Karolina's side for like 12 years! So I wish I'd known about this in time to get it in.
4. Jennifer Kale (Witch Woman) who has a girlfriend in a vision in Ghost Rider #92 (1997)
Marvel hired gay Latino comics writer Ivan Velez Jr, who had previously written for Gay Comix, to write this run of Ghost Rider! Super cool! But I couldn't find this issue.
5. Toni Ho/Aikku Jokinen (2016)
I accidentally crossed Toni and Aikku off of my list when I read the Aikku intro in Avengers (before I'd clipped New Avengers) and so I missed them in the end section and I'm bummed about it. Toni is Yinsen's daughter, and she is an engineering genius who makes a Rescue suit and ends up becoming Supreme Leader of AIM (after it was no longer evil) and renaming it RESCUE and she falls in love with Aikku. Aikku is a regular human who ends up bonded to an alien AI armor and ends up wearing it all the time so that the AI (named Pod) can develop, because whenever she takes it off the AI resets. Together they fight AIM crime.
6. Johnny Bart (Rawhide Kid) who was gay in volume 3 of his self-titled comic (2003 maybe?)
The Rawhide Kid was a long-time Marvel character who was revealed as gay in volume 3 (which was rated as a Max comic despite containing no sex). Later he was left out of the Marvel Western event so they wouldn't have to rate that Max. Also later the Marvel Official Handbook seemed to say that he was actually straight and this was just "an eccentric persona apparently intended to confuse others." Then later he was gay again. I decided I didn't want to deal with this and figuring out what date to list.
7. Curtis Doyle (Freedom Ring), a new character Marvel super talked up and bragged about (2006)
Sooooo Freedom Ring. I'm still so mad about this and I don't even care about him. Joe Quesada was like "Freedom Ring is our new amaze gay superhero! He's awesome! Everyone focus on him!" Then they killed him literally one month later. By impaling him on spikes. Fuck this shit. He lasted from May – September 2006. I think he appeared more in Joe Quesada interviews than he did in actual comics. I didn't feel like I could include Curtis without changing the title card to be like "fuck Joe Quesada" which seemed like it would distract from the point of the vid? But fuck Joe Quesada. Here's a geeksout post on the subject..
8. Amalia and Elena, America Chavez's moms (2013)
I used the best shot of them in the intro and this section at the end was the most full :(
9. Akihiro (Daken) (????)
Daken basically only ever has sex with anyone if he wants to get something out of it or manipulate them; comics readers agree that he's bi or pan or queer, but he doesn't ever say that because Marjorie Liu thinks he's "past that kind of identification." Everything I found when I was first looking was dubcon or noncon, whether it was sex or dancing or kissing – he has pheromone control powers and since he uses sex to get things, like, yikes. I felt bad about this for a while because a lot of people love him but then
isagel told me she'd never heard of him and I was greatly relieved to get to stop looking for a panel I could use. 10. Maxwell Dillon (Electro) (2004)
This is a Max Millar comic and it does a prison rape -> bisexuality thing. Pass.
11. Mephisto (1994)
Mephisto is pure evil; at one point he shapeshifts into Nova, a dead woman that Silver Surfer worked with and loved. As Nova, Mephisto tricks the Silver Surfer into surrendering his soul. Oops. Silver Surfer is like "I surrendered my soul under false pretenses! This doesn't count!" Mephisto is like "uh it totally does." Also pass. (Although if this is a dynamic you're into, WOW are Silver Surfer 3.99 and 3.100 for you. Liiiiike: "You exist for my amusement … to do and be anything I desire … take any shape … serve any purpose. It is mine to deem you slave … or lover … or nothing.")
12. Sybil Dvorak (Skein) (2003?)
The internet swears to me that Sybil comes out in Thunderbolts 1.75 but I read that comic like four times and I swear that the only thing that happens is that someone else assumes that Sybil is making a pass; it just didn't feel that clear to me.
13. Val Ventura (Flatman) (2005?)
The internet tells me that Val comes out in the same set of comics as Living Lightning, who I did find and who is in the end section? But I missed it somehow.
14. Perry Webb/Frank Cortez (American Ace/Captain Flame) (2011)
Perry and Frank are both part of a squad of enhanced soldiers in WWII; they reportedly make out in an alley in All-Winners Squad, but I couldn't find a copy of it. Perry was created in 1939 and is one of the characters on this list with the longest intro-to-outing gap: he was in 3 comics in in 1939 and 1940, and then he wasn't in any comics again until two issues in 2011 in flashbacks. This makes Perry (along with Brian Falsworth and Roger Aubrey) some of the earliest in-internal-chronology queer human characters in Marvel comics. Frank was created for All-Winners Squad so he's newer. Also, Perry was married to a woman while he was having sex with Frank, and Frank was blackmailed by his squadmate Slo-Mo Jones for his homosexuality and possibly killed by Slo-Mo. Also Slo-Mo was created as a minstrel stereotype and Marvel "updated" him to make him less offensive … by making him a homophobic blackmailer and maybe murderer. Yikes.
15. Ned Campbell (2005)
A disabled mutant who was married to a woman but having astral projection sex with a dude. He gets killed in his astral projection form so his body dies. This manages to be ableist AND a terrible closeted-gay-dudes-ruin-lives story at the same time. Yikes, Peter David, yiiiikes.
16. Percival Pinkerton (2002ish/1964)
One of Nick Fury's howling commandos. Semi-outed retroactively a la Dumbledore by word-of-god when Stan Lee was asked about Rawhide Kid; in my reading this does not appear in the actual comics and it feels like the usual Stan Lee retcon. Scans-daily has some comments on this subject. I declined word-of-god gays especially vague-forty-years-later word of god gays.
17. Katrina Luisa Van Horn (Amazon / Man-Killer) (2000)
Katrina is mentioned on some lists of lesbian comics characters, and I can totally see how people interpret it that way – she's a feminist terrorist who goes by Man-Killer – but everything she says on the subject is vague; like, she says things to dudes who flirt with her like "I call myself Man-Killer, how do you think I really feel about you?" Which is "not into dudes" but doesn't necessarily imply "into ladies" so unless there's something I missed I wish people would put her on lists of queer characters instead of specifically lesbian characters – like, she could be ace. Anyway I left Katrina out because she also worked for HYDRA. Also this is yet another terrorism narrative on this list that ties disability and queerness together.
18. Victoria Hand (2009)
Victoria Hand is in a relationship with another SHIELD agent, Isabelle … in a flashback in one comic that is incredible badly framed and dark and surrounded by speech bubbles everywhere. I recall reading other comics that referenced her queerness, but I couldn’t remember which ones, and I didn't find anything else on a quick skim.
19. Stacy-X and Sugar Kane (2011)
Stacy-X and Sugar Kane and Ultimate Nullifer have a threesome in the terrible Vengeance comic that was only good for introducing America Chavez.
20. Benjamin Deeds/Nathaniel Carver (Morph/Hindsight) (2018)
Benji and Nathaniel are in the new X-Men comics; Benji is a shape-shifter and Nathaniel has psychometry. Benji revealed as gay (to the reader) earlier in the comics, and has some hesitance about revealing his feelings for Nathaniel, but then it turns out Nathaniel is also gay and has had a boyfriend before, and then they kiss and because Nathaniel has psychometry he sees Benji's past in the kiss. A+ combination of power+feelings. C- panel arrangement. I had planned for this to be the most recent panel in the end section for a while but then I yanked it out at the last minute for the much better framed (and by Wiscon GOH Saladin Ahmed) Valkyrie/Bucky kiss.
21. Romeo (2016)
Romeo is one of the Inhumans and young time-traveling Bobby Drake's boyfriend, but I ended up using just one Bobby shot in the final section (original Bobby/Judah) because I didn't have room for both Bobbys and their boyfriends.
22. Jessica Drew (Ultimates) (2014)
There's a set of panels in All New Ultimates where Jessica is like "I'm into Jewish redheaded women because I'm Peter Parker's clone." Weird biological determinism but I might've used it if the layout wasn't just impossible to get into 16:9.
23. Karl Coven (Coven) (2003)
A serial killer who nonconsensually kissed Rick Jones. Peter David sometimes gives you gems, and sometimes he gives you Karl Coven or Ned Campbell.
24. Doop (2012-ish)
Doop is omnisexual! But I also find Doop and Doopspeak incredibly annoying and I didn't wanna.
25. Ian Soo (Telekinian) (2016)
Ian is an Inhuman who tried to rob an armored truck, gets stopped by Patsy Walker, and then becomes friends with Patsy. I totally forgot this Hellcat comic existed and thus missed him.
26. Raz Malhotra (Giant-Man) (2016)
The internet tells me that Raz had a boyfriend! But I couldn't find a good panel for it.
27. Alana Jobson (Jackpot) (2008)
Alana is in a bummer of a story. Sara Ehret is the original Jackpot, but she doesn't want to be a superhero; Alana pays Sara to take over Jackpot and uses MGH to get powers. Also Alana is attracted to Sara. Then Alana dies and the queer death is a ~lesson~ for Sara in how great power means great responsibility and you can't opt out of superheroing in a Spider-Man comic. Pass.
28. El Brujo (1991)
El Brujo is a bi Mexican superhero! … in the comic Captain Confederacy, an AU where the Confederates won the Civil War. By W*ll Sh*tterly. Soooooo I didn't go find this. (Hilariously every time I ran into it somewhere I had this outraged BUT I BLOCK W*LL SH*TTERLY reaction even though I was on, like, someone's blog.)
29. Deadpool (????)
My feelings about Deadpool are reaaaaaaallly complicated.
II. Humans with no powers who don't work with supers
I mostly didn't include non-supers or non-heroes except for Arnie in the main section, since he's so egregiously left out of Captain America.
1. Arnold Astrovik (1994)
Arnold is Vance Astrovik's father; Vance is a mutant, and Arnold beats him and calls him a freak. Vance kills Arnold accidentally. Later, Vance goes back in time for $reasons, and learns that Arnold was gay and beaten by his own father for it; Arnold decides that his only option is to leave his boyfriend and get married and have the life his dad wants. So it's a story about the cycle of violence and also another piece in the gay mutant metaphor. What I find interesting about this is that Vance tries to stop his grandfather's violence against his father with violence, and fails and is upset at his own violence; then he also tries to encourage his father to stay with his boyfriend, even though he might erase his own existence. Vance already ends the cycle of violence by being an out mutant and not a violent abuser, but also he tries to intervene in it in the past. This is some fucking queer time travel. I only wish it had actually worked, that Vance had successfully intervened with his father via compassion. (Though at the same time the story perpetuates stereotypes about closeted dudes that comics are super into. Plus the immigrant homophobia stereotype.) I find this story really really interesting but I didn't include it because a) non-super b) people familiar with Vance's backstory might find this distressing and c) my decent version download of it didn't complete in time. But for real look at this two-page spread.
2. Ultimate Jarvis (sometime between 2002 – 2006)
Jarvis (Tony's butler) is gay in Ultimates, but I was never an Ultimates fan, the internet was not helpful in indicating when exactly this happens in those comics, and he's not a superhero so I didn't try too hard to find it.
3. Curtis Moss (2002)
A closeted gay dude married to a woman; Jessica Jones investigates him for his wife, who thinks he's cheating on her. It's like the Ned Campbell story, but earlier and less ableist but also less mutant-y.
4. Rebecca Cross (2002)
Another Jessica Jones investigation! Rebecca runs away from home and her parents hire Jessica to find her; Jessica thinks she's a mutant. But it turns out that Rebecca ran away because she felt "different" in a queer sense - she starts dating a woman in the town she runs away to.
5. Jack Casey (2010)
A Daily Bugle reporter; his homosexuality comes out after he's dead.
6. Christian Frost (2003)
Christian is Emma Frost's brother; he left his family and defied his asshole of a father to be with his boyfriend Dante. Buuuuuut then his dad had Dante deported and then Christian was depressed and then his dad institutionalized him sooooo I passed on this.
7. Colt Varney (1993)
Colt technically appears in the panel from the early 90s drag bar from Nomad 2.11 that's in the vid, which is part of why he's not in the end list. He's just a one issue character, but he helps Nomad find a murderer preying on the drag bar. He was also discharged from the military because he was gay. Nomad v 2 also features several other queer characters: Henry Greider, Robert Thaldron, Robert's unnamed secretary.
8. Tyler Lang/Jefferson Wolfe (1991)
AIDS narrative, but also Tyler is the son of a crime boss and has to be protected by the Hulk. Tyler dies, Jefferson doesn't (but also never appears again).
9. Rebecca Bergier (1995)
Rebecca works for Worldwatch, a non-profit that investigates humans rights abuses. James Rhodes ends up running Worldwatch; someone attempts to blackmail the org with Rebecca's lesbianism and instead she comes out to Rhodey. Rebecca is in several War Machine and Iron Man comics but then all of Worldwatch just stops being a part of the War Machine comics and they never really follow up on Rebecca or any of the other employees.
10. Kaycee (2013)
Kaycee kisses Anabelle Riggs in Fearless Defenders (when Anabelle and Valkyrie are sharing a body); she's Anabelle's ex. But there are already two different Anabelle kisses in the vid: one with Valkyrie in the main section, and one with new Inhuman Ren in the end section.
11. Adam Keith (2009)
A gay lawyer who defends Mille Collins.
12. Chili Storm (2009)
Chili has been in almost 250+ Marvel comics! In the models / comedy / non-supers line to start with. She's a supporting character to Millie the Model starting in 1948, and in a Models Inc comic in 2009 she is casually interested in women and it's lovely.
13. Molly von Richthofen (1999)
Molly is a lesbian policewoman who has to deal with rejecting the police commissioner when he hits on her! They give her a problem case to punish her but she cracks it (with some other characters). She's a minor non-super but she appears in 15 whole comics … but they're all issues of Punisher.
14. Steve Southall/Clark (2003)
Steve is a sheriff; Clark is the son of a weapons dealer. Together they don't fight crime, but dream of a better life together. But this is a Punisher comic, so instead Clark dies in a terrible bloody way and Steve is strung up on a building to slowly die in a terrible hate-crime martyr way; he's cut down by Punisher but he still dies of his injuries. Hard pass. I went to find this based on a character list and it suuuuuper bummed me out.
15. William Rawlins (2005)
Oh look another character from Punisher who really bummed me out! A corrupt bisexual CIA agent who in his most noteworthy act pushes his wife out of a helicopter and leaves her behind to be raped forever in an also super racist arc. He has sex with Nicky Cavella, a gay dude in the mob, a bunch of times.
16. Lisa (1993)
Lisa is a lesbian who went to Hell because she had so much guilt about being a lesbian. Fun! Then she gets resurrected into a reanimated corpse and it's all very complicated and might be a demonic plan. Hellstorm comics. Idk.
17. Lisa Halloran (2015)
Lisa is dating America Chavez! I would have used the America/Lisa relationship instead of America/Mags (which went wrong) but unfortunately I couldn't get Avengers 6.0 and everything I saw later was framed really badly.
18. Zoe Zimmer (2016)
Zoe is a Ms Marvel supporting character who has a giant crush on Nakia Bahadir.
19. Max Modell/Hector Baez (2012)
Max is Peter Parker's boss (briefly), and he casually references his relationship with his bf Hector Baez. Nice!
III. Characters who aren't in the end section in part because queerness gets complicated in comics, especially in cosmic Marvel
1. Monark Starstalker (2011)
Monark is Paradox's lover when Paradox comes to 616! However, Paradox is a shapeshifter and we only ever see Monark kissing Paradox when Paradox is shapeshifting. (They also bang while Paradox is shapeshifting and Monark is in glowing nanite cloud form. If that's a thing you're into.) There's a super confusing conversation that they have at one point that seems to indicate that Monark isn't into dudes? But he is kissing Paradox, who is a dude even when he is shapeshifting? But the various wikis don't list Monark as queer/bi/wev? But maybe that's because Wolverine: The Best There Is was such a terrible comic that nobody remembers it? Or maybe it's because he identifies as straight elsewhere and since it's not in this comic I missed it? So anyway this seemed complicated and I didn't want to deal with it or read a million other Monark comics for context.
2. Erik Josten (Atlas) (2001)
Atlas ends up dead and then shares his girlfriend's body (so they're two people in her body). Trans metaphor, but does he belong in this set of queer characters? Also he worked for Nazis so nope.
3. Christina Carr (Captain Power) (1999)
Christina is exposed to the same radiation as Doc Ock, but her superpower is to turn into super-strong and invulnerable Captain Power. Captain Power is male-bodied. Again, trans metaphor or genderfluidness possibly? But it's totally unexplored in the comics.
4. Anthony Druid (Dr. Druid) and Jillian Woods (Sepulchre) (1994)
Anthony and Jillian have been linked lovers through multiple past lives; in previous incarnations Jillian was a dude and Anthony was a woman. Gay League includes them in their list of trans characters, possibly because this felt way more like representation in 1994, but reincarnation feels different to me.
5. Ayesha/Kismet/Her/Paragon (1980)
In comics, Adam Warlock was made by the Enclave as a super-soldier. When he declined to stick around, the Enclave made Kismet; Kismet, like Adam, was made in a male-bodied form (originally called "Paragon" and a self-described paragon of mankind). Paragon destroyed the Enclave, escaped, learned about Adam Warlock, decided that as two perfect and unique beings they were destined to have babies, and emerged from a chrysalis female-bodied and using the name (and the pronoun) Her. Unfortunately, Adam had died while Her was in the chrysalis and so she went around trying to have babies with a other super-dudes. Also unfortunately for Her, her solution to procreation was to make incubation pods and put them in the super-dudes, and none of them wanted to be incubators for her babies. (I find this super interesting – like the comic does the body-change-for-procreation thing but she doesn't try to get pregnant herself.) Eventually Quasar was like "biology isn't destiny" and Her renamed herself Kismet and went off to protect the universe. For some reason this backstory and changing-gender didn't happen in Guardians of the Galaxy 2? And instead she was just an obsessed-with-bodily-perfection golden person? I would have included this since I've read trans comics fans talking about how important this was to them - a lot of characters in comics have accidental, unwanted body changes / brain transfers / etc but Her's is a chosen transformation - but unfortunately the most important scenes happened in a Marvel 2-In-1 and I couldn't find it and have only ever seen them in a super-blurry crops.
6. Aleta Ogord (Starhawk II) (1992)
This is a SUPER complicated Guardians of the Galaxy story: Aleta and her brother Stakar discover the statue of god, Aleta accidentally triggers it and turns into pure energy, ends up in Stakar's body, they share the body (when one of them is using it, the body shapeshifts to their form, and the other person is in limbo). Then they explore space together for a while, get bored and lonely, and ask the god to separate them. They "mate" and have kids (this is the point at which the wikis all capslock about ADOPTIVE SIBLINGS ADOPTIIIIIIIIVE) and then re-merge, and Aleta does all the childrearing while Stakar gets increasingly bored in limbo because god forbid he help with the kids. So then he steals the body and goes off into space, the kids end up dead because they aren't there to protect them, Stakar joins the Guardians, Aleta and Stakar get separated again and Aleta divorces Stakar because he's a jerk and gets engaged to Vance Astro instead. But then! Stakar noncon absorbs Aleta into his body again because he's a terrible person, and this time even when she's in control she looks like Stakar. (This is the source of this amazing panel.) Then they split bodies again. *does butterfly meme is this queer gesture* Stakar is a supporting character in GotG2, played by Sylvester Stalone, laughing about how he divorced that bitch. (SHE divorced YOU, asshole.) I could be misremembering, but I think Aleta is never actually named in the film, though she does appear in one tiny mid-credits scene (played by Michelle Yeoh). But for some reason there's no hint of shared-body shape-shifting.
7. Xavin (2005ish)
My feelings about Skrull gender are complicated.
8. Noh-Varr (2014)
My feelings about Kree sexuality are also complicated. And also of all the Young Avengers he's the most boring.
Some places to read more:
Prism Comics: a comics advocacy group! They have an annual grant for comics of interest to LGBTQ readers, they do profiles of queer creators of comics, they exhibit at Comic-Con. They also talk about homophobia in the industry. Also they sell "homo superior" tote bags if that's a thing you're interested in.
Gay League: a site run by lgbt comics fans; their news section is really good at what's released and upcoming. Gay League has been around since 1997, but they were hacked and offline for a while, and are back now! They also do some lgbt comics history that includes indies as well as mainstream comics. I appreciate putting Hothead Paisan and Northstar in the same list!
Autostraddle's Drawn to Comics: This is Autostraddle's tag for print and web comics, and it includes reviews of some recent Marvel comics.
Homosexuality in Comics on CBR: this is an interview series with various comics creators about queer themes in comics that talks about their formative comics, where they think the industry is, etc. It dates to 2007 so it's super dated now but interesting as a historical document. Especially because it interviews both queer creators like Allan Heinberg, Terrance Griep, and Devin Grayson, and creators like Mark Millar and Alan Moore who have written/drawn queer themes but aren't queer themselves.
Gay Comics List: a long list of reviews of comics with queer themes, including indies. No longer updated as far as I know.
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Date: 2018-06-30 11:12 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-06-30 04:52 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-06-30 06:14 pm (UTC)And great point about the DC tv series doing so much better than Marvel. I can't wait for Batwoman to show up in the next crossover event eeeee!!
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Date: 2018-06-30 07:25 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-06-30 10:22 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-07-01 12:55 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-07-01 01:03 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-07-01 01:07 am (UTC)I am so excited about Batwoman! I hope she ends up a regular or even a frequent guest star.
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Date: 2018-07-01 01:08 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-07-01 01:09 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-07-01 04:12 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-07-01 10:23 pm (UTC)Is there a link to the vid and/or this post anywhere on tumblr? I'd love to reblog it if I could.
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Date: 2018-07-02 02:11 am (UTC)Neither of these is on tumbler (because I'm not), but feel free to post/link them there.
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Date: 2018-07-02 04:26 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-07-12 07:18 pm (UTC)... dragon girlfriends would be so cool...
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Date: 2019-02-28 09:16 pm (UTC)Also, MAN the weird body-switching "queerish" superhero comics. That seems to have fallen out of fashion, the past twenty years or so, but for the prior twenty, it was such a thing, so much a thing that I could probably do a presentation just on THAT. As it is, it gets to be an interesting footnote in my queer comics history talks, along with the genital-transformation fetish webcomics bubble.
Superhero comics were my gateway drug to comics, and I have watched all the crappy Fantastic Four movies (yes, even the Gordon Korman one, I have no taste) but your video made me realize yet another factor in why I might not be into MCU.
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Date: 2019-04-02 08:37 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-06-12 02:50 pm (UTC)Thank you!
Date: 2019-07-19 12:30 pm (UTC)Thank you for letting me take advantage of your hard work!
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Date: 2020-09-08 10:27 pm (UTC)*I doubt that it was intentional that Arnie seems part of Bucky, that's what happens when you retcon the kid sidekick into the playground to battlefield childhood friend and there was a canon childhood friend that's Missing. That MCU canonically Damsel in Distress tropes Bucky until it it hard Nopes, that's the Not Rep (with your side order of Hydra's POW|Fist)