Is Iceman gay now?

Apparently. The founding X-Man of the past recently came out as gay but it remains to be seen if the present Iceman is also gay.

This is all due to time travel shenanigans. The present-day Beast, disgusted with the increasingly militant behavior of Cyclops, decided to bring the founding teenage X-Men from the past to show them their dark future so they could avoid it. Iceman starts ogling at a woman and Marvel Girl thinks he is putting on an act.

Jean pulls Bobby aside and basically says, you can drop it because we all pretty much know you’re gay. Iceman reluctantly admits it. Readers have pointed out that Jean’s behavior of reading Iceman’s mind without his permission, as well as pushing him out of the closet, was unethical. This is of a piece with Jean’s character, as she could be brash and as the Phoenix Force started influencing her, she used her telepathy to “change” people’s minds without their permission.

Anyway, I assume the present-day Iceman will come out but time travel screws up so many things in the Marvel Universe that you can never be sure. The tendency is to look back and see if there were any hints in the past that the character was gay. Iceman never really did well with women. He had a girlfriend in the ‘90s but acknowledged that he’d rather be going on missions with the X-Men than spending time with her, so they broke up. Emma Frost once had sustained telepathic access to his brain and hinted that he was holding something back but kept his secrets. It’s pretty rich that Emma, who a lot of characters regard as unethical and catty, would keep Iceman’s secret, while her mortal enemy Jean did not. (In fairness, this is teenage Jean so she might get a pass for immaturity.)

The whole thing is amusing if you remember X-Men 2, when Iceman’s coming out as a mutant to his parents was staged just like a gay coming out.

Iceman would be the oldest Marvel character to come out. There aren’t a ton of gay Marvel superheroes but there are a few notable ones. Northstar famously came out around 1993 and it was a big deal then. They had hinted for years about his sexuality in the pages of Alpha Flight but Marvel would not allow gay heroes in the ‘80s (there is an infamous story where he got an AIDS-like illness and was revealed to have an Asgardian faerie heritage but it got retconned to hell and back). Times have changed because when Northstar married his partner a few years ago, the reaction was a deafening shrug. Young Avengers members Hulkling and Wiccan (sort-of son of the Scarlet Witch) are also gay.

There are a handful of Marvel lesbians. I believe former New Mutant Karma is gay. There have been heavy hints that Rachel Summers is gay and Kitty Pryde’s close friendship with her and Illyana Rasputin was implied to be more than platonic, but nothing ever came of it. One of the Power Pack girls is also gay but I forget which one. Storm was heavily implied to be bisexual in the ‘80s and to have slept with Yukio, an ex of Wolverine.

There are probably a few gay characters that I forgot.