Thor: Love and Thunder was “super gay,” director Taika Waititi promised viewers when promoting the Marvel movie. “So gay,” echoed star Natalie Portman. We saw it last weekend and I can assure you the movie was not gay. Not really at all. There was a slightly lavender tint to a few fleeting scenes, but that was it. The January 6 hearings had more gay subtext.
Here is the sum total of gay moments in the “so gay” Thor sequel: Valkyrie kissed a woman’s hand and later made a few stray comments about loving a woman in the past. The non-humanoid character Korg mentioned that in his species, the males reproduce, so he had two dads. And that’s it. These were all scenes that were isolated moments that can be cut for screening in Qatar. There was supposed to be a story about Valkyrie finding a queen, but no sign of it, and Tessa Thompson was backtracking from the character’s sexuality, doing that “It shouldn’t define her character” tapdance that gay audiences are familiar with over the past few decades when something gets a little too gay and someone has to walk it back. So Waititi and Portman were just bullshitting the audience about how LGBTQ their movie is.
In 14 years of Marvel movies, here is the sum total of LGBTQ characters or moments. Some rando in Avengers: Endgame makes a throwaway reference to a boyfriend during a support group meeting. In Eternals, the character Phastos kisses his husband. America Chavez wore a pride emblem and had two moms in Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness. Loki once alluded to a boyfriend. And beyond some footsie in The Falcon and the Winter Soldier that would have been daring in the ‘90s, that’s it. The Phastos thing was along the lines of what I wanted to see—an LGBTQ character presented frankly, just living life as in our reality—but it was a moment for a character that I couldn’t pick out of a lineup even after 40 years of reading Marvel. The moment in Endgame was a blink-and-miss-it moment for an unnamed character. All this could easily be cut, so Marvel wouldn’t have to not release the movie in an easily offended foreign country, and could get the full $1.5 billion per movie instead of scraping by with $1.2 billion and a same-sex kiss.
Yet people cheered these moments. Doesn’t the fact that we get so excited about these gay crumbs Marvel is throwing us just emphasize that the Marvel Cinematic Universe is basically lagging behind every form of American pop culture in terms of LGBTQ representation?
Almost everything else is lapping Marvel in this. The list of LGBTQ characters in movies and TV is almost too long to get into. You trip over us in these mediums. The Marvel TV shows are a little better, with a few lesbian characters in Runaways. The DC TV shows do a pretty good job in representation—you have Sarah, Talia and Mr. Terrific on Arrow, and probably more, since we’re many seasons behind on these shows.
The Marvel Cinematic Universe is also lagging behind its own comic books by several decades. Northstar, the first Marvel superhero to come out, did so in 1992. This was after years of innuendo, since the Comics Code Authority forbid any depiction of homosexuality for decades. Still, a lot of writers were able to slip gay stories under the radar and show some sensitivity and maturity. There’s no such Comics Code binding the movies but Marvel is still censoring itself. Marvel Comics has a ton of LGBTQ characters, including the recently married Hulkling and Wiccan, America Chavez, the bisexual Hercules, and many more, since I don’t follow everything these days.
The X-Men have always been gay as hell, and you can read the story of their separation from society as an allegory for any marginalized people. Iceman came out a few years ago and that was a big deal, since he is a founding X-Man who has been a prominent character since 1963. Mystique and Destiny were always intended to be lesbian, introduced in the early ‘80s as two women raising their foster daughter, Rogue. Nowadays, they are long since a married couple. In the days when anything LGBTQ was forbidden, Marvel had to rely on heavy innuendo, and X-Men characters such as Kitty Pryde, Illyana Rasputin and Rachel Summers were heavily coded (and still are) as gay. Chris Claremont wrote a few stories about Storm that had screaming subtext.
That’s how Marvel had to get around the censors years ago, but now they can be more open if they want. So the MCU is in 2022 where the comics were in about 1983, and that’s disheartening.
I don’t need a two-hour drag show or a treatise on gender identity but given that Marvel has always tried to ground itself in the real world, it would be nice to see a significant gay character going about their business (or a transgender character, since they’re completely unrepresented in the MCU). If Marvel doesn’t want to do this, fine—but don’t bullshit your audience into seeing content that just isn’t there. You can’t do next to no work on something and then expect a great employment review at the end of the year.
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