The media is full of openly gay characters. Rather than staking out a controversial stance ahead of the curve of popular opinion and riding the waves of its own making, Marvel found itself instead playing catch-up to the headlines of the day. They live in the state of New York, where gay marriage is legal in both the real and comic book worlds, so why not? The story was broken on " The View" and picked up a predictable amount of press. In May 2012 it announced that Northstar was going to marry his boyfriend Kyle. Shan Coy Manh AKA Karma from the original New Mutants in a scene casually referencing her sexuality.įast forward twenty years, and Marvel decides to pull two tricks out of the old playbook.
Rather than being a storyline driver it was simply part of the normal fabric of the fictional world.
Northstar wasn't destined to be the solo gay mutant, though less was made of more minor players like the New Mutants' Karma being revealed as a lesbian. Media event or not, Marvel was directly speaking to that connection, and it was a somewhat risky move on its part the public might not have been ready for it. Themes of distrust and fear of the other are familiar-the neighbor who might look like you but inside is somehow different, people who feel like outsiders inside of a society that at best isn't always welcoming and at worst reacts with unveiled hatred and violence. Much has been made of the parallels between the struggle for gay civil rights in the real world and the fictional portrayals of mutants fighting for equality and stepping out of their own closet.
It was likely no coincidence that the character Marvel chose to come out was a mutant. The storyline of Alpha Flight #106 revolved around a baby dying of AIDS, and it felt relevant that a superhero would hold a press conference to discuss his sexuality. ACT UP activists had tried to hijack the set of the CBS Evening News the year before. The early '90s were also the peak of ACT UP ( AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) generating its own headlines.
(That's right, ink-this was 1992.) Advertisement Comics like Frank Miller's Batman: Year One or Neil Gaiman's The Sandman were slowly breaking down the popular perception of comic books as purely a children's medium, but the notion of a gay hero was still one that generated plenty of ink and controversy. At this time there was no Will & Grace putting gay characters into the mainstream and Ellen DeGeneres hadn't made television history by coming out (in character) in an airport. This storyline appeared a year before Don't Ask, Don't Tell-the United States policy on gay men and women serving in the military-a particularly relevant piece of real world legislation when it comes to talking about someone who isn't straight putting their life on the line to save people, be they fictional or otherwise.
This wasn't exactly a shock to anyone who followed the character-there had been sly nudges and winks aplenty for a while (including a strangely aborted AIDS storyline), but a comic book hero holding a press conference (the action takes place in Alpha Flight #106) to announce his sexuality generated plenty of real world press, as, one imagines, Marvel would have hoped. The spotlight fell on mutant hero Northstar, a member of Canadian team Alpha Flight, and an on-and-off-again X-Men teammate. Alpha Flight #106Looking to stir up some of that juicy publicity again in 1992, Marvel skipped the marriage route, let the tired, massive character crossover events take a break for once, and instead decided to out one of its characters as gay.