Spiderman is a Twink, and Wolverine is a Bear
Even though Stan Lee actively fought against LGBTQ representation, except for the most problematic of queer-coded villians
In 2014, Wikileaks published hacked emails between top executives and producers at Sony Pictures. Reporting on the contents spilled out onto the internet throughout 2015. Despite attempted scrubbing, you can still access some of the documents using the Wayback Machine.
Included in these leaked emails were contracts regarding the Spiderman movies. They explicitly detail that, according to Marvel, Spiderman is never to be portrayed as anything but male, white and straight.
Interestingly, E! News reports that this contract appears to have been created after the first appearance of Miles Morales, a Black/Puerto Rican Spiderman from an alternate universe. Miles has since become hugely popular. We know that Stan lee did not hold comprehensive creative control over the sprawling Marvel universe of characters at that point. Was this contract with Sony pictures enshrining Spidey as white really a reaction to a percieved loss of control over the white character he co-created with artist Steve Ditko?
When asked by Newsarama, Lee plainly verified that he feels that Spiderman should forever be white and straight:
“I wouldn’t mind, if Peter Parker had originally been black, a Latino, an Indian or anything else, that he stay that way,” Lee said. “But we originally made him white. I don’t see any reason to change that.” [ … ]
“I think the world has a place for gay superheroes, certainly,” he said. “But again, I don’t see any reason to change the sexual proclivities of a character once they’ve already been established. I have no problem with creating new, homosexual superheroes.” — Newsarama via the Wayback Machine
But was that true? Was he OK with new, queer characters? Stan Lee passed on November 12, 2018. Prior to that date, there simply was no queer content in the MCU, apart from one line from Valkyrie in 2017’s Thor: Ragnarok (more on that later). And queer characters in the books were very scarce, as illustrated by this article on marvel.com from 2019.
To be perfectly honest, I had ZERO IDEA that Iceman had a queer journey in the comicbooks — which I just learned from reading that article. He has always been portrayed as the straightest of dweebs in the FOX studios movies, and in the books I have read. And who is Northstar, anyways? I don’t think that there are many folks who would argue he is an A-list character as far as the Marvelverse goes. From my perspective as a lifelong Marvel fan, there has been almost no queer content in the Marvelverse until relatively recently. Fans have loved to extrapolate about Loki’s queerness via his gender switching in the comicbooks. But it wasn’t until after Lee passed that that this was talked about on-screen via Disney’s 2021 Loki TV series.
The earliest queer content I noticed on-screen from Marvel properties was in the FX TV 2017 series Legion. There, the most depraved and mentally unstable villian (Lenny) is explicitly queer. She is such a caricature of evil, almost the personification of it, that I find it extremely hard to read her whole arc as anything but an attack on queer identity. The fact that she is possibly only an hallucination/figment of imagination (not a real person) only cements this feeling for me. This is the kind of queer content that Lee approved for distribution.
To put it mildly, queer content in Marvel properties was scarce prior to 2018. We got that one-line about a girlfriend from Valkyrie in 2017’s Thor: Ragnarok, but according to OUT Magazine, a scene actually illustrating her queerness was, unsurprizingly, cut:
According to writer/director Taika Waititi, there was originally a scene filmed where a woman can be seen leaving Valkyrie's apartment, presumably after a hookup. Unfortunately, the scene was cut after audiences didn't understand it.
"We tested that scene. And people were just so confused," Waititi said. "I think we were just being so subtle about it that most audiences were like, 'who was that? Was that a flatmate?' People didn't connect the dots – or not enough did. So it was more confusing for audiences. We should have just had her come out and kiss her and then leave." — OUT Magazine
Other Marvel movies that had queerness scrubbed from them include The Marvels (which originally was set to include an inderlude between Captain Marvel and Valkyrie) and Black Panther: Wakanda Forever.
And it cannot be forgotten that actor Andrew Garfield himself confirmed that the powers that be pressured him to retract speculation about portraying Peter Parker as bisexual in a third Amazing Spiderman — a project which ended up getting scuppered entirely.
There was an interview I gave where I said, ‘Why can’t Peter explore his bisexuality in his next film? Why can’t [his girlfriend] MJ be a guy?’ I was then put under a lot of pressure to retract that and apologise for saying something that is a legitimate thing to think and feel. So I said, ‘OK, so you want me to make sure that we get the bigots and the homophobes to buy their tickets?’ — Andrew Garfield in the Independent
After Lee passed in 2018? We finally got legitimate, on-screen queer representation in 2020’s New Mutants — which was not produced by Marvel Studios, and so is absent (like Lenny) from many internet lists on LGBTQ Marvel content. New Mutants was the first Marvel on-screen property to centralize a queer love story. And damn, it felt good.
Then, the 2021’s Eternals movie featured a queer hero — a first for the MCU proper.
I have high hopes for increasing queer content in the Marvelverse going forward. But it seems clear to me that this started with, and was only possible after, the passing of Lee. I find it EXTREMELY hard to digest treatises from fans who rail against this take, and defend Lee as some kind of crusader for inclusivity. In my view, he caplitalized on this perception, which was in actuality driven by content and direction from other Marvel-associated creators. Basically — taking credit for other people’s stuff.
Lee did speak about creating the X-MEN in 1963 as a metaphor for the Civil Rights movement. He did speak about equality for Black people, and racism being a societal ill. However — the X-MEN were a group of 100% white people for their first entire decade (until the debut of Storm in 1975), and remain overwhelmingly white on-screen to this day.
Similarly, much is made about seeing the X-MEN as a metaphor for queer oppression. I definitely have had those feels throughout the years, myself. However, it has always been the fans (like me) overlaying this take onto the existing content — which remained stubbornly straight until New Mutants. After Lee was gone.
Happily, queer joy can always be found in fanfiction and fan hot takes. That’s the lovely thing about fiction — readers, as a matter of course, create our own backstories and futures for characters as we read. We naturally imagine the totality of worlds they inhabit — inner and outer. And nothing could ever stop that.
For your daily dose of queer joy, google “Is Spiderman a Twink?” The internet is rife with conversation. And I think few could argue casting Wolverine as the ur-bear — a genre-defining specimen. You think he never once had a dalliance with a man in hundreds (thousands?) of years of life and interplanetary travel? Please. Though, he might never admit to it.
It’s a little tough for me to give a whole lot of credit to the MCU for finally including Deadpool’s canonical bisexuality onscreen in 2024’s Deadpool & Wolverine, as there isn’t much that comes out of the guy’s mouth that isn’t an actual joke. But ultimately, I just don’t like Deadpool very much, and I’m happy to admit this bias being probably most of the reason I don’t think of Deadpool & Wolverine as praise-worthy LGBTQ representation. But that’s just my take. There are legions of fans that Deadpool makes very happy. And that is the only, singular fucking point that has any meaning or value in fiction. Does it make you happy?