The X-Men have always been here and queer, get used to it

According to triggered conservatives, a superhero team famously defined by their marginalised identities, has now "gone woke" lol.

Mar 26, 2024

In 2003’s X2, the sequel to the first X-Men film, mutant Bobby Drake aka Iceman, comes out as a mutant to his parents in a scene that’s a clear parallel to queer folks coming out to their families. His mom replies by asking the age old question, “Bobby, have you tried…not being a mutant?”

“I thought it might be fun to get an analogy with the way some people are picked on by bigots,” is a direct quote from the former head of Marvel Comics, Stan Lee, in a video clip you can find floating around social media that’s from 90s. As recent as a 2014, Stan Lee told Rolling Stone, “And basically, the main idea was to show that bigotry is really a terrible thing, and we should all get along with each other no matter how different we are. That was the main objective. If you needed an objective for a superhero story.”

And yet, If you have foolishly looked through the comments on literally any post on social media about Disney+’s new X-Men 97 you may have noticed how a certain sect of fans have reacted. The comments will usually range from “why’d they have to make it gay” to “it was better before they forced an agenda” or, the ever popular, “they made it woke now.”

The idea that even one person would think the X-Men weren’t ever woke is laughable but the idea that so many people think that has started to give me a nosebleed.

Well guess what, Mimi—the X-Men have always been woke. They’ve always been an allegory for queer folks, race relations in the US, and damn near any group that’s been othered. It’s always been there and it’s never been subtle but since media literacy seems to have died years ago, these folks seem to have retroactively missed the point. How did they even ever enjoy the X-Men? My wildly conservative father even said he knew the X-Men were always, “a metaphor for gays.”

a queer allegory doesn’t need to have an abundance of crop tops, but it doesn’t hurt

X-Men 97 and the woke agenda

X-Men 97 isn’t a reboot, but a revival of the original animated X-Men series from the nineties, which has only just started airing on Disney+.

It’s already both a love letter to the original and it’s own beautiful thing, a continuation of the original animated series with a lot of the same voice actors back in their roles 30 years later. It’s fun, action packed, and, yes, political. So political in fact, I’m surprised Disney allowed it to be made at all.

In the second episode, a human villain pulled from the comics named X-Cutioner (who debuted in a storyline with a mutant virus that’s an allegory for AIDS) shows up and tells Cyclops, “Know what I hate about your kind? You act like you got it so bad. Normal people have it hard, too. Harder! We just have the dignity not to whine about it” which has, in an unhinged turn of events, gotten lots of the aforementioned certain sect of fans on social media saying the villain had a point.

Later, X-Cutioner would go on to get his ass handed to him by Magento, who then calls him, “Bigot, ingrate, sycophant, worm.” This all sounds pretty heavy, and it is, but the show is still a ton of fun. The revival may be more blatantly political but it still very much is in line with the original.

Writer Alex Abad-Santos said on Twitter, “X-Men 97 is extremely fun because they kept the original spirit in which Rogue is Dolly Parton, Storm is Angela Bassett, Gambit is hot and Jean faints” and he couldn’t be more correct.

And the rest is (queer) history

The X-Men debuted in September of 1963, and came hot off the hells of the success of comics such as Spider-Man and the Fantastic Four. The comic revolved around a ragtag team of gifted youngsters named Cyclops, Marvel Girl, Beast, Angel, and Iceman who went to a school for youths born with superpowers run by telepath Charles Xavier. They were called mutants and their main villain was a Holocaust survivor named Magneto who hated regular humans for…obvious reasons. It’s also where a gay fan favorite Marvel character, Scarlet Witch, debuted.

The villains in X-Men are often larger than life sci-fi comic book villains like Apocalypse or Mr Sinister but they are also often just bigoted humans. One of the more famous X-Men storylines that doesn’t start with a “Dark” and end with a “Phoenix” is ‘God Loves, Man Kills’. In this story from 1982, a preacher named William Stryker sought to exterminate mutantkind. He kidnaps Charles Xavier after they have a televised debate about mutant rights (sounds familiar doesn’t it) and later tries to kill Kitty Pryde live on TV. This story would later be lightly adapted for the big screen in X2:X-Men United. Stryker would come back to the comics some 30 years later with an army of followers called Purifiers, dressed in religious garb, to attack Xavier’s mansion killing a bunch of young mutants at the school and brutally injuring a ton of others. In 1993, the human son of the iconic villains Sabretooth and Mystique named Graydon Creed debuted and ran a hate group called the Friends of Humanity whose sole purpose was ridding the world of mutants. A literal hate group! But no, the X-Men were never woke, were they.

In the first episode of X-Men The Animated Series, which debuted in 1992, we see teen mutant Jubilee being hunted by a group of giant robots called Sentinels as part of the Mutant Registration Act. The Sentinels are created by regular human Bolivar Trask and backed by regular human Senator Kelly—all plot lines that are in step with the comics. In part 1 of the episode ‘One Man’s Worth’, a time traveled alternate universe (don’t ask) Storm, Bishop, and Shard are called “their kind” by a random human bartender and Storm responds with, “Skin colour prejudice? That’s so pathetic, it’s almost quaint.” The cartoon would also heavily feature the Friends of Humanity and Graydon Creed trying to eradicate mutants. The cartoon often featured court scenes and scenes in congress about voting on the rights of mutants. It was all there!

X-Men on x-men action

In 1992 (apparently a big year for the X-folks), we got our first out and queer superhero in Alpha Flight’s Northstar - Alpha Flight was a Canadian team Wolverine started on, which included mutants Northstar and his twin sister Aurora in their roster.

It had been hinted at early on that Northstar was gay but took 10 years after his debut for him to officially come out due to the Comics Code Authority having a ban on gay characters in comics that was lifted in 1989. Northstar would later become a mainstay of the X-Men in the early 00s and, in 2012, be part of the first depiction of a same-sex marriage in mainstream comics when he married his husband Kyle.

In 2015, original X-Men team member Iceman came out - or was outed by a time displaced young Jean Grey (again, don’t ask) reading his mind. Northstar’s coming out was met with a small amount of fanfare but that’s most likely because he wasn’t a well known character. Iceman’s coming out, however, was met with a ton of backlash. Straight folks who didn’t understand how being in the closet works were commenting everywhere and anywhere on the internet to say he couldn’t be gay because he’d dated women. I wrote an article for a website that no longer exists about how happy I was about Iceman’s coming out and how in line it was with my own coming out—and it was met with such backlash that a group of folks rallied to get me fired from the website. There are also out characters like Shatterstar, Karma, Rictor, Mystique, the unfortunately named Anole, and more. The queer X-Men army continues to grow!

Mutants, queers and outcasts

My first foray into the X-Men was as a little gay boy at the Jersey Shore, or at an arcade on the boardwalk at the Jersey Shore, with my family. I was thrilled you had two different women you could play as - and that they were powerful. Dazzler was the Sporty Spice who did kick flips and throw bombs out of her hands. Storm was a scantily clad queen who threw hurricanes and hit folks with her staff. Were they 100% comic accurate? No way. Was I a little gay boy in heaven getting to play as girls who fought just as well as the boys? Hell yeah I was! I had no clue it was a comic but then came the animated series where I overly related to Jubilee in her cool yellow jacket and sassy attitude as she was only a few years older than me at the time (I have since surpassed her in age because of how comics work).

In one of my absolute favorite interviews I’ve ever done on my podcast, I had on the lovely Eric and Julia Lewald (Showrunner and writer, respectively, for the original animated series) and the voice of Rogue herself, Lenore Zann. I could not stop telling them how they raised a generation of queer kids and helped us feel seen. They told me they didn’t realize how many queer fans they had until they started doing comic cons.

Eric said, of the fans, “As far as the people who come up to us…most of them have some sort of story about feeling so different from the world around them. A certain percentage of that is queer folks, a certain percentage of that are just outcast or people who didn’t fit in racially in their community.”

The X-Men face religious bigots, villains with nuance, and the most soap opera-like of drama. As a kid my mom and grandma had their telenovelas and I had X-Men The Animated Series, each with their own equally over the top story arcs.

But inside all the heightened drama and bigger than life super-powered fights, is the metaphor for feeling othered and a story about community. Wolverine might punch Cyclops in the gut after every other mission, but he’ll have his claws out if anyone else tries to do the same. And that’s community, that’s chosen family - that, folks, is queer praxis.

Ian Carlos Crawford has written for BuzzFeed, Logo, Men's Health, GQ, and other random corners of the internet. He loves Buffy, X-Men, Scream, and pugs. He currently hosts a queer pop culture podcast called Slayerfest 98 and co-hosts a horror podcast called My Bloody Judy.

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