When I told people I was working on a video about the gayest moments from the X-Men movies, the usual response was "oh geez, how do you even choose?" There are, it turns out, a lot of them. (That video is now live, by the way!)
But I think my favorite is in X2, the second film. Bobby Drake (a character who has since come out as gay in the comics) is visiting his parents, and awkwardly delivering the news that he's a mutant.
"This is all my fault," his mother says, echoing lines like the mom in Edge of Seventeen who asks her gay son, "what did I do wrong?"
"How long have you known you're ..." she asks, echoing the scene in the indie gay film Get Real when one kid asks another the same question, only swapping "dodgy" for "mutant."
And of course, there's the memorable line, "have you tried NOT being a mutant?" I love that one, because it's not even the first time something has parodied it; a few years earlier, when Buffy's mom learned the truth about her, she asked, "have you tried NOT being the slayer?"
The X2 scene's subtext is so blindingly obvious that everyone knew exactly what they were doing when the filmed it. According to Shawn Ashmore, who plays Bobby, they referred to it as "the coming out scene," and he speculated that it might insinuate even more about Bobby Drake -- in fact, he said in one interview that he'd be interesting in returning to the character and having him come out as gay.
So will we get a gay Iceman in the movies? Well, it's been ten years since Shawn gave that interview and it hasn't happened yet; and Disney doesn't seem particularly eager to add anything gay to their superhero movies, so I'm not holding my breath for anything official. But there's nothing stopping the fan from deciding that he's been queer this whole time. After all, we'd know better than some heterosexual in a suit in Burbank.
What's New This Week
New video about what makes X-Men so gay is now live!
We watched a bunch of fun behind-the-scenes X-Men clips on Twitch last weekend.
On this week's Sewers of Paris, I'm chatting with writer Anthony Olivera and actor JP Karliak about what it's like to be a part of bringing X-Men stories to live.
I've been dogsitting a lot lately, and I'm posting pups in my Instagram stories, if you like to look at pictures of dogs having a fantastic time.
What's Coming Up
I'm already chugging away on the next YouTube video -- it's about the incredibly troubled production of one of the greatest gay films ever made, Kiss of the Spider Woman.
On the next Twitch livestream, we're watching 1982's Victor/Victoria.
I've got some very fun British guests on an upcoming Sewers of Paris.
Stuff I've Been Enjoying Lately
Here's a fantastic side-by-side comparison of Airplane! and the movie that inspired it, Zero Hour.
I think I've shared this before, but here's Judy Garland's first appearance on Carson. She shares a story about the Vaudeville performer Hadji Ali that is a real show-stopper.
Have you ever seen a binturong? They're one of those animals that moves like it's a theater student doing an improv exercise.