Originally published July 16, 1999, in Comics Buyer’s Guide #1339
Did you know the X-Men were gay? At the very least, that they were a metaphor for homosexuality?
I’ll get back to that.
When the X-Men first showed up, I wasn’t buying the title. Then again, when most Marvels first started, I wasn’t aboard for the ride. My dad had banned Marvels to me at a young age, feeling that characters such as the Thing, the Hulk, and others were too ugly to be remotely considered heroic, and therefore were inappropriate for young Peter to be exposed to. Remember Aunt May complaining about Spider-Man’s hideous mask and ugliness? That was my dad (although, sadly, he never offered to bake me brownies or knit me a sweater).
So I missed the early, initial excitement of Marvel titles. By the time I caught up with X-Men, the book was already in its reprint stage. But both the early reprints, as well as when the series continued its numbering with more reprints, were so intriguing to me that the series rapidly leaped to the top of my must-read list, even though nothing “new” was going on with the characters.
Perhaps no series, other than the first six issues of Incredible Hulk, had as much of a feeling as “making it up as we go” as those early stories of the X-Men. Who can forget that immortal panel wherein Professor X—Professor X—is having sad, romantic thought balloons about Jean?
Stan and Jack must have realized pretty darned quick that a teacher rhapsodizing romantically about a student was simply not a good idea. Then there was Scott, who sported the most short-lived nickname on record: “Slim.” Or Hank McCoy, who traded in a standard Ben Grimm-esque speech pattern for a fairly unique and stupendously pretentious dialogue style rife with polysyllabic words.
What made the early X-Men work so well was the sheer humanity of the characters. As opposed to the frequent fractiousness that characterized the early FF or Avengers, it seemed as if the X-Men genuinely liked each other and wanted to be with one another. Whatever angst they experienced seemed to derive mostly from romantic feelings, requited or otherwise. And what made them the most unique was the bond that they shared: they had a mutual secret. They were outcasts among the rest of the world, and only in each other’s company could they find solace and peace.
The FF, after all, were not outcasts. They were considered glamorous; when the Human Torch streaked across the skies of Manhattan in that first issue, people didn’t run screaming. The Avengers had their big honkin’ mansion smack in the middle of New York City; folks weren’t picketing the Avengers, telling them to get out of town.
The X-Men, by contrast, were in hiding. One always had the feeling that if the general public knew there were mutants hiding out in Westchester, the school would have been under assault by John Q. Public. To say nothing of the fact that here was a teacher who was knowingly sending his young charges into dangerous situations against super-powered foes.
Bad enough that he was hung up romantically on one of his young female students, but he was putting them head-to-head with the most dangerous, monstrous mutants that the world had to offer. And he did so without the permission of, or knowledge of, any of the kids’ parents. What in God’s name would he have said to the folks, who thought that they were simply sending their children to a school for gifted youngsters? How would parents of MIT students feel if they knew that their tuition money was being spent on sending their kids, in costume, against the likes of Magneto? Call me crazy, but I don’t think they’d be too jazzed. Would you be?
I also liked that they had matching costumes in the old days. The number of teams who have matching uniforms in comics can be counted on the fingers of one hand. Actually, aside from the FF, I can’t think of anybody else off the top of my head. When Professor X gave them each their own ensembles to celebrate that they were each of them unique, it actually made them less unique because now they were just like every other team: separate outfits.
The thing is, in the early days, X-Men featured so many “realistic” elements (students, school, teacher, unrequited romance) that it was probably the most accessible book in Marvel’s stable. It felt real. It felt right. They were the ultimate clique: they hung out with kids of their own type and other cliques (i.e., homo sapiens) couldn’t stand them. Considering that the series, over the decades, “mutated” into one of Marvel’s most inaccessible titles—wherein you could pick up several issues at random and have absolutely no clue what was going on—that’s really somewhat ironic.
(And, while we’re on the subject, did it ever occur to them that if they hadn’t called themselves “homo superior,” regular folks might have been just a little less hostile? I mean, good lord, how snotty is “homo superior”? Why did they bother to call themselves “X-Men”? Why didn’t they just name themselves, “The Legion of Guys Who Are Better Than You”?)
And speaking of “homo” (how’s that for a snarky segue?)…
Imagine my surprise upon learning that, by some in the gay community, the plight of the X-Men and mutantkind is seen as a huge gay metaphor.
Did you know that? I mean, I sure didn’t. Then again, I’m frequently the last person to find out about stuff like this. I’m kept out of the loop, information passed along to me on a need-to-know basis. So I had zero clue. Heck, you probably knew.
My source for this is the gay newspaper The Blade, which stated that many readers equated mutation in X-Men with homosexuality. I’m not entirely sure why this would be. After all, within the Marvel universe, parents live in fear that their children might be mutants; mutants are subject to loathing, misunderstanding and disdain; the mutant characters come to a realization of their actual “persuasion” sometime around their early teens; mutants have been persecuted by religious zealots; and in many cases, mutants are forced to hide their true nature for fear of upsetting those around them who do not display similar tendencies. Gays, on the other hand, are…
Oh.
Well… okay. Maybe they’ve got something there.
I think it fairly safe to guess that creating a gay parable was not uppermost on Lee and Kirby’s minds when they first crafted the merry mutants. Indeed, what made X-Men successful (or at least, as successful as an eventually cancelled comic book could be) was the universality of it.
Anyone who had ever felt downtrodden, put upon and oppressed was able to relate to the X-Men. Me, I always thought of them as a metaphor for Jews.
Gee, perhaps that was why the series wasn’t a huge sales hit in its first incarnation. The majority of the comic buying public is probably white Anglo-Saxon protestants, and how much oppression do WASPs have to deal with? I mean, really?
(Peter David, writer of stuff, can be written to at Second Age, Inc., PO Box 239, Bayport, NY 11705.)
• 
I think the whole mutant-gay parallel was most explicit in X-MEN 2 when Bobby/Iceman tells his parents that he’s a mutant and they ask, “Have you tried not being a mutant?” I suspect the “have you tried not being what you are?” line is something many gay men and women have heard from parents when coming out to them.
I found my first X-men under the sink in my room during a stay in a convalescent hospital. I was seventeen, disabled, and away from home for a long time, for the first time. I didn’t know what the X-men stood for..for me they were all about being ‘different’ in the way that *I* was different. Visibly, unalterably, and stuck in a society that then (early eighties) had no time or interest in changing to suit me. The “I am different” trope works on all kinds of levels, and it provided me with a welcome place to escape the boredom of therapy and rehab after orthopedic surgery I neither asked for nor wanted. I didn’t feel that I’d found ‘a story’. I felt as if I’d found friends.
Teams with matching uniforms? Do you insist on supers?
If not, how about the Challengers of the Unknown? Or the Blackhawks?
Or just about every sports franchise. “Teams with matching uniforms” indeed.
As a tangent, I wonder how super powers would affect professional sports, the Olympics, etc. Would getting a boost from magic, radioactivity, etc. be considered the same as performance-enhancing drugs? Could someone be disqualified for being an alien, advanced plant, or other non-human entity? Would humans and mutants compete against each other, if no amount of human training could ever match a mutant’s innate powers? (The Toad was first revealed as a mutant when he won a track event in a way no human could.) And if there were separate leagues, would that sort of “separate but equal” situation go against the sort of dream Professor X had? Or would mutants continually beat humans (which is pretty much the dream Magneto has)?
That would have made for an interesting issue of ASTRO CITY…
Ummm … comic book teams.
I’d always seen the development of mutant powers in X-Men as more a metaphor for puberty than anything else. One day, you’re ticking along like always, then you hit your teens, and suddenly your body is changing in all these weird ways, and doing things you never imagined it ever could. And then you start in with the whole “teenage angst” thing, feeling alone and different…
On the other tentacle, I always thought that if the “mutants are feared and hated” thing ever came to an end, it would start with someone deciding the appropriate term for mutantkind, which is after all the same species as humans, just a different subspecies, should be Homo sapiens novis, as an update to Homo sapiens sapiens. Not “superior”, just different.
Well, the puberty metaphor works better with Spider-Man, IMHO (after all, he shoots sticky fluid with his wrists, right ?), but I suppose it can work with the X-Men as well. But that’s the beauty of the concept : The X-Men ca be whoever we want them to be : Gays, Blacks (Xavier as Martin Luther King and Magneto as Malcolm X), Teenagers, and so on.
The old International Society of Supervillains website said it best with their “Single-Sentence Synopses of Popular Comics”: “Uncanny X-Men is about black people and gays who are straight and white, but have superpowers.”
And, Blinky the three-eyed fish really is a stand-in for hermaphrodites.
What was funny was that some of Bryan Singer’s team have stated that this is exactly what they did with the X-Men in the first two films. Some of the lines written into the script were even written to be essentially what we see in real world conversations about homosexuals in the culture now. Bobby coming out to his family as a mutant and her reaction of asking him if he’s just tried not being a mutant was the most transparent example of this.