How to Fail at Coming Out Stories in Comics
On April 22, 2015, comics retailers far and wide will be selling copies of All-New X-Men #40, which, spoiler, features the coming out of a major character from Marvel Comics’ original five X-Men (sort of): Bobby Drake, AKA Ice Man. On the one hand, I want to be loud and supportive, and to celebrate this wider diversity. But on the other hand, they do a really, really offensive crap job of it.
The scene begins with our time displaced version of Bobby from the past being confronted by the time displaced Jean Grey (henceforth referred to as “young Bobby” and “young Jean”) after he says a few misogynistic things about Magik. This is potentially great meta-commentary from a female comic character confronting the male gaze and the hypersexualization of female comic characters. But, rather than go there, it instead goes the route of revealing young Jean is pretty awful at respecting the privacy of others and both of them are equally awful at discussing sexual diversity.
Just another day at the X-Men where your resident good-guy telepath is bouncing around in your brain without your permission and then dictating to you what your sexuality is without any concern for consent or self-identification.
Bobby is literally telling her that her brain is not welcome inside his and she disregards him. After 40 issues of practice, this isn’t a girl who can’t shut other peoples’ thoughts out. She can read his thoughts; that doesn’t mean she should.
But wait, old Bobby isn’t gay. He’s dated girls. Wouldn’t this really make Bobby bisexual, pansexual, or sexually fluid?
Oh no, let’s just decide for future/present/whatever Bobby his sexuality for him as well. He’s never been straight. He’s in the closet because being two things the world hates is worse than one. Barf. If there’s one thing that’s never rung true for not-young Bobby, it’s the sort of personality that would somehow be afraid of homophobia while being brave about mutant phobia.
And how disgusting is the argument that because all of his past relationships with women have failed, they all must mean he’s really gay too? Assuming old Bobby and young Bobby are the same Bobby, that’s some hard core bisexual erasure going on right there. Every relationship I’ve had with a man has failed. That doesn’t make me straight. Every relationship my straight ex-wife has had with a man has failed too. That doesn’t make her a lesbian. This is outright the worst, most biphobic logic I’ve seen this week. It’s just awful.
And there’s one more doozy:
No. They don’t. Only really uninformed or really crappy people say this. Patrick Richardsfink writes an excellent post on the inappropriateness of saying everyone is bisexual. Saying everyone is bi erases us. It invalidates bisexual identity and gives room for people to feel it’s perfectly ok for them to smack their own labels on us rather than allowing us to self identify. This is exactly what young Jean does to young Bobby in this exchange.
This entire five page exchange is breathtaking in how absolutely awful and problematic it is. I want to believe Bendis was sincerely trying to sensitively introduce the world to another major gay character in comics. It’s just a shame he had to do so by being ignorant and dropping a steaming dump on bisexuality and other non-monosexual identities.
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