I am still seeing responses to Mackie's Variety interview that are a bit baffling.
I will absolutely defend Mackie. He’s not homophobic and nothing he said was grounds for a twitter roasting or cancellation. It was misguided and messy but not irrecoverably harmful. His argument is rooted in homophobia, though, and I don’t need to defend that.
This idea that it is a problem when m/m characters who are close friends get shipped because it, in any way, negatively impacts the important work of showing non-toxic male friendship is homophobic. Mackie also had some pretty classic straight panic in his answer. ‘I can’t hang out with my guy friends without worrying about how it’s perceived.’ Again, it doesn’t make him homophobic, but this fear is rooted in homophobia.
Yes, there are a lot of problems in fandom, there is a lot of toxicity. There are issues of exploitation. All of that is vastly more complicated than, gay fandom won't just let two guys be friends.
It is not the lgbt community that has hindered m/m platonic intimacy. We aren’t the ones that for centuries have insisted the only way men can interact with one another is through toxicity. Us projecting our queer desire onto fictional characters, especially when there isn’t actual or good queer representation, is not the reason men are uncomfortable in expressing their friendships however they see fit. Men did this to themselves/each other.
Homophobia and heterosexism created the conditions that Mackie is concerned about. It’s that logic that has decided that physical and emotional closeness between men = gay. In that way m/m non-toxic platonic relationships are queer. They directly challenge heterosexist ideals of m/m relationships.
Queerness isn’t about sex (or even romance) exclusively, and to have a bias towards believing it does is also classic homophobia (as well as anti-ace/aro). This bias seems founded in truth because sexuality in the gay community feels flaunted, but this comes out of the history of our sexuality being criminalized and punishable by death. Along with the normalization of heterosexual desire which makes it invisible and queer desire hypervisible. Fandom seems overly sexual (and can be) because it is one of the few spaces where queer desire can be expressed in relative safety. Where we can explore sex, along with a slew of other topics that aren’t touched upon elsewhere.
And it’s not just lgbt folks who are exploring queer desire. Fandom is filled with straight folks who are drawn towards gay ships and not solely to fetishize it (though yes that happens a lot). Homosexual desire is not exclusive to gay folks, it’s something everyone experiences in some capacity, whether it is sexual, romantic, platonic, or pragmatic. In TFATWS, Zemo was literally reading about this on the plane when he stole Bucky’s notebook.
There is not as much separation between queerness/gay relationships and m/m platonic friendships as we are led to believe, and that’s not an issue. We don’t need to distance these things. In fact, they also often coexist, gay men regularly experience platonic intimacy.
We can take issue with the way fandom interacts internally as well as with the media we consume. These are symptoms though, not the cause of the issue. Heterosexism (interconnected with racism, settler colonialism, and capitalism) creates the conditions for a toxic fandom, a Hollywood that does not provide space for queer storytelling, and the discomfort men experience in their friendships.