By Peter Rizzo | Staff Writer
Avengers: Endgame was a landmark film for Marvel Studios, being their twenty-third film overall and the grand finale of the story they’ve been telling for the past decade. The film also featured the MCU’s first gay character, a sad Joe Russo cameo lamenting about having a bad date with a man. Something like that would’ve been fine on paper, since showing LGBT+ people out in the world has an element of world-building that helps make the movies seem more realistic, even with giant green monsters and talking raccoons. The problem with this was that ahead of release, the directors bragged about how Endgame would include Marvel’s first LGBT+ character. People speculated which of the heroes would be revealed to be queer, only for the character in question to be onscreen for about two minutes in a three-hour movie. That, paired with it being a director cameo, made the whole thing seem like a self-indulgent publicity stunt.
This was not the first time a major studio bragged about including an LGBT+ character or characters, and it wouldn’t be the last. 2017’s Beauty and the Beast proudly revealed that it would include Disney’s first gay character in LeFou, who, in the final film, was a stereotypically effeminate man whose sexuality was “confirmed” in a split-second shot of him dancing with another man. Likewise, in the recent Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, the film “[made] Star Wars history” by including a same-sex kiss. The kiss itself was similarly in a split-second shot between two characters we barely knew and had no attachment towards. Scenes like this attempt to appear “woke” by making it seem like sexuality is no big deal. Being nonchalant about it has the appearance of steps forward as the movie presents it as something nobody bats an eye at, but it actually shows a lack of respect for the community.
By putting scenes like that in inconsequential sections of the film, the filmmakers try to have their cake and eat it, too. They pat themselves on the back for including it, and then cut it out of the movie so it doesn’t get banned in other countries. A common excuse is that, in a superhero movie, for example, a character’s sexuality rarely has anything to do with the “save the day” mission they have; same can be said for horror, action, and adventure films, but that’s the same thing as saying, “if sexuality doesn’t affect the plot in any way, everyone will just be straight.”
J.K. Rowling, in her first foray into retroactive representation, revealed that Albus Dumbledore was gay, but that fact was never mentioned because it “wasn’t relevant to Harry’s story.” By that logic, of course, there could’ve been an eighth Weasley child named Beyoncé and Snape wore hoop earrings the whole time; they just weren’t mentioned because they weren’t relevant to Harry’s story. Then it was announced that Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald would feature both young Dumbledore and his canonical male lover, but wouldn’t “explicitly” mention his sexuality either.
Rocketman, Bohemian Rhapsody, and Love, Simon are all recent films that center around queer characters, and, as a result, it was impossible to edit the movie in a way that both included the whole story and omitted the sexuality of the main characters. That’s only because the characters’ sexualities directly affect their story arcs in the movies. But why? Why can’t a character be queer and have that be unrelated to the main plot? I say this because very few films that center around a heterosexual lead are directly affected by that fact. For example, Thor may be straight, but Thor: Ragnarok had no romantic subplot; and Deadpool is canonically pansexual, yet it doesn’t affect the main conflicts of the movies. Sometimes, a character’s sexuality can just be part of their character without being part of that character’s arc.
A perfect example is Raymond Holt and Rosa Diaz in Brooklyn Nine-Nine, the two characters are gay and bisexual, respectively, and while there are episodes that deal with the oppression the former faced by being both black and gay and the latter’s family not fully accepting her, their characters and stories aren’t centered around that fact. They’re a captain and a detective who are also gay and bisexual.
It’s not that hard to include queer characters; it just boils down to the homophobia of studios. Disney, especially, is guilty of this. Oscar Isaac and John Boyega, who respectively play Poe Dameron and Finn in the recent Star Wars trilogy, have called out Disney for not letting their characters end up together, considering how popular the pairing was with fans and the duo’s chemistry on-screen. Instead, Poe was given a new, female love interest—because a canon gay relationship is too much in a series where we’re told Chewbacca, an eight-foot fur monster, is dating a four-foot, orange Lupita Nyong’o cameo.
The only explanation for any of this is homophobia; most studios want to appear representative or forward-thinking but are too focused on the bottom-line to risk any profit. I can’t really propose any solution to this because as long as homophobic studio executives hold the power over the final cut of a film, meaningful representation will continue to be denied to worldwide audiences while the queer characters continue to be relegated to split-second shots and retroactive representation.