Andrew Garfield wondered aloud why Spider-Man couldn’t be gay, but the reason could lie within the very pages that first brought the character to life.
Andrew Garfield in The Amazing Spider-Man 2
Via: Sony Pictures Entertainment, Niko Tavernise / AP
With those words, The Amazing Spider-Man star Andrew Garfield has launched a long overdue debate over why virtually every single well-known superhero has remained resolutely heterosexual ever since Superman first appeared wearing a skin-tight costume and bright red briefs.
At least, Garfield should have launched that debate. Instead, the reaction has largely been knee-jerk trolls posting in all caps about a gay agenda, while gay and gay-friendly geeks swoon at Garfield's refreshing attitude.
Meanwhile, the actor's central question — why can't Peter Parker be gay, or at least be, you know, bi-curious? — has gone rather unexplored. Perhaps it's because at first glance, the question seems intractably depressing to answer, inviting the kind of cynical "because mainstream America would reject a gay Spider-Man" shrug that makes you hate people in general for sucking so much. Or, conversely, the question seems so rhetorical — "Because of course he should be!" — that trying to answer it feels maybe a little dumb.
But as Mark Harris pointed out in his terrific essay for Entertainment Weekly, in the last 10 years, on the big screen and on the page, Spider-Man has died, sung, turned evil, and been recast as a half-black, half-Latino teenager. And then there was the time Peter Parker made a deal with the evil Mephisto to save the life of his elderly Aunt May by erasing the entire existence of his marriage to Mary Jane Watson.
So, truly, if all that can happen — or if Wolverine can kill an alternative universe version of himself, or two different Supergirls can merge to become an "Earth-born angel" — why is it so difficult to allow these characters to explore their sexuality more forthrightly?
PRISM Comics' booth at San Diego Comic-Con 2013
Via: Adam B. Vary/Buzzfeed
The answer, it seems, may lie with comic books themselves.
"I think it has a lot to do with the cyclical nature of the big-name comics industry," says Charles "Zan" Christensen, founding president of PRISM Comics, a nonprofit organization that serves as a kind of clearinghouse for LGBT comics and comic book writers. "Even if something very radically different happens, regardless of what it is — marriage, children, death — nothing lasts forever."
Indeed, those aforementioned storylines for Spider-Man, Wolverine, and Supergirl that pulled the character away from their established core identities were all eventually retconned out of existence — or likely will be soon. "Everything always gets reverted to what it was and then its relaunched as a brand new thing," Christensen says. If a writer were to launch a story arc that made Spider-Man, Batman, or Wonder Woman gay, they would inevitably become straight again — it's just the way comics work. But "de-gaying" an iconic superhero could be just as problematic as "gaying" that superhero in the first place.
"You're dealing with a community of queer characters in comics that is so small to begin with," Christensen says. "All those characters are bearing a burden of representation that is inordinately high compared to their stature in that universe. They have to stay the way they are and grow in number, otherwise it's a step backward, because they're already so underrepresented. ... You whittle away at it, people are bound to take offense. That's just kind of where we are right now." (A rep for Marvel declined to comment for this story, and a rep for DC did not respond to a request for comment.)
