If you told comic book fans growing up way back in the ‘90s that their nerdy passions would inherit the earth, you’d receive a raised eyebrow. Sure we might one day have an X-Men or Spider-Man movie, maybe even Green Lantern, but never Deadpool, much less a Deadpool 2 that also acts as a backdoor kickstart for an X-Force movie. That’s sheer lunacy! Since this century’s modern superhero craze exploded after the release of X-Men, we’ve had about 50 superhero movies based on major Marvel or DC characters. And yet, with all those capes and cowls flying around, none have been explicitly coded as LGBTQ characters. This makes the brief but endearing relationship between Negasonic Teenage Warhead (Brianna Hildebrand) and Yukio (Shioli Kutsuna) in Deadpool 2 the real marvel. While definitely supporting characters (perhaps too much so), the pair are among the most memorable players in an ensemble stacked with charismatic charm from all comers. They also represent a major (and unfortunately necessary-by-default) subversiveness within the superhero movie landscape. In this vein, the pair is introduced in a fitting location: Charles Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters. It is there during the movie’s first act that Ryan Reynolds’ smugly lovable Wade Wilson is recruited against his will by Colossus into the iconic superhero team. But it’s obviously going to be a short tenure given that Wade can’t stop referring to the X-Mansion as the “Château de Virgin.” Still, some major developments occur for Wade and the franchise. First he is allowed to break the fourth-wall and has most of the X-Men: Dark Phoenix cast cameo (as opposed to being “stuck” with only Colossus and Negasonic Teenage Warhead from the first Deadpool), and second he meets one other supporting X-Man: Kutsuna’s Yukio. To be clear, this does not qualify as equal representation for LGBTQ characters—they’re barely in the movie, which is all the poorer for it—but the fact that a film based on cynical humor like Deadpool 2 elects to not mock the insertion of a lesbian couple into its franchise, nor even really address it as anything other than natural, is a good start for the genre and its wider franchise. After all, the X-Men side of the Marvel Universe has always been popular among marginalized adolescents. As Ryan Reynolds hilariously snarks in Deadpool 2, “Make way for the X-Men; dated 1960s analogy for racism coming through.” Sure it’s a “dated analogy,” but one that’s been updated throughout the years, most specifically to connect with the franchise’s considerable LGBTQ audience. The first explicitly gay superhero in Marvel Comics was North Star, a mutant and X-Men off-shoot from Alpha Flight #7 in 2011. Since then, one of the original X-Men, Iceman/Bobby Drake, was revealed to be gay in last year’s Iceman series. This was in turn likely influenced by Bryan Singer’s still popular X2 (2003), the X-Men sequel in which Shawn Ashmore’s Bobby Drake memorably “came out of the closet” as a mutant to his parents. The scene was subversive to the mainstream, and endearing to many young and alienated LGBTQ geeks, because it was an obvious metaphor for gay pride—and the poison of homophobia—during the height of the Bush Years when gay bashing and homophobia went very mainstream. (The next year, George W. Bush would run a successful reelection campaign that, among other things, falsely promised to create a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage.) Superhero movies have a far wider audience, and by their four-quadrant nature are meant to be seen by everyone. At least by everyone who sees superhero movies, which increasingly becomes a huge chunk of the world considering that Marvel’s Black Panther and Avengers: Infinity War have both crossed $1 billion in this year alone. Yet as superheroes become more of a global export of pop culture fantasy in this century, the more unlikely it’s become to see LGBTQ characters in a genre dominated by straight white males. Before February’s game-changing Black Panther, the only black superheroes in the MCU have been supporting sidekicks (with Marvel CEO Ike Perlmutter recasting one of these parts while bleakly saying, “They all look the same.”) We still haven’t had a female-led superhero film in the MCU nearly 20 movies in either, although this will finally change with 2019’s Captain Marvel. This is because, unlike CW television, superhero movies are a major export. And increasingly in our globalized world, foreign markets are where superhero movies and other American tentpoles have their fortunes made or broken. No billion-dollar grosser in this decade got to that number without a sizable push from markets like China. But China, and its government’s censors, are notoriously behind on gay rights. Gay relationships were a punishable offense until 1997 in the People’s Republic, and those who participated in them were still recorded as suffering from a “mental disorder” until 2001. To this day, movies with explicitly gay relationships are banned in China, as well as other smaller markets. Earlier this year, Call Me by Your Name was banned from appearing in the Beijing International Film Festival. This follows in the footsteps of some notable films, including Brokeback Mountain, Mad Max: Fury Road… and Deadpool. It is easy to imagine this won the film no favors with foreign censors. But it also gave Reynolds and company the room to be more defiant and explicit in Deadpool 2. Because unlike any other superhero movie, Deadpool 2 is the first to feature explicitly lesbian characters as superheroes. And it is not a punchline or form of titillation; it is just a remarkable case of inclusion being treated as something unremarkable.
