Travis Hedge Coke
Patricia Highsmash
Examining New X-Men Pt. 12
by Travis Hedge Coke
From 2001 to 2004 Grant Morrison (The Invisibles, Batman and Robin) and team of pencilers, inkers, letterers, editors and colorists, including Phil Jimenez, Mike Marts, and Frank Quitely made a comic called New X-Men.
Revitalizing the X-Men as a politically savvy, fashion-forward superhero soap opera, New X-Men was published by Marvel Comics as the flagship of a line wide revival.
Part 12
Out and Proud
“I chose to cast the X-Men not as the victims ‘feared and hated’ by a world that refused to understand them but as out-and-proud.”
– Supergods, Grant Morrison
“You’re tokenizing me! I’m not a white man, I’m a Scot, OK?”
– Grant Morrison, responding to a question about the whiteness of themself and the co-authors of 52
The 2000 Bryan Singer/Tom DeSanto movie, X-Men, and its David Hayter/Zak Penn-written sequel in 2003 cemented the X-Men as a gay metaphor. This had been teased and played with, as early as Kitty Pryde being able to say gay slurs in New Mutants, Iceman being so jealous of his male friends having attention he would claim to be their gay lover, over twenty years before the character officially came out as gay. But, the movies were a gay metaphor. Even if you did not know Southern California twinks who swore they were treated like kings at Singer’s parties (editor’s note: Bryan Singer has also a history of alleged repeated sexual assault of underage boys) or thought Chad’s World was a promise, the early X-Men movies were pretty rigid and pretty male-centered. Women were background or plot devices to the celebration of men and boys.
The early 00s saw recruitment to pornography and military service on the march, but most years do. A primary difference for the era was the aid the internet led to both. The final years in which the internet could, for the anglophone world, feel like something peripheral to reality.
New X-Men was “a diary of [Morrison’s] own growing distrust of a post-9/11 conformity culture.” Calling the world of the X-Men “a spectrum of conflicting viewpoints, self-images, and ideas about the future,” Morrison and the artists, starting with Frank Quitely, set to a much more diverse spread of genders and equally as coded-only sexualities. Neither the movies nor the comics could say the words or confirm too strongly, while straight heterosexuality flew around like those cows in the tornado. Or, maybe it did.
Do we really think Cyclops, Jean Grey, Logan or Emma Frost are heterosexual or straight? Search your heart as much as your back issues. From physicality to intimacy to gender markers, even the straightest x-characters. Men’s and women’s clothing falling from Cyclops’ parachute in a psychic therapy session fail to delay his fall, to ease his anxieties, but they represent more than a paraphilia. These are core doubts for Cyclops.
Charles Xavier and Jean Grey both stroke EVA, upon meeting her, in the same fascinated and not unchaste way, both also visiting her mind as they do. Intimacy is immediate. They are drawn to her and in a way, into her, even as they ride inside her body as passengers.
Fantomex will tell Dr Grey he can tell she is into him, but it is the female half of the pair, EVA, who she cannot help but stroke pleasurably.
Joe Weems, Marc Silvestri, Grant Morrison
Is Fantomex’s abandonment of a female half that is as much a part of the whole person as he, the male half, the ground broken on the road that leads her to loneliness and he to jealousy and corruption? Is Fantomex becoming Apollyon a fantasy version of what happens if you stay too long and aggressively in the closet? Or, is it a metaphor for rejection of communal living, communal thinking, for an unhealthy individualism?
Searching your heart cannot replace canonicity or clearly-delivered confirmations, and those are not found. Even the creatives working on New X-Men were impervious to reflexive liberal bigotry or, even more sadly, growing Nazi affectations.
Grant Morrison, Frank Quitely
Two background gays being saved by Beast are not canon gay enough, if nobody says or does something expressly homosexual, though for some no confirmation will ever be enough and bigots do not play fairly with fact or intent. We are armed with knowledge and intimation, but those will never keep the haters from weaponizing the lack of inarguable and on-panel confirmation against anyone seeking solace for themselves in these comics.
When I was thirteen, the Klan burned a cross in our yard. Local police, neighbors were involved.
When I look at protestors, harassers, bigots and brutalizers in New X-Men or other X-Men comics, I have no difficulty in seeing neighbors, in seeing local community or the community of border towns and sister cities.
Most of the anti-mutant protestors outside the Xavier Institute are not U-Men or supervillains. They have day jobs, rent to pay, family gatherings on holidays where they might even be the most liberal or left at the table.
They might not be the neighbors who help light the cross in someone’s yard, but they are the folks who tolerate it. Who understand it.
There is a great load of understanding for the violence and hatred of bigots all through New X-Men. When Beast has to blow off steam making cranky anti-human jabs, it really is blowing off steam. It is unfair, but has to be measured against the brutality humans have inflicted on all levels against mutants. The only people he gives grief about humans are his bigoted ex-girlfriend after she insults him terribly, and a police who takes it in stride and eventually becomes a de facto X-Man for a brief couple issues.
Chuck Austen’s run on Uncanny X-Men published alongside Morrison’s New X-Men, for a couple years, dealing often more directly with homosexuality than New did. There were actual conversations about who was or was not gay, excitement or frustration over who was or was not gay. New X-Men mostly danced around it, giving us the beginning or the end of a conversation, no commitments, no confirmations.
In Andrew Hickey’s delightful, An Incomprehensible Condition, he draws attention to the foregrounding of fruit, rainbows, and queer scientists in a Morrison JLA comic published just after New X-Men had completed, as a queer subtext independent of having explicitly queer characters or events.
Morrison, themself, refer to Batman as not a homosexual man but a gay character.
When Beast says that he is, “as gay as the next mutant,” we are left to decide, ourselves, if he is really queer, but Beast is a scientist, a biologist with a deep interest in philosophy. Beast knows that largely, gender and sex and sexuality are political constructs before anything else. They are performed and performative, and Beast (and Morrison) knows those are not the same, those two things.
Of course, Hickey and Morrison are reaching. Sometimes, they miss a beat or overreach. I overreach all the time. It’s hard to be a utopian if you don’t. And, it is weird to be too invested in a comic concept like the X-Men, all of it schools and futures and evolution, change, hope, education and growth, if you are not a little bit on utopia’s side.
Beast is a scientist and a media addict with body dysmorphia and probably a cat penis who happily kisses straight men on the mouth.
We like to say that there are fair less trans people in the world than those with red hair, because it fits a particular narrative. We make it perpetually-reducing. “They’re not transgender, because they don’t want a surgery.” “They are not trans; they have a biological difference, not a psychological.” “It only counts if they have a gendered brain chemistry.” Intersex is demarcated as “mildly” and “significantly,” and judgments are made as to the veracity depending on external aspects visible on adults to the naked, untrained eye, because somehow surgery, hormones, or subtlety make you less trans.
We like to say, broadly, that most people are heterosexual, and then those heterosexuals spend all their time telling each other they are not behaving appropriately heterosexual.
Beast can be queer, or 2000-colloquially-gay, and maybe he acknowledges that, maybe he is not and he is simply fanning flames to show there is a fire. Beast does not make the greatest of decisions, but he knows how to cover himself in rhetoric.
If heterosexuality or the gender binary were real, they would not need to be constantly policed, the cis and heteros would not need to upbraid one another all day and night into maintaining appropriate levels and rigidities of cis heterosexuality.
We are generations away from Kinsey’s studies and Bornstein’s groundbreaking. We are centuries away from non-anglophone cultures understanding and embracing.
So, it is not hubris to see queer in everything, and everything in queerness.
Even in a comic so often as gendered as New X-Men. Where The Invisibles often gains criticism for its trans characters not being especially gendered enough, New X-Men frequently divides male and female in very deliberate and dominating fashions. Emma and Jean, Charles versus Cassandra, Scott and Logan, Quentin versus the Cuckoos. The couples are male/female couples to the degree that as soon as a male-presenting and female-presenting body are in proximity, it becomes read as a couple, as many interpretations of EVA and Fantomex testify to.
And, yet, Tom Skylark and Rover, the far future team of two called, Rover and I, are as much a romantic or sexual couple as whatever Tom is trying to start up with EVA. That she is or presents female and Rover is addressed in he/him terms has generated a longstanding interpretation of Skylark’s overture to her as romantic, as sexual, with his relationship, a lifelong and serious bond, with Rover, as dispassionate or platonic.
Marc Silvestri, Grant Morrison
It is not hubris to see queer in everything, and everything in queerness, if it is there.
Where New X-Men really fails, for me, is that it is so white. Extraordinarily white. In character cast. In outlook.
Older characters, such as Storm, a Black woman, could only be borrowed for brief appearances, as other comics had claimed their use, but of the new characters in New X-Men, very few are identifiably nonwhite, and the main cast are all white, nonhuman-looking, or Angel Salvadore. Dust is a minor character who gets almost no dialogue. Tattoo and Radian are Black teens who get a line or two each, as they serve Quentin Quire.
At the end of time, the end of the world, in the final arc of New X-Men, the last living human is a white man.
For mutants, in New X-Men, to be out and proud, is, quite a bit, to be white.
It is amazing, in its way, to see clothes designed for mutant bodies, to have more out and loud mutant bands, like Sentinel Bait, but they are, from what we can see, clothes for white people, schools for white people, songs for white people. Nearly all the humans or mutants we see are either nonhuman-looking or white/white-read. Most of the nonhuman-looking ones are explicitly white (Beak), the kind of yellowface of Xorn/Magneto, or simply white-read by readers.
Morrison’s later, The Multiversity, a comic I have deep love for, has similar issues, when it tackles racism subtly but seriously only by covering up its nonwhite characters or keeping them off the pages entirely. There is some wit there, but what it really means is that most white readers will not notice at all, and everyone else may notice but will be left wanting.
The main cast of the main cast, the teaching staff who go out on fight missions, they are all white and they are mostly wealthy or living without financial concern. Cyclops is not technically a millionaire or billionaire, like his mentor, Xavier, his partner in affair, Frost, or the object of his fascination, Wolverine, yet Cyclops will never be in a position to worry about how much international flights will cost him. Cyclops can take off a specially-made leather jacket and leave it on the ground because he can quickly and without personal cost get another.
Some X-Men are, in this era, in this comic, independently wealthy, and the others are independently comfortable. Papa Saint Xavier and the Shi’ar technology abide and supply.
Some readers remain, to this day, discomfited by Emma Frost taking on Angel Salvadore as a mentee. The Stepford Cuckoos make more sense, to these readers, because they are white, blonde, and act upper class and lower-c conservative. They are, as if this was not already highlighted, pretty Stepford.
Salvadore comes from a lower class family, she is neither worldly nor especially educated. The first time we see Salvadore and Frost together in a scene, Frost is half-serious wishing to lynch her for rudeness, in her very very white lady way. And, that, too, is the clue to her offer of mentorship. That is why she likes Salvadore.
Angel Salvadore is a better student than Quentin Quire, even before he stages his riot, because she is a better person. Because, despite her crudeness and flaws, Angel Salvadore is cool. She’s a decent person. Her boyfriend, too, is a good kid. They are going to be better neighbors, better parents, than Quentin ever could be, but better, too, than X-Men stalwarts like Cyclops, Wolverine, or Colossus are.
Angel Salvadore comes into Emma Frost’s range in need of education, training, and permission to be, but she is also never going to murder a horse to emotionally blackmail a teenager into joining a special child army. What Frost can offer Salvadore of real and serious value, is not a turn to villainy or a million dollars, though the money and security help. The real value is in teaching her pride and confidence. To let her be out and proud.