Happy Pride Month!

"It posts the rainbow profile pic or else it gets the hose again."

It seems like only yesterday that we kicked off this year’s annual celebration of all things LGBTQIA$◎…ZΩ+🍆, and yet sadly we wake up today to find the month-long jubilee already drawing to a close.

Time flies when you’re having fun.

Aside from the usual corporate pandering and narrative peddling festivities, another increasingly common occurrence around this time is subjecting popular, previously straight, fictional characters to a kind of conversion therapy in order to meet D.I.E. quotas in Imagination Land.

This will always be hysterically funny to me. The expressions are priceless.

My favorite example of this, by far, is the curious case of Bobby “Iceman” Drake of the X-Men. Despite there being every indication that Bobby was straight since his first appearance way back in the original, 1963 X-Men #1 (regardless of what some cope posts will try to sell you), the hairless hack Brian Michael Bendis decided to make Bobby gay anyway in 2015’s copy-pasta paneled All New X-Men #40.

Bendis did this in the most unintentionally hilarious and meta way possible: literally hijacking existing characters (and even introducing a future version of Iceman himself) to clobber Bobby with the Woke Narrative and inform him that he would be taking one for Team Diversity here, whether he liked it or not.

This made no sense to anyone. Including Bobby. Including the writer-insert, omega-level telepath who had just broken the news to him.

Bobby didn’t want to kiss dreamy boys; Bobby wanted to kiss sexy girls! Oh well, too bad, Bobby! Time to man up ‘cause it’s buggerin’ time, true believer!

Outside of the sheer inanity of these kinds of moves, the really frustrating thing is that there are already awesome gay characters in pop culture, yet—similar to Selma Envy—the Wokesters just shove them back in the closet in their mad dash to strap rainbow capes onto unsuspecting hetero-heroes. It is never actually about diversity, inclusion, and equity with these people; it is always about subversion, vengeance, and control. They’ve degenerated into self-parody at this point, unironically writing stories that read like a comedy bit from Nick Mullen. (Do not click that if you are easily offended. OK, you really shouldn’t click on anything I write if you are easily offended, but still :)

So, to end Pride Month on a high note, here is a list of five underappreciated LGBT characters left out in the cold by the Social Vengeance Warriors.

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#5) Northstar (Jean-Paul Beaubier), Alpha Flight

Nowadays every character seems inclined to discuss their sexuality all the time.

The OG himself. Northstar made headlines when he came out as gay in Alpha Flight #106 back in 1992, during the height of the HIV/AIDS scare. He did this while protecting his adopted AIDS baby from a ‘roid raging Major Mapleleaf hellbent on stomping said baby for getting more sympathy than his son, who died from AIDS. It’s a wild issue. Jean-Paul has since gone on to get married and have a serviceable career of superheroing. He never became an A-lister, but I attribute that less to unjust discrimination because of his sexuality and more to just discrimination because of his membership in the super-lame Canadian team Alpha Flight. Unlike Iceman, Northstar’s writers had actually been alluding to Northstar’s homsexuality for years—only hindered from being more overt by the Comics Code Authority of the time—making the eventual reveal far more natural.

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#4) Midnighter and Apollo, Authority (also Stormwatch)

He has a winning smile.

Speaking of authorities, one of the most badass characters period is the Midnighter, an original member of the Authority along with his lover and later husband, the superpowered Apollo (great name). Equipped with integrated battle computers, enhanced reflexes, a healing factor, and a sadistic streak, Midnighter is an absolute unit. At one point, he fights his way through Hell to rescue his true love. Badass and romantic. I actually wanted to use an image with both of them together, but the panels above are so metal that I had to run with them instead. While Wokesters were clumsily making existing DC icons gay, this power couple homage to Batman and Superman was already out there fighting the good fight, and looking damn good doing it.

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#3) Yurimaru, Ninja Scroll

“Do you feel the agony, Jubei?”

Madhouse Studio’s 1993 insta-classic Ninja Scroll has arguably the greatest rogues gallery in anime film history with its menacing “Devils of Kimon.” Yet, the deadly Yurimaru still stands out as a singularly fascinating threat. Calm, cool, calculating: he is both the righthand man and the gay lover of the film’s archvillain, Genma. He can charge near-invisible filaments with supernatural electricity to communicate across great distances with allies or to stealthily strangle and electrocute adversaries. He had the protagonist, Jubei, dead to rights too until he was betrayed by a fellow “devil,” a jealous female ninja with an “explosive” temper whose advances he had spurned. Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned, even among devils.

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#2) Buffalo Bill (Jame Gumb), The Silence of the Lambs

Precious the poodle (played by Darla, the greatest actress of all time) was the real hero of this film.

Dance enthusiast. Fashionista. Animal lover. Bill is a man woman amateur lepidopterist who appreciates the simple things in life… and the importance of moisturizing. He tucks better than Tom Brady and puts more things in the basket than LeBron James. Yet, tragically, this heroic tranz pioneer has been discarded by today’s Wokesters in their rush to celebrate monsters like Dylan Mulvaney.

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#1) Bob Glover, Preacher

I still call that style of hat a “buggerin’ cap” because of this panel.

Bob is one of my favorite characters in all of comics. If you haven’t read Garth Ennis’s madcap, late-90s, “mature” comic series Preacher, it is impossible to truly explain why this relatively minor character is so magnificent. (Skip the show, read the comic.) A gay lad from Yorkshire, Bob fled an abusive, homophobic father and escaped to “that grand modern-day Babylon, San Francisco,” where he worked hard to build a “sexual investigation” detective agency along with his new (business) partner, Freddy Allen. Hijinks ensue. Bob can get a bit… carried away at times, but in the world of hyperbolic villainy that Ennis creates, Bob’s indefatigable optimism and contagious enthusiasm make it impossible not to love him regardless, like a happy Golden Retriever puppy that blithely brings you the slippers he just chewed up. A self-made man and entrepreneur who also happens to be aggressively gay, Bob should be the ultimate bridge between the political divide! And yet, not only is he always conspicuously absent when Pride-o-rama rolls around, he was cut from the TV adaptation entirely. Bollocks!

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There are plenty of awesome gay characters already out there in pop culture, and there are surely myriad others still waiting to be written. I didn’t even mention my beloved, Brazilian shaman Lord Fanny from The Invisibles or the brooding, young brawler Vi from Arcane. There will always be the pearl-clutching goofballs aghast at any gay character, but that’s not most people wincing at the latest wokewashing. Most people just want existing characters’ lore to be respected, new characters to be original and interesting, content to be basically age appropriate, and to not feel constantly clobbered over the head with the topic of sexuality.

Maybe writers should show a little pride in their work and stop lazily retconning existing characters to score easy ESG points. Heaven forbid they develop an existing gay character or create an interesting new one! And maybe, as the great Morgan Freeman once eloquently expressed with regard to racism, segregating an entire month to focus on this group or that group does more harm than simply integrating them into the normal flow of things and then keeping it moving.

Turns out, not all heroes wear capes.