Of Tights and Men

Like every boy, I was always looking for the heroes. Whether they were on the big screen with lightsabres or in comic book panels with tights and super powers, they were people I wanted to be. They were always dashing, always handsome, and always drop-dead gorgeous. I didn’t know if I wanted to be like them or if I just simply wanted them. Now that I think about it, I’m still not sure!

It wasn’t until I reached my teenage years that I began to appreciate the value of a decent story. Sure, Batman kicked plenty of bad guy butts, but his back story was just as tight as his backside. He was the orphaned son of rich philanthropists who were murdered before his very eyes. He swore to fight crime to keep that from happening to anyone else. And sixty years later, he’s still fighting crime and fighting off those pesky gay rumors with his “ward” Robin.

Strangely, I’m probably one of the few gay boys who never really could get into the X-Men series. It was always so dark, so confusing, and every page was riddled with a myriad of back stories that I simply couldn’t comprehend. Even back in the mid-1980s, the art was light years ahead of anything else in the industry. But I sure did get confused. Wolverine was cool. I could understand him.

It wasn’t until I met my current partner almost fifteen years later that I fully began to grasp the relevancy that comics like the X-Men had on modern gay life and activism. Not only do we have great stories now, we have something even more powerful: Parallels.

The universe of the X-Men told of a small minority of people who would develop strange abilities and powers around the time of puberty. These people were known as mutants. Some had greater powers than others, but they all knew that once they became aware of their new powers, their lives would be changed forever. The film X2: X-Men United even had a character “coming out” as a mutant to his parents. Their first reaction was eerily familiar. “Have you ever tried not being a mutant?”

And yet there were heroes. There were pacifists, the deeply religious, and the bitter cynics. In an age where armchair activism has taken hold of the GLBT community to the extent that the first of our three cable TV networks has folded, the story of the X-Men has become a reminder of how important it is that we engage society from within.

The latest film, X-Men: The Last Stand is chillingly relevant. The cynical Eric Lensherr (out actor Ian McKellen) is also “Magneto,” one of the most powerful mutants who has the ability to manipulate any form of metal. Then there’s the heroic Professor Charles Xavier (Patrick Stewart). The two patriarchs of the mutant universe face each other even as the entire mutant race faces imminent doom from a new “cure” which suppresses the mutant gene—“permanently.”

When I first learned of the film’s plot, I knew there was a great opportunity for all of us to get at least a symbolic image of the importance of working together for GLBT rights across the country. Now that I’ve seen the film, I’m pleased to say that the opportunity was not wasted.

It paints such a disturbingly relevant picture of how extreme things can get that it’s almost rendered irrelevant. War between humans and mutants. War between mutants. Battles. Lots of special effects. But yes, there’s a point. What if there were a cure for mutancy? Or more to the point, what if there were a cure for homosexual orientation? How would we react?

Imagine a world where gay activists who work to build bridges have to struggle more with those who are lethargic, apathetic, or outright hostile to heterosexuals. Imagine a world where anything that is accomplished is met with abject hostility from those who are in the GLBT community. And then imagine how difficult it would be to work toward full equality in a world that insists that we accept their “cure.”

As much as I hate to say it, there’s no need to imagine such a thing. It is reality. There are classic lines like “we’re not a disease to be cured,” and “Since when did we become a disease?” The complexity of this kind of struggle is very much relevant to ours, and I can only echo the hope that Xavier had that we can all work together.

And our struggle remains. We struggle not only against those who would rob us of our equality, but against those who don’t want to be equal and insist that “things will never change.” It’s quite disheartening, to be honest, and even more distressing is the vast amount of apathy that seems to be everywhere in between. They might watch the gay TV networks or attend the pride parades festivals, but they’ll rarely support them with their time or money or even their voice until the dark cloud of marginalization gathers into a storm of real oppression.

And then it will be too late.

But it’s not too late. And we can make a difference. We just have to believe it and yes, even act on it.

David W. Shelton

David W. Shelton is Chair of Clarksville Pride, Inc., and serves on the Clarksville Human Relations Commission. He can be reached at http://mailto:dwshelton@bellsouth.net/ or at http://www.davidwshelton.com/.