Spoilers The Falcon and Winter Soldier discussion

"cisheterosexist"? Seriously? Greece, Rome, India, just to name a few powerful cultures going back thousands of years? Over in the Loki thread we were just chatting about Loki's thousand + year history of gender bending and how the Vikings seemed to handle that just fine.

You seem to have bought into a pretty rigid political agenda, complete with made-up terminology.

 

I'm fairly sure Cap and Bucky, or parodies of Cap and Bucky, have been routinely hinted at being gay, as a joke over the course of the last 60 years, which if I think about it, is probably a light weight hate crime.

Sam has had a gay nephew for the last 25 years.

Meanwhile, the soviet model was to find high ranking homosexuals, attain compromising evidence or a honey trap, to turn them (red) and then milk them (for information). So even though Bucky is an assassin and not an infiltrator by design...

There is an old Winter Soldier code-phrase, that will make Bucky go to a gay night club, pick up a closeted male US Senator, bang him till he passes out, and then take microfilm pictures of all the senators secret documents that he naturally took to Studio 54.

Also Bucky was born in 1920ish?

He's either gay or he's participated in throwing some gays down a well.

I'm being very black and white here, but if you try to be an ally back then, you get thrown down a well too, because there was no difference between being gay and being an ally, to a mob.

At least in "mainstream" America.

 

Sure maybe he could have worded it better, but I don't think your version of things would have applied. If all of the creatives involved with the creation of a character or characters intended those characters to be straight, then those characters are straight, and there is nothing wrong with them saying that when asked.

The people who created the characters know.
Does the creators intent mean nothing?
It's fine if you want to hope, or imagine that a character or characters are gay, but if that wasn't the creators' intent then they aren't gay.

When did this happen? This is the first I've ever seen anyone get upset over the word homosexual.

This is just strange to me, the only "valid" interpretation of something is what the creator intended when they created the artwork. It's fine to have different interpretations of something if it was created with that intent, but if the creators had one interpretation in mind, then that is the only valid interpretation.

Yeah, it would be nice to see LGBTQ+ characters in the MCU but saying it's "offensive" that there haven't been any yet is taking it a bit far.

I'm sorry, I'm a huge supporter of the LGBTQ+ community, but this is bullshit, when it comes to stuff like the MCU this is way to complicated an issue to look at it so black and white.

If people want to imagine or hope that the characters are gay, that doesn't mean they are, and it's ridiculous to get angry when the people involved say they aren't.

 

Of course not.

True, but some are so Hell-bent on trying to imply or hope clearly straight characters are gay, that they invent traits or behavior for the characters which were never intended, yet if the creatives give what should be the expected response in the negative, somehow, its a "fault" of the creatives for not agreeing that the character(s) in question are possibly gay.

This.

 

I remember George Takei being upset that Sulu was portrayed as gay in the JJverse movies. He said that Sulu wasn't written gay and that he himself didn't portray him as gay and that wasn't Roddenberry's intent that he be gay and that mirror Sulu definitely was not gay.

 

1. It was a silly question, and Mackie should have gracefully punted on it. Fans can headcanon whatever they like, but it's obvious this friendship has not been presented as anything other than two straight guys.

2. There's no need for Sam and Bucky to be anything more than bickering buddies.

3. The MCU (defined as the movies plus Disney+ series) does have a glaring lack of queer representation problem, which only grows with each new movie and episode. Given that Disney's Star Wars, Pixar, and major movie releases all share this fault, it's easy to identify the corporation as the core culprit here.

 

You are either in favor of equality for LGBTQIA+ people or you are not. If you are in favor of equality for LGBTQIA+ people, then you have a moral obligation to depict them and to depict them as equal to straight people.

Nobody would accept a world in which Marvel Studios makes dozens and dozens of films and creates over a hundred major characters without any of them being black; why is it okay to do that with LGBTQIA+ people?

No. Just as black people and their allies do not have any obligation to accept the belief of some white people that black people are not equal, LGBTQIA+ people and their allies do not have any obligation to accept the belief of some straight people that LGBTQIA+ people are not equal.

Yes, it is, because excluding LGBTQIA+ characters in a franchise with dozens upon dozens of characters means you're constructing a fantasy world in which LGBTQIA+ people are not present. That is not realistic -- it is a deliberate decision to depict straight people and their experiences as being more important than those of people who are not straight.

I repeat: Nobody would accept a world in which Marvel Studios makes dozens and dozens of films and creates over a hundred major characters without any of them being black; why is it okay to do that with LGBTQIA+ people?

Not when you do it over 100 times in a franchise consisting of dozens of movies and TV shows. That's a pattern of centering straight people and their experiences first.

They weren't upset he disagreed with whether or not Sam and Bucky are straight. They were upset he implied there's something bad about the idea of interpreting Sam and Bucky as LGBTQIA+.

I do demand that people treat LGBTQIA+ people as equals.

1) I tried in my first post on this topic to be generous to Mackie's POV and point out that there does need to be more space in art for depicting platonic friendships between men. Why has no one acknowledge that?

2) I never said "or else you're the enemy." But if Marvel Studios, out of dozens of films and God knows how many major characters still hasn't introduced a major LGBTQIA+ character, then that absolutely reflects a bias in favor of straight people over LGBTQIA+ people. It is absolutely not a realistic depiction of humanity to exclude them. That doesn't make them "the enemy." But it does mean that prejudice is at play and that they need to do better at depicting a marginalized community as equals.

I don't understand what you're trying to say. What's wrong with the word "cisheterosexist?" Do you have a better word to describe a belief that cisgender heterosexual people are more important than or superior to LGBTQIA+ people? It packs a lot of concepts into one word and it's easier than trying to individually list prejudices against lesbians, gays, bisexuals, transgender people, queer people, intersex people, asexual people, nonbinary people, etc.

I don't use the word "homophobic" for 2 reasons:

1. The people the word is describing do not usually fear homosexuality. Rather, they usually simply believe that cisgender straight people are superior to and/or more important than LGBTQIA+ people.
2. The word "homophobic" only itself encompasses fear of homosexuality, and does not encompass prejudice against transgender people, nonbinary people, genderqueer people, asexuality, and other sexual identities that exist behind the inadequate "either-gay-or-straight" paradigm.

Marvel Studios films are not the product of ancient Greek, ancient Roman, or Indian cultures. Marvel Studios films are the product of American and Western European cultures, and American culture inherited cisheterosexism (the belief in the superiority of cisgender people over transgender people and nonbinary people and in the superiority of heterosexuality over other sexual identities) from Western European culture going back roughly to the time Christianity became the dominant religion in Western Europe roughly 2,000 years ago.

I don't think "LGBTQIA+ people are equal and should be treated as equal" is an unreasonably rigid agenda. Like I said: Nobody reasonable person would think it would be acceptable for Marvel Studios to produce dozens of movies and create hundreds of characters and have none of them be black. Every reasonable person recognizes that they would have a moral obligation to depict black people. So why doesn't that same rule apply to LGBTQIA+ people?

Are you referring to the word "cisheterosexist?" Is there something wrong with that word? It's the most efficient, all-encompassing word I've ever found to describe prejudice against LGBTQIA+ sexuality in general rather than only one particular sexuality identity within that spectrum. It's becoming pretty common in the LGBTQIA+ rights movement. If you have a better word to describe prejudice against the entire spectrum of non-straight sexual identities and orientations, please let me know.

Unless someone is a member of the community so affected, I don't think it is the place of people in the dominant group to police how members of marginalized communities feel and react their (the dominant group member's) word choices.

Not if they don't explicitly establish them as such. Unless Sam and Bucky explicitly are identified in the text as being straight, interpreting them as LGBTQIA+ is just as valid an interpretation as interpreting them as straight.

It's art, not an encyclopedia entry.

They're not upset Mackie doesn't agree with the interpretation that the characters are LGBTQIA+. They're upset he implied there's something bad about that interpretation.

No, they know what they intended and they know what is textually established.

Not if it isn't explicitly in the text. "Death of the author," baby.

To be clear, I wasn't upset -- I was trying to help you avoid offending someone else in the future.

As for when this happened, it's been building organically for a long while now. I first became aware of it just from talking to LGBTQIA+ friends. The prominent LGBTQIA+ rights organization GLAAD (founded as the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation) first included "homosexual" on its list of offensive terms in 2006. Gary Nunn wrote an op-ed in the Guardian asking them to stop using the term "homosexual" for LGBTQIA+ people in 2011, and this essay in This Week from a straight person to other straight people explaining why the word has widely come to be seen as offensive in the LGBTQIA+ community was published in 2015.

I strongly urge you to look up the concept of "death of the author."

If that were the case, a lot of important works of art would have been long forgotten. How many productions of Shakespeare have used entirely different interpretations of his plays? Think about the time Patrick Stewart played Othello with a cast that was otherwise all-black. This is the ur-example, but think about all those scholars who have written that John Milton, when he wrote Paradise Lost, was of the Devil's party and didn't know about it.

That idea only makes sense if you think that representation for a marginalized community isn't a moral necessity in treating them as equals. But marginalized people, over and over again throughout history, have stressed that not being represented in popular media causes them major psychological harm. It's one thing for one installment in a series to focus on members of other communities. But if you have dozens of installments and over a hundred characters, then that's systematically excluding them. That harms them, and that is not treating them as equal.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: No reasonable person would say it would have been acceptable for Marvel Studios to produce dozens of films over the course of 12 years and not feature a single prominent black character. So why is it acceptable to do that to LGBTQIA+ people?

Sure it does -- to them. You don't share that interpretation, so they are not -- to you. No one interpretation is more valid than the other in the absence of explicit textual statements. The characters are not real, and therefore they can be LGBTQIA+ to one person and straight to another.

1) It is not ridiculous if it is yet another instance of their being excluded from representation from a long series. 2) Again, they're angry Mackie implied there's something bad about interpreting Sam and Bucky that way.

* * *

I won't be replying to any more posts on this topic. If after reading this post, someone still does not understand that creators are not treating members of marginalized communities as equals if they (the creators) exclude them again and again and again and again across dozens of movies and over a hundred characters, then that person is treating straight people as more important than LGBTQIA+ people even if they don't consciously realize that's what they're doing. And if that's the case, there's nothing else I can say.

 

If the Eternals are all a million years old, it would be amazing if they were all straight, since the beginning of time and will continue to be straight until the end of time.

Especially if the UNI-Mind is in their lore.

Back when She-Hulk defended Eros of Titan, who is an Eternal, for rape, because he would use his mind powers to loosen women up, who he then would have sex with, I don't recall any of the complainants being men.

Although after a million years, I doubt any Eternal has any sexual interest in any other Eternal sexually, especially if they are sterile, or can control their fertility. Mentor had kids, hell Thanos went on a purge across the Galaxy killing all his bastard progeny.

Although is Thanos hates life, and hates children, so gay sex seems like a valid alternative to a million years of celibacy.

 

This.

 

Thank you. I don't know why people are having such a hard time with this.

Mackie's answer was ridiculous, complaining that you can't do platonic male friendships anymore when he lives in a world where he just starred in a mega-popular mini-series all about two guys' platonic friendship and which didn't have a single gay person in sight.

THAT SAID, the interviewer was basically engaging in entrapment, the way he framed the questions. Said interviewer has a history of targeting Black actors for this kind of thing, to get people angry at them. So fuck him. https://twitter.com/TheFirstOkiro/status/1405731744049889287

 

I would agree that this conversation is more appropriate to The Neutral Zone. That said, you are just a coward who is not willing or able to respond to opposing POV, And for the record, I was getting egged coming out of bars with my friends before you were born, and marching in Pride parades while you were in diapers. Don't presume to lecture me child.

 

Google was no help

Wasn't Sam a gang member before he met up with Cap?

So his first job was either protection, drugs, prostitution or petty larceny?

I'm reading his origin on IGN.

Some guy with a pet Falcon called The Falcon stops Nazis from 1969 from training indigenous tribal island folk (probably depicted as being from the 17th century) to hate America.

Seriously?

Sam sounds like a nerd.

A huge nerd.

Who loves his bird, like Ernie loves Burt.

Oh...

Sam Wilson was a Pimp.

He sold women like cattle.

Let's see Anthony defend that?

 

No, that's not how art works. Intent doesn't matter at all except insofar as it is actually present in the art itself. Once you put the art out in the world, you can't control it anymore (unless you're willing to literally change it a la Star wars special edition stuff). Keep in mind, it was Roddenberry's intent that Spock had hypnotic sex powers and Ferengi should have massive dicks. And no one in charge of Star Trek (or in the fandom) has ever cared about that at all beyond saying, well thank god that never happened.

It was utterly ridiculous for Takei to be upset at a new version of Sulu being gay and it would be equally ridiculous for Mackie and Stan to be upset at people wanting to see their characters as gay.

Having said that: Mackie's actual comment doesn't read this way to me, anyway. It seems more like a larger frustration for him that goes beyond how one role is interpreted and his comment is clearly aimed at the fact that platonic male friendships are themselves underrepresented and its problematic to cipher them out of existence. To that extent, his comment is totally understandable. But the reaction to it, coming from a group who have just as much trouble getting decent representation (and in the context of the MCU specifically, they clearly have more trouble) is equally understandable. The simple fact is there's two things here that are woefully underrepresented and they're very specifically not compatible with one another so when there is any room for interpretation one way or the other, there is unavoidable friction between them. The only real solution to it would be to significantly improve the representation of both of them.

 

George asked Gene to make Sulu gay in the 60s.

When it mattered.

When he could enjoy it.

When it would have made his Life better and his friends lives better by making positive press about being gay.

60 years later he can't take a viagra without his eyeballs exploding.

Too little.

Too late.

 

But in this particular case, even if it is explicitly in the text and the author makes the character saying "Ah, yes, by the way, I'm straight." one can reply, "Oh, the character is simply in denial. He obviously has the hots for his best male friend".

 

This is why I hate some fans. "Oh no they care about each other and open up about their feelings to each other, they muuuuuuuust be in love and gay."

At least it's not as bad as Supernatural's fans that despised any woman on the show because it got in the way of their incest fantasies.

 

It’s useful as a concept, but overrated in importance. I don’t usually quote myself but I’m in a lazy mood,

The above doesn’t invalidate subjective readings/interpretations of art, of course, but if authorial intent is not the final word, neither is that of any audience member (nor can authorial intent be legitimately erased in its entirety).

 

I don't think anyone said the author's interpretation was *invalid* because some of the audience disagree. Merely that the author's interpretation isn't any more valid (or any less valid) than the audience's. Because authorial intent is not 'proof' that x, y and z must indisputably be true.

 

Surely we can all agree that one pleasant, albeit secondary, benefit of more equitable sexuality representation will be fewer Twitter eye-roll fests like this one.

 

That shines a necessary light on the ill-minded motives behind the Mackie interview. Frankly, I cannot say Vary's behavior and utter lack of ethics is at all surprising. For more than a decade, the extremes of the new progressive movement in my field were/are almost exclusively guided / influenced by white people--and a large number of them sharing a decidedly hostile view of black men, overloaded with beliefs that are utterly divorced from reality, but they are determined to attack and paint black males with a condemning brush. Relevant to the Mackie hit piece, the Vary's of the media (and in the not-so-hidden backrooms of political groups) constantly accuse black males being a number of things they feel are (imagined), interrelated "root causes" for attitudes, beliefs or statements like Mackie's--ultimately, reasons why black men are not in lockstep with their behavior, their views, such as being "too masculine" / "Alpha Male", "too Christian" and "too hetero" among other allegedly "offensive" traits and/or beliefs. I--and innumerable black men have heard and continue to deal with this festering propaganda in media, politics and academia. Again, those "root causes" are seen as the reason Mackie "dared" to make an obvious point about the characters in his show.

The Vary's of the media (and beyond) have long seen black men as some "problem" that needs to be attacked and broken down for every thought, action and perception in order to force some sort of "racial reset" that brings black males in line (think about that)- after not only beating the "offensive" traits out of them, but forcing them to adopt the white progressive mindset/platform. Anything less is met with the kind of unfettered, calculated propagandized garbage "journalists" such as Vary aim--in marksman-like fashion--at black men.

To echo YLu's point: fuck him--and any who share his frankly racist platform.