I have grown disenchanted with superhero films: perhaps inevitable due to the genre's ubiquity (never a good way to keep my affection), but a bit disheartening when I remember how much I really appreciated superheroes once upon a time. Whether because I always liked the X-Men or whether the films simply grabbed me when I was young enough, the first two X-Men films have remained my favorite. Yes, even the first one (it's got issues, but every superhero movie ever has issues and I cannot be bothered to care about much beyond personal affection).
It's fairly obvious ("Have you tried... not being a mutant?") that the two films intentionally reference gay rights, what with gay rights being the most topical civil rights struggle of the time, the director being openly gay, and Ian McKellen's presence as Magneto. It's obvious with Bobby Drake and his parents, with Magneto's rants, with Senator Kelly trying to ban mutants from schools or Rogue having a traumatic first sexual experience that she doesn't understand and has difficulty coping with (and my favorite... that moment in Alaska when "mutants" come up on the TV and Rogue's eyes dart to it and Wolverine's eyes dart to it, and they notice each other and they know...).
Which brings us to Nightcrawler, a.k.a. Kurt Wagner, played by Alan Cumming. His immersion in the gay subtext is instantly obvious from the casting, but the character is where the real matter lies: a very religious mutant with a visible, unalterable mutation who is used and exploited, forced into acting against his kind, feared equally by both sides, yet holds confidently and gently to both his body and his faith: seeing no discrepancy with evolution or his demonic appearance; seeing no war, only forgiveness. The strength of the portrait may have been borne home more if the film had given Stryker any religious correlations, like the comics, but Kurt isn't really a lead anyway, and there's no point in giving Stryker religion if the guy's just supposed to be Wolverine's backstory.
The thing is: even though it's subtext, even though the character of Nightcrawler isn't actually gay (we know this from the comics), even though he's a very minor character... has there been a better example of a gay Christian, man or woman, in film? Or other fictional mediums? Maybe I'm forgetting something? Because I'm drawing a blank. Most projects I've seen that actually use gay Christians tend to make them hysterical hypocrites, delusional frauds, shallowly sketched foils for atheists, or doubters who lose their faiths in order to more fully embrace their sexuality. All of which can be, I'm sure, valuable characters, but none of which reflect anything I'm interested in seeing. Even Angels in America starts out creating a complex, gay Mormon, investing him with weight and emotional heft, only to use him as a punching bag in scene after scene of the second play, no longer a protagonist, but a scapegoat to bear the full brunt of everyone's judgment and/or self-loathing.
I'd like to think there's something I'm forgetting, or there's too much I haven't seen yet. Otherwise, I'm just in awe of how important X2 really is to me... and how ridiculous it is that a superhero movie, of all things, has given me the closest cinematic representation of one of the most significant combinations in my life.
Which is, I guess, what superheroes are there for?
Whatever. I'll take it.
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