Spider-Man isn’t queer on screen, but he’s a queer icon on Twitter
This weekend, Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse will be catching millions of moviegoers in its animated web, continuing the story of Miles Morales as the wall-crawling superhero.
The June 2 film is LGBTQ-affirming — note the “Protect Trans Kids” poster fans spotted in the trailer — but we doubt it’ll establish Miles as anything other than cis and hetero.A queer onscreen Spider-Man is long overdue, as even the latest two live-action Spideys have noted.
In 2013, Andrew Garfield told Entertainment Weekly that he talked with a producer about the prospect. “I was kind of joking, but kind of not joking about [Peter Parker’s love interest] MJ,” he recalled. “And I was like, ‘What if MJ is a dude?’ Why can’t we discover that Peter is exploring his sexuality?
It’s hardly even groundbreaking! … So why can’t he be gay? Why can’t he be into boys?”And Tom Holland told The Times in 2019 that there could soon be a gay Spidey onscreen. “Of course,” he said. “The world isn’t as simple as a straight, white guy,” he added. “It doesn’t end there, and these films need to represent more than one type of person.”In 2015, however, a hack of Sony Pictures documents revealed that Marvel Entertainment’s contract with the studio insisted that the cinematic Spider-Man is “not a homosexual (unless Marvel has portrayed that alter ego as a homosexual),” as Variety reported at the time.On the printed page, it’s a different story.
