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Topic: Rachel Summers, love life of Kitty Pryde? Post ReplyPost New Topic
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Marc Baptiste
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Posted: 15 September 2020 at 3:30pm | IP Logged | 1 post reply

Personally, I find "turning" established characters gay usually jarring and forced.  However in this case you have a 20 year old Kitty/Kate Pryde coming out as bisexual, not gay; and in a world where some people don't come to term with their homosexuality or bisexuality until they are in their 60's or older - a 20 year old embracing her bisexuality is hardly unrealistic.

And if you want to trace Kitty's complex sexuality, you can go ALL the way back to DAYS OF FUTURE PAST and the self/lesbian kiss!

Marc
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Mark Haslett
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Posted: 15 September 2020 at 7:05pm | IP Logged | 2 post reply

And if you want to trace Kitty's complex sexuality, you can go ALL the way back to DAYS OF FUTURE PAST and the self/lesbian kiss!

***

You mean the story where we go to the future to see Kitty as an adult and see that she is happily married to Peter, with whom she has been in love since "the moment we first met?"

I don't see this latest development as particularly noteworthy one way or the other, but the idea that Kitty's sexuality has been in "debate" for 40 years is utter nonsense.
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Marc Baptiste
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Posted: 15 September 2020 at 7:20pm | IP Logged | 3 post reply

Mark,

If you think that loving someone from the moment you first meet precludes you from being attracted to or even falling in love with ANYONE ELSE on Earth from the same or opposite gender, then you understand neither what the heart wants nor sexuality 101.

Marc
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Mark Haslett
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Posted: 15 September 2020 at 7:54pm | IP Logged | 4 post reply

Marc

If you think that, in fiction, seeing a person has been in love with a person of the opposite sex since the moment they met is basis for a debate of whether or not that fictional character is gay, then you etc. etc.

This is not a question of how human sexuality works. It's a question of whether or not a character has been portrayed as bi for 40 years or not.

Edited by Mark Haslett on 15 September 2020 at 7:57pm
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Michael Roberts
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Posted: 15 September 2020 at 9:50pm | IP Logged | 5 post reply

but the idea that Kitty's sexuality has been in "debate" for 40 years is utter nonsense.

-----

40 years? Yes. 20-30 years? Not that nonsensical. Just because you weren't part of that debate doesn't mean that debate did not exist. Recently, Lilly Wachowski acknowledged the speculation among trans fans of THE MATRIX that it contains a transgender allegory. As a cis-dude, this would have never occurred to me, and even now, I still am not sure what specifically speaks to trans fans. But I'll take their word that they have seen something in THE MATRIX all along and that the Wachowskis, as trans women, put it in there.

Is it controversial to say that there are a lot of lesbian overtones in Claremont's X-Men? If they announced that Storm was bisexual tomorrow, people would just say, sure, Yukio.

Here's a frequently referenced sequence from Excalibur where Sat-Yr-9 pretending to be Courtney Ross has Kitty licking off birthday frosting off her finger. (Setting aside this was Kitty's 15th birthday. Her age inappropriate relationships is a whole other discussion.)


Here's Alan Davis acknowledging that he was playing the relationship between Kitty and Sat-Yr-9 as a lesbian affair.


 QUOTE:
I hope I'm not going to disappoint you Jim but although I knew Chris had some plan for Sat Yr 9 to corrupt Kitty and that the various Cross time versions of Saturnyne were attracted to Kitty, I had no idea what, if any, the goal of this relationship was to be. I just played it as a lesbian affair. Kitty the innocent victim of a wicked woman-- I thought all of scheming was just a ruse to keep Kitty interested.


There's no Frederic Wertham-esque grasping of straws going on there.

So is it so ridiculous that some people picked up on the intentional lesbian overtones there and wondered about Kitty's sexuality?


Edited by Michael Roberts on 15 September 2020 at 9:58pm
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Rebecca Jansen
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Posted: 15 September 2020 at 11:00pm | IP Logged | 6 post reply

Bringing adult sexuality into super-powered people comic books is pretty fraught with, well... the potential to look exceptionally dopey. I'm all for an Alfred Hitchock approach, leaving things open to being filled in by the reader as they are inclined to, and as their interpretation. Nothing could be clumsier than explicitness in a genre form originally developed for children... what was naughty or edgy in a b&w '60s or '70s underground actual kids would be unlikely to encounter, or spend their allowance on if they did, is now the clapped-out old hooker plying their trade amongst adults (possibly only in terms of chronology), an ever dwindling clientelle. How's this working out for the medium? Has anyone really topped the Director's Cut of Watchmen with Nite Owl and Silk Spectre having 'problems' until they do some super-personing and finally get it together in the Owl ship? Are the rabbit-headed chicks still having graphically imagined sex in mature anthropomorphic conceptual universes? Giant-eyed purple haired things that look like precious moments figurines still doing the nasty with those black bits?

I often do see this revelation stuff as more hand-me-down table scraps to have existing characters changed from what was established, but mostly it's some fairly uncreative person wanting to 'make history' in comics, plus maybe spike sales with free publicity. Actually creating solid comic stories with personalities that are not a few items on a checklist is not so easy. If I can put Popeye in it (ala terry Austin) how does it look as a headline? Popeye 'comes out' as bisexual! The death of Popeye! Popeye now a visible minority sailor! Wow, exciting and historic right? Like I say; how's that been working out for you/us/the medium?

Edited by Rebecca Jansen on 15 September 2020 at 11:10pm
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Mark Haslett
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Posted: 16 September 2020 at 12:25am | IP Logged | 7 post reply

Michael: Here's Alan Davis acknowledging that he was playing the relationship between Kitty and Sat-Yr-9 as a lesbian affair.

***

That is fascinating to see something I missed that was overt and overtly intended.

Well, kudos to them for keeping this on down-low. I didn't know about it and prefer this 30-year approach to the crap-tastic coming out of Northstar.

It's too bad there weren't more representative characters created back in my childhood who were able to come out in healthy and realistic ways. When young readers were still in the hobby, we all could have benefited.

Edited by Mark Haslett on 16 September 2020 at 12:30am
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Shawn Kane
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Posted: 16 September 2020 at 4:41am | IP Logged | 8 post reply

With Iceman and now Kitty Pryde, I'm interested to see if someone at Marvel will try to go forward with Captain America/Bucky speculation that's been a popular online subject over the years.
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Dave Kopperman
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Posted: 16 September 2020 at 7:13am | IP Logged | 9 post reply

 Rebecca Jansen wrote:
Bringing adult sexuality into super-powered people comic books is pretty fraught

Then we should take Franklin Richards away.  Or the entire sequence from JB's FF run that leads up to and results from Sue's miscarriage, which remains one of my favorite character arcs in mainstream books to this day.
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Dave Kopperman
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Posted: 16 September 2020 at 7:16am | IP Logged | 10 post reply

 Mark Haslett wrote:
It's too bad there weren't more representative characters created back in my childhood who were able to come out in healthy and realistic ways. When young readers were still in the hobby, we all could have benefited.

Which version of the 1980's did you live through?  The idea that a major comics company back then would have a gay character - much less one in a healthy relationship - is more fantastical than the superpowers in the books.


Edited by Dave Kopperman on 16 September 2020 at 9:12am
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Andrew Bitner
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Posted: 16 September 2020 at 7:32am | IP Logged | 11 post reply

Dave: Then we should take Franklin Richards away.

***

Not necessarily. In the 1950s, characters could not say the word 'pregnant,' and yet Lucy Ricardo had Little Ricky on I LOVE LUCY.

One of the biggest breakthroughs on that front? Showing Mike and Carol Brady sharing a bed (which I think was the first time we had seen that--and they were married). And that was in the 1970s.
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Eric Sofer
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Posted: 16 September 2020 at 9:06am | IP Logged | 12 post reply

Andrew B. - Well, Fred and Wilma shared a bed. Lots of husbands and wives did, but until the 60s/70s, no one could admit it. Apparently some individuals couldn't reconcile a bed as something to sleep in. Crap.

Claremont apparently loved to indulge in lesbian fantasies, right down to Ororo ridiculing Scott for his feelings about Jean's "death" in Antarctica. One might have thought she could show a LITTLE compassion for the team leader... but Claremont seemed to love attacking authority and standard sexual mores, from what Is saw.

As for Kitty's sexuality... I saw her fall for Peter from the first moment, as noted. So straight lesbian is out of the the question. She had possibilities to go lez with Illyana and with Rachel. But there were hints that she could have had a sexual relationship with Wolverine as well. I saw all of this, and never saw it consummated. There was the shot from Excalibur with Sat-yr-9 - OBVIOUSLY a seduction in progress. I can't' say that was Kitty's fault, and I never saw the two of them fall in bed together.

Also, I may be the only one on the planet, but when I read, "Impulsively, Kitty gives her younger self a kiss", I figured it to be a kiss on the forehead. Surely, one could go the other way, and assume it was a full-on incestuous trans-time liplock - but it just never occurred to me until people started commenting on it.

So maybe it IS me, an old (and old fashioned) fogey. But I always figured it was Kitty and Peter until that incredibly screwed up Secret Wars scene.
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