X-Men: First Class Screenwriter Confirms LGBT Subtext as Totally Intentional

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Sorry, fanficcers, he wasn’t talking about the tenderly presented friendship between Charles Xavier and Erik Lehnsherr. What we have here is a case of the internet bringing people together… even if those people are a random commenter and the screenwriter who can immediately and authoritatively tell them they’re wrong.

We begin with Alyssa Rosenberg’s essay for ThinkProgress.org, which was a lovely deconstruction of the ways in which X-Men: First Class continued the subtextual messages of all the good X-Men movies before it: Mutants as an allegory for the LGBTQ community.

And honestly, who could argue with that? Even Fox News commenters have figured out what all those pinko commies at Marvel have been trying to say with the X-Men for years. But the tl;dr argument is strong with those who object to the critical or textual deconstruction of so called “lowbrow” entertainment.

Yup, that’s Zack Stentz, writer behind First Class, Thor, and Fringe. Here’s the facebook page that comment linked to.

Random? Yes. Awesome? Yup.

Stentz even stuck around long enough to give some recommendations:

The internet: bringing people together. For science comic books.

(Thanks, Anon!)


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Susana Polo
Susana Polo thought she'd get her Creative Writing degree from Oberlin, work a crap job, and fake it until she made it into comics. Instead she stumbled into a great job: founding and running this very website (she's Editor at Large now, very fancy). She's spoken at events like Geek Girl Con, New York Comic Con, and Comic Book City Con, wants to get a Batwoman tattoo and write a graphic novel, and one of her canine teeth is in backwards.