How Marvel's Iceman superhero urged me to come out

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/sep/09/marvel-iceman-superhero-urged-me-to-come-out

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Thursday, 22 October 2015, was the day I realized just how alien I really was.

I’d come home from work to read the most astounding blog headline I’d ever believed I was misreading: “Olympic Freeskier Gus Kenworthy: ‘I’m Gay’.”

I sent my best friend six texts in a row that each said “OH MY GOD” even though, long gone from the homophobic church days of my childhood, I still felt guilt about taking the Lord’s name in vain and still avoided using “OMG” by writing “OMGosh”.

An attempt to describe Gus Kenworthy’s good looks would be an insult to God as well as the gods I’d been told were false idols (Buddha, Allah, Katharine Hepburn). Thus, at the risk of being smote, I will simply say that his is an impossible beauty – Gus is a grinning, blond, jocular jock, a golem of eugenics involving a Disney prince and a Ralph Lauren model.

But this resplendence of his wasn’t quite the cause of my paroxysm. Before that moment of revelation, Gus was someone I’d not only fawned over but had studied. Over the years I’d scrutinized even his most casual interviews in the hopes of emulating what he seemed to be: gregarious, kind, chill.

In short, he was a dude.

When I was a boy, I didn’t know I was gay but I did know I was the opposite of a dude: bookish, sensitive, shy. I was also the son of a minister in the Bible Belt, a place as conservative as it was homogeneous. To adapt, I gradually took on palatable mannerisms and interests until, by the time I’d graduated from the glass-closeted world of an Ivy League school, new acquaintances inexplicably treated me like what I’d once thought was my antithesis – the bro.

Along the way, I’d changed the way I talked and walked and played (I’d taken up rugby, surfing, lacrosse) until I couldn’t quite discern the difference between what was fun and what was survival.

And so it was with an alarmed possessiveness, and then an unnerved bewilderment, that I watched as the newly out Gus absorbed global acclaim as he threw off his hard-won dude-isms to appear like other gay guys whose effeminate “pride” I had never quite understood. Somehow, Gus had skipped the quasi-closeted stage of his journey where he and I were finally in the same place: waiting outside a strange house but hoping to be invited in.

Instead, Gus was more distant than ever: out, proud, less masculine-acting and a member of the preposterously attractive gay phalanx that made me feel that I had none of the requisite traits that would help me connect with my tribe.

It was in these throes of discombobulation that I saw, just two weeks later, a headline on the New York Times’ homepage that read Marvel’s Iceman Cometh Out. It was not about Gus but, to my tepid delight, a member of the fictional X-Men.

Earlier that year, Brian Michael Bendis’s comic book series All-New X-Men – which brought the original, 1960s-based team of superheroes time traveling to the present day – featured the adolescent Iceman being outed by a telepathic teammate. What the Times had just reported, though, was a new development: the adolescent Iceman finally meeting back up with his older, present-day self to ask why the hell his adult counterpart had spent his whole life pretending to be straight.

At first, adult Iceman is speechless, and then defensive, but then goes silent: there is a panel of adult Iceman looking down; the next panel, teen Iceman waiting for an answer; the next panel, just a shot of adult Iceman’s sneakers; and then, the same panel but with something hitting the floor next to adult Iceman’s shoes and making a “tink” noise as it bounces up. It took me a moment to realize what the falling object was: one of adult Iceman’s tears, frozen before it could even hit the ground.

I’d read comics as a kid but didn’t think they had a place in adult life. In fact, I thought their increasing influence on modern art was one of the main causes of what literary critic James Wood referred to as “the infantilization of our literary culture”. Yet after Iceman’s confrontation with himself, I put a pause on reading Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian – which I had been boasting to everyone was “likely the greatest prose I have ever read”! – to try and uncover every freezing fractal of Iceman’s life.

At first, it was merely seeing him: to observe exactly what he had to say, to watch just how the addition of superpowers allowed him to handle the quandaries of life. But then my project broadened to getting a feel for his personality. And the more I read, the more I discovered, with a feeling not unlike pride, that the way I imagined myself was the way Iceman’s writers imagined him, too: hilarious, loyal, agile yet powerful, and willing to acknowledge his sexuality even if he didn’t yet know how to embrace it.

In the restless intervals between the release of X-Men issues, I caught up online with reviews of past stories that included Iceman. I learned about the character’s inception and subsequent, more powerful mutations over the decades. I found out that he had a conservative upbringing, too. I even bought a vintage Iceman shirt on eBay.

What really entranced me, though, was how the reveal of Iceman’s sexuality intersected with something called retcon (short for “retroactive continuity”), which is when a story’s previously established facts are altered from a later time in the tale’s chronology – it’s some element of a story, in other words, that’s supposedly always been there even though it’s not revealed until later.

After learning of retcon, I spent night after night trying to find a textual causality, from decades of X-Men comics, that hinted at Iceman’s sexual identity. And for every vitriolic comments section of a comic book blog – in which some commenter would inevitably remark that they were not homophobic but then still ask why a character who seemed straight had to be “made” gay – there were also annotated theories from others that supported why Iceman had, in fact, always been a homo.

Every time I found one of these particularly compelling theses, sometimes from comic book writers themselves, I felt gratified: “See”, I would think to the critics in the ether, “this has always been a part of him, even if he couldn’t show us.”

It was a few months into my ice-ploration, after a particularly fruitless Friday night out at some gay bars – the kind of night where you believe that gay culture’s only viable currency is an extreme, unobtainable beauty – that I came home alone and dispirited, to really feel the weight of my imagined disconnect from the gay community.

There had been other nights like this, even one a few months before that when my sense of isolation was so unbearable that I drafted Gus a note, telling him how similar we were, even though I knew we were now such disparate species that I would never actually send him the message.

So on that night I came home alone, with the miasma of tequila still strong at 3am , I appealed to a different idol: I took All-New X-Men #40 from my bookshelf and read the scene that I’d only seen until then in bits and pieces on the internet. It was a six-page conversation of a girl making her friend come out to her. The friend is resistant and angry and ashamed, but he’s also, ultimately, grateful, because he becomes a little less alone.

The scene included telepathy and ice walls but it also had the most realistic dialogue I think I’ve ever read and I cried over its words until I fell asleep.

Knowing Iceman the way I now know him, what I feel is still not a crush, not even in the playful way readers swoon over Heathcliff or Holden Caufield or even, Christ forgive us, Christian Grey. What I’ve somehow found is a commonality. I can only see very little of Iceman: he’s made up of ink dots and plot points and, in his ice form, is just shades of white with a minimal but evocative smirk. And yet, when I look at him and let myself feel our natural similarities, I don’t mind that neither of us is not the most beautiful one, not yet the dazzling image of a fully fleshed-out form. In the ice of his face what I see is myself reflected. I’m grinning, I’m chilling, I’m mutating.

Jonah Wynne is a pseudonym for a novelist who lives in New York City. For other essays in this series, go on the You Changed Me page.