Back in 2011, when the movie X-Men First Class came out, I went to see it with a friend of mine who happens to be gay. As far as I knew, I was just taking in one more rollicking superhero romp, maybe not Academy Award worthy, but certainly worth the price of admission. My gay friend, however, had an entirely different take on the film.
“What did you think?” he asked as we were leaving the theatre.
I gave him my two-cent review: fun story, cool effects, though I’m more of an Avengers man, myself.
“Maybe,” he said. “But I thought it did a great job conveying what it feels like to be gay.”
If you’re scratching your head at that one, like I was when he said it, then maybe I should explain. One of the primary conflicts in X-Men First Class has to do with the search for a cure to the mutations that give the X-Men their powers. The feeling of being an aberrant “freak of nature” is a source of great torment for the super-powered mutants in the movie. Many of them hide, disguise, or suppress their mutations so that they can fit in with every-day society. One of the mutants, a blue-haired superhero named Beast believes he has found a way to medically “cure” their mutations and turn them into “normal” human beings; by contrast, the mutant named Magneto wants them to embrace their mutations and wage war against the human race.
The plot didn’t stand out to me on first viewing as an especially LGBTQ-themed story, but my friend helped me out. “Being gay,” he said, “in a world where everyone is straight and you don’t know if you belong, you can feel like that: like you’re a mutant with a mutation you have to hide, because if anyone knew you had it, they’d think you’re were a freak.”
It turns out that my friend was picking up on something the movie was intentionally laying down. At least, the screenwriters of X-Men First Class have since gone on the record confirming there was an intentional gay subtext to the story.
When I think back to that night watching X-Men First Class, though, two things stand out to me: one, how meaningful it was for my gay friend to see his own experience of queerness being metaphorically represented on screen like that; and two, how easily I had missed the metaphor, as a heterosexual man. That night at the theatre helped me to see my “straight world” through the eyes of someone who did not feel as though he fit into it, because the mainstream narratives of that world, where everyone found a romantic partner of the opposite sex, settled down with a family and set up a white picket-fence around it all, did not include his experience. It helped me see how painful the feeling of “being queer” can be for queer people, and how healing it can be when that pain is acknowledged.
This is one of the reasons I’ve been using the kid’s show Steven Universe as a starting point for this series on practicing hospitality for LGBTQ people in the church, because it too helps us to grasp what the “feeling of being queer” can be like for queer people. If you missed the background, let me explain that the central premise of Steven Universe is that a group of aliens called the Crystal Gems, beings that look and sound and more-or-less act just like you and I, have come to dwell among the “normal” citizens of planet earth. These aliens are really gems, whose only physical form are their gemstones, and whose anthropomorphic bodies are really projections of corporeal light that they emit.
As the show progresses, it becomes clear that the Crystal Gems are somehow meant to represent, if not the LGBTQ community, at the very least the queer experience. This is most obvious in an episode called “Rocknaldo,” (Season 4, Episode 18), where a character named Ronaldo is shown distributing pamphlets that warn the residents of Beach City about the “Rock People” living among them. The episode doesn’t dwell on this for long, and Steven quickly helps Ronaldo see the harm his pamphlets are causing, telling him that a term like “Rock People” is offensive, and that he is a Gem himself. With only a little bit of imagination, though, it’s easy to see this entire exchange as a way of exploring the problem of homophobia on a level that children would get. I may be reading too much into this, of course, but my experience with X-Men First Class suggests that even if this was not the main point of the episode, many queer people would resonate with it in this way.
If the Crystal Gems really are meant to help us to think about the queer experience, it strikes me as significant that whatever else they are, the Crystal Gems are alien. They do not fit the mainstream world of Beach City, and they frequently encounter situations that make them starkly aware of this reality. It is true that most often when this happens, and their alien natures are exposed to their human neighbors like this, the humans themselves tend to take it in stride, and life in Beach City sort of goes on more-or-less as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened. This is one of the endearing quirks of the show, that the most bizarre of storylines—from intergalactic space travel to extra-terrestrial invasions—do not leave the least lasting scar on the tranquility of Beach City. It is almost as if the show is suggesting to queer kids that, yes, the feeling of “being the other” is real and painful, but however painful it may be, life on the other side of coming out will find a way of carrying on. It’s sort of like a sci-fi fantasy adventure version of the “It gets better” message.
I realize that in reading Steven Universe like this, as an allegory for the “othering” that so many queer people face, I may be guilty of “othering” myself. When I see an alien on screen and assume that the alien in question must be a metaphor for a gay person, it reveals something, perhaps, about what I really think about the gay people in my own community (do I really think they of them as “aliens”?) This is part of the brilliance of the show, however, that it holds up the mirror to all of us, queer and straight together, and asks us to re-examine what we see there.
If I am on to anything in this reading of Steven Universe, I think there is a lesson here for the Christian Church. I have written extensively on this topic before, but in a community like the Church, where the focus is almost exclusively on the family, where ministries tend to presuppose marriage as the normative way of following Jesus, and where gay people historically have not been welcome or affirmed, this feeling of “being an alien” can be intense. Like I had done with my gay friend at X-Men First Class, it is easy for Christians to under-estimate just how intense, and indeed how painful,it can be to be made to feel like “the other.”
This is why we need to hear more stories like the one Steven Universe is telling, not just imaginative ones, either, but the real stories of real gay people; and not just hear them, but authentically engage with them. Only as we are able to acknowledge and address the alienation that our “heteronormative narratives” may be causing, will we be able authentically to include gay people into the life of the church. This will take more than watching a few episodes of a kid’s cartoon, of course, but if nothing else a show like Steven Universe might help us to understand how important it is to do this well, and give us some idea of where to start.
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