This is queer superhero time.

The advent of streaming television is a curse wrapped in a blessing because it allows me to get obsessed with shows I wouldn’t normally get obsessed with by virtue of the fact that I can watch. every. episode. consecutively. for days. Which leads me to my current quasi-obsession, Heroes, the grownup version of X-Men, where “seemingly ordinary individuals” realize that they have extraordinary abilities. I watch it partially because it offers more insight into our cultural predilection for masked superpeople, and mostly because it gives me insight into my own (deep, I know). Plus, I’m easily manipulated.

I loved superheroes when I was a budding, pimply teenager for the reason that most awkward, introverted kids my age did; because rippling beneath the surface of total ordinariness, and perhaps even freakishness, was the fact that these people were heroes. No other comic articulated this trope better than the X-Men, where the world feared our superheroic protagonists – “mutants” – to their own detriment. They were noble, and righteous even, for dedicating themselves to protecting those who would rather see them dead.

But there is, a special resonance for queer people who read comics. There was the same subterfuge, the playing along, and suppression of identity in service of normalcy (this is where a racial parallel doesn’t fit as neatly, as it’s somewhat harder to suppress racial features, try as we might.) There too, was the idea that I would not, and could not, become extraordinary until I fully embraced myself, rather than begrudgingly accept “it” as the way I am. Many people, queer people included, have difficulty with the identity, “queer” because they believe it forces otherness when we should really be concerned about showing the heteros of the world that we are just like them. But why are we so scared of being different? I think it would help all those singularly obsessed gay marriage activists for whom state-sanctioned marriage and hypercapitalism is the road to liberation, to get in touch with their inner queer superhero.

~e.a.