KarMel
Scholarship 2008
|
Personal
Story “The
Strangest Heroes of All” By Jeramey
Kraatz |
Desciption of Submission: “A reflection of how
the X-Men comic books relate to homosexuality from the eyes and personal
experiences of a gay teenager in
|
And now, prepare yourself for one of the most
exciting reading experiences of your life! For you are about to enter the
fascinating, unpredictable world of…The X-Men! - X-men Issue #1 I wish I had superpowers. I wouldn’t even be too
picky about which powers I had. Naturally, there are those attributes that I would
value above others; given the choice between telepathy and super strength, I
would choose the ability to read minds, hands down. But I’d settle for less,
as it is often the case in the world of superheroes that it is not so much
what you do and but the fact that you can do it at all. The ability to
command sea creatures may have limited practicality on the battlefield or in
every day life, but at least it’s something. The type of superpowers I would
like to have is a subject that I have spent a somewhat disturbing amount of
time considering. Flight or teleportation? Lasers or a healing factor? More
hours than I care to count have been spent discussing the logistics, the
capabilities, the strengths, and the limitations of different abilities with
my fellow superhero wannabes, creating fantastic illusions in our minds of
banding together to fight in the name of truth and justice, analyzing alarmingly
specific situations and planning out our courses of action. My morals
wear capes; my sense of humanity wears spandex. My knowledge of right and
wrong wasn’t learned in Sunday school lessons or fables or a classroom, but,
rather, they were drawn in inky outlines on the pages of comics and showed up
animated every Saturday morning on Fox Kids television while I watched the
Marvel Power Hour in the early 90s. Vividly I can remember sitting at my
kitchen table, cereal at hand, waiting for the synthesizer theme of the
long-canceled X-Men cartoon series, anxious to see what adventures lay ahead
for my heroes, for my friends. Decades before I caught sight of my role models on
television, the first issue of the comic book series X-Men was released in September of 1963, the brainchild of Stan
Lee and Jack Kirby, two of Marvel Comics’ most prolific minds. Together, Lee
and Kirby created superheroes like Iron Man and the Fantastic Four who were
not the pristine and squeaky-clean men and women in tights that the golden
age of comic books had made popular. Their heroes were virtuous, yes, but
flawed and faced with issues like alcoholism and marital problems. Generally,
they were more realistically human than comic book characters in the past,
even if the origins of their superpowers were farfetched. The X-Men were a team
of teenage mutants, those blessed and cursed with special powers thanks to a
naturally occurring evolutionary gene that set them apart from the rest of
humanity. They banded together secretly at Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters
under the guidance of Charles Xavier (Professor X), whose vision was to
create a world where mutants and humans could live together in peace. The
idea of coexisting in harmony was the dream that would guide the X-Men over
the next 40 years; the hope that one day they might live without fear of
being persecuted for their differences. The original five X-Men, Cyclops,
Iceman, Beast, Angel, and Marvel Girl, were anything but a testament to
diversity. They were all white, upper-middle class teenagers with modest
dress and conservative thought, politely going about their daily lives and
causing G-rated shenanigans when not facing down super villains. It wasn’t
until the special issue Giant Sized
X-Men #1 in 1975, written by Chris Claremont, that the X-Men series began
to take on a more serious, worldly voice. This issue added five mutants from
around the world to the X-Men’s roster, including Storm, the first black
female superhero to play a major role in a comic book series, later serving
as the X-Men’s leader, and Wolverine, the feral, cigar-smoking Canadian who
would grow to be an icon for Marvel Comics. There was little expectance for The first issue of X-Men I read was in July of 1993, issue #22 of the second series
(the original series had been officially re-titled “Uncanny X-Men” in February
of 1981). At that time, Wal-Mart carried a few of the more popular comic book
lines in the aisle next to the action figures in an effort to lure seven-year-olds,
like myself, into begging their parents for four-inch plastic molds of heroes
and villains. It was my mother’s idea to buy me the comic book, as she was
wary of the Jumping
into the middle of a comic book series is a like beginning to watch a
television show that has been running for decades with the same cast characters;
in many ways, it’s a lot like watching a soap opera, but with more flying and
fireballs. The plots were confusing, the allusions referred to obscure issues
originally published in the ‘70s, and the characters carried with them
histories and personalities built over countless story arcs and crossovers concerning
love and death and blurring concepts of good and evil. The family trees of
the characters were extensive and overlapping, forests of past relationships
and split personalities and alternate universes and timelines that meant that
nothing was ever black and white or concrete. I continued reading, even
though I didn’t really know what was going on half of the time, because from
page one, I wanted to be a mutant: to be an X-Man. Over the next few years, I
collected not only X-Men comic books, but toys, bed sheets, bookmarks,
novellas, trading cards, and encyclopedias concerned specifically with
characters of the X-Universe. By the age of 12 I could recite to anyone who
asked the origin, powers, and a biographical sketch of the characters I had
grown to love. I was a stereotypical adolescent comic book geek, and I
relished every aspect of the label. In my youth, the thing that drew
me to the X-Men, aside from the undeniable appeal of superpowers, was the
sense of family found within the team, and that I shared with them. I knew
these people, was attuned to their hopes and fears. In my mind, I pictured
myself in their world, hanging out at Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters,
training and honing the finer parts of our superpowers. My days at school
were spent daydreaming that I was on a secret mission, posing as a normal
student in order to seek out future recruits. I knew how I would interact
with each individual team member, who would take me in as a protégé and who I
would have a rocky relationship with until I inevitably wound up saving their
life in the midst of battling giant robots. When I read conventional
literature, I would always feel cheated as I closed the book, knowing that
the story was over and that I would never know anything new about the
characters or where their life took them after the final period was typed.
But the X-Men promised to appear month after month with new stories. I knew
that even if a character died that, in true comic book form, they would come
back to life 20 issues later, explaining that it was not my friend who was
killed, but rather a clone from an alternate reality that had taken over his
or her life as part of some unnecessarily convoluted, diabolical plot. I was aware of the general
immortality of comic book characters from the beginning of my reading, but
that did not stop me from mourning the loss of Professor Xavier in X-Men #41. As a 10-year-old, I threw
myself onto the couch of my living room, and wept for hours when Xavier’s
time-traveling son mistakenly impaled him with a telekinetic sword. I begged
my parents to allow me to fly to I was at the cusp of puberty, about to enter the sixth
grade when the Marvel universe trembled with the repercussions of Xavier’s
death. I assumed he would be returning at the end of the storyline (in all
actuality, a mere five months later) but I made a conscious decision that this
would be a good time to put away childish things and abandon my illusory
family. After seeing my reaction to a fictional character’s death, my parents
also felt that maybe it was a good idea to take a break from the Marvel universe.
I stopped buying comic books every Wednesday, picking them up only a few
times a year to see what my friends were doing. I would buy the odd X-Men
action figure that caught my eye as I roamed the toy aisle, and when I got a
credit card at 18 and discovered the hidden treasures of eBay, I bought a
bootleg DVD set of the entire animated series, all 76 episodes. In my room, I
kept the poster of Gambit, my favorite X-Man, hanging above my bed. Creased
and beginning to fade, the print hangs above my sleeping head even now; Gambit
watching over me in mid-leap, a symbol of the dreams of my youth and the
elaborate scenarios of wonder that I placed myself in, wishing that I were
born into their world. Have you
tried not being a mutant? - Iceman’s mother, X2 The themes found in the pages of the X-Men comics
were something that I did not give much thought to in my youth. To me it was
simple: most humans didn’t like mutants, but the X-Men accepted this fact and
fought against the evil-doers that sought to destroy humanity. When I was a
freshman in college, however, as I retreated to my I spent the my youth in West Texas wanting nothing
more than to fit in, trying to conform to the conservative, moral individual
that the region loved to raise. But that had always been a problem with me,
no matter how many friends I had or how popular I was with my peers. When
puberty hit, my budding sexuality led me astray, as my appreciation for
Gambit’s abs far surpassed the skin-tight costumes and exaggerated physiques
of the X-Women. I watched as my friends began to couple off in the naïve
relationships that characterize your early teens and realized that the person
that really captured my affection was my best friend Ben. It was easy to
explain to myself that Ben was just my good friend, that I was confusing the
sense of brotherhood I had with him in my head thanks to a flux of hormones
and general teenage angst. This was a one time thing and, like all phases, it
would pass. I learned to repress my thoughts during the day, indulging them
only in those fleeting moments between sleep and consciousness when I
couldn’t be held responsible for my wandering mind, and, even then, unable to
wake from lurid dreams without a heavy sense of guilt. I grew older and these
feelings didn’t change. Slowly, they became more unavoidable, Ben giving way
to a series of different boys, all friends who were unaware of the turmoil
they were causing beneath my practiced, stoic exterior, who I would obsess
over with the same fervor that I had worshiped my X-Men. Even in the scarce
moments that I would feel at peace with these feelings, in the back of my
mind I still nursed the idea that one morning I would wake up and be normal.
Anxiously, I waited for the day that my thoughts would change. My moves were all calculated in public;
everything I said or did was screened in advance, all in the name of creating
a version of me that I thought others would deem acceptable. But when you
hate who you are, you can only be miserable trying to be someone else. Nevertheless,
I felt that if I tried hard enough, if I ignored these feelings long enough,
they would simply disappear. College, for me, had always represented an
opportunity to create from scratch a new version of myself, one carrying with
it no past or preconceived views. Under its more liberal minded views and 300
miles away from the oppressive heat of I sat in the same spot for hours, my back aching, poring
over stories I knew by heart and reintroducing myself to friends I had long
since neglected. I was accustomed to putting myself into the action of the
stories, fighting alongside the X-Men to save innocent bystanders or a city
or the world, but I took extra care this time into letting the subtleties of
the stories sink in. It was not the action that jumped out at me as I leafed
through the pages, but the implications behind it. The subtext of the
material allowed me to draw new parallels, connections that were more
realistic and applicable to my life. Mutants became aware of their powers in
their early teens, an unexpected gift of puberty. There were those few who
were excited about their gifts, at the prospect of power and uniqueness, but
for the most part the discovery that you were a mutant resulted in self-hatred
and denial. These teenagers were hiding what they viewed as flaws, genetic
anomalies, and would conceal their true identities from their friends and
family in a desperate attempt to seem normal. Bobby Drake, Iceman, had the
power to freeze moisture in the air and take on an ice-form. When his
community discovered this, a mob broke into his As I read on, the analytical skills I had worked at
mastering in my English classes took hold, and I began to see the X-Men
series for what it had transformed into during the mid 70’s: a cry for social
equality. I read everything in my box, but I wasn’t satisfied. I blew a large
portion of my Christmas money at the local comic book shop buying back-issues
and hardbound collections of some of the more famous X-Stories. Their fight
had always been my fight as well, but now on an entirely new level. Countless
instances throughout the history of the X-Men can be viewed as criticism
concerning race, gender, and anyone considered to be a minority, but I
focused on what was closer to me at the time, what I could really relate to. The X-Men are hated, feared, and despised
collectively by humanity for no other reason than that they are mutants. So
what we have here, intended or not, is a book that is about racism, bigotry
and prejudice. - Chris Claremont, 1982 By the following summer, I was once again making a
weekly trip to the comic book store. Late at night when I couldn’t sleep, I read
over online databases that warehoused thousands of facts and summarized comic
book issues, studying the history and continuity of the X-Men. I found that
Northstar, a popular character in the Marvel universe since his introduction
in 1979, revealed his homosexuality in March of 1992 and went on to become a
fervent supporter of gay and mutant rights. Northstar was not only one of the
first openly gay comic book heroes, but also explored groundbreaking ideas
about the negative stereotypes of homosexuality, drawing distinct comparisons
between the plights of gays and mutantkind. Over the years, mutant hate
crimes in comics seemed to coincide with major stories of gay bashings and
racial bigotry, until any of the faux reports on the vibrant comic pages
could be read with astounding relevancy in real life publication. Political
movements such as the “Genetic Purity Act” made it illegal for mutants or
those who were suspected of being capable of producing mutant children to
reproduce seemed outlandish until compared with the legislative grey area
where gay marriage and adoption live. In 1993 the Legacy Virus was introduced
to the X-Men series, a disease that devastated the mutant population. The
legacy virus spread like a cancer, causing cells to replicate at random and
the afflicted to suffer lesions, fever, and the loss of control over their
powers. When it was first discovered, virus seemed to only infect those with
the mythical mutant X-Gene, but was later found to affect humans as well: a
clear reference to the AIDS epidemic and its connotation as a homosexual
disease during the ‘80s. When the Legacy Virus broke out, it was heralded by
many humans as a plague sent by God to wipe out sinners, or, more specifically,
mutants and their supporters. This was an idea I was all too familiar with
having grown where there was a church, or two, on every corner. One
stereotype of West Texans is that they are a God-fearing, conservative bunch:
a population more concerned with who was not at church on Sunday than rising
racial tensions on the south side of town. For many people, this label rings
true in The X-Men have faced some of the same religious
struggles, fighting to find redemption in a sect whose inclusiveness can
often be followed by an asterisk. In God
Loves, Man Kills, a graphic novel published in 1982, the reader is
introduced to one of the most disturbing villains in the X-Men’s history: the
Reverend William Stryker. An articulate televangelist, Stryker’s religious
crusade against mutants began as the same simple label of sin I had heard
many times in my youth, but grew into something more. Before long, coliseums
full of people were gathered, hanging on his every whim. Murders broke out
across the country, the killing of mutants in the name of God by Striker’s
elite team of predators called The Purifiers. Mutants were a curse, a blight
on the land, and the righteous would not inherit the kingdom of heaven until
the sinners were wiped out. He was a messenger of the Lord, and his message
was one that played to one of the most common traits of humanity, the fear of
the unknown, of change and the alien. Stryker and his Purifiers murdered many
mutants, children and the elderly alike, before being stopped by the X-Men, as
one could expect. His actions and followers were undeniably radical, but his
ideas, his piercing resolve against those born differently jumps out at me from
time to time as I watch the news. Reflections of his hatred echo in the
preaching of religious fanatics throughout the world, but don’t watered-down
versions of his notions trickle down into our everyday society as well? And if this is true, where are the X-Men
when we need them? "Are
arbitrary labels more important than the way we live our lives, what we're
supposed to be more important than what we actually are?" - Cyclops, God Loves, Man Kills By the spring of 2006, I was once
again a proverbial encyclopedia of X-knowledge, having an impeccable ability
to recall the most trivial of facts from the course of X-Men history. When my
roommate was bored, he would ask me simple questions like “Does Cyclops have
a brother?” and an hour later I would still be in the middle of my answer, as
I explained the decade-long saga concerning the unknown identity of the
character’s third sibling. In Astonishing
X-Men #1 (the third series to carry this title), released in the summer
of 2004, it was revealed that a cure had been developed for the mutant gene.
Thousands of mutants jumped at the chance to become normal, to finally blend
in with the status quo. Illustrated lines formed outside of specialty clinics
as men and women with physical mutations and uncontrolled powers begged to
finally walk down the street as a conventionally normal human being. Even
some of the X-Men that I so trusted asked themselves if they’d be happier
living a life that seemed so temptingly easier. I was appalled by those weak
enough to submit to other people’s ideas of normalcy, was angered that
someone would give away what I had always so desperately longed for. But I had
to question myself as well. I was genetically determined to stand somewhat
outside of the perceived norms presented in the world I was born into, but if
the choice were mine, would I keep it that way? I like to think that I would,
that I am happy with my mutation, and that I have the integrity to not change
my very being to fit into a society rather than rise up and promote change in
the society itself. But then, I state this comfortably knowing that there is likely
no chance that I will ever be faced with that decision. The third X-Men movie, based
loosely on the Astonishing X-Men
series, once again raises the issue of the mutant cure. One of my favorite
scenes features Magneto, the first and most dangerous of the X-Men’s foes,
standing before a crowd of mutants proclaiming “They want to cure us? I say
we are the cure.” From the first
issue in 1963, Magneto has acted as a foil to Xavier’s vision of a peaceful
future, certain that humans will never accept mutants into society, and
therefore should be destroyed. He preaches that they, the humans, will never
really accept mutants: that every step toward equality spurs those who would
have mutants destroyed. I often find myself tempted by Magneto’s eloquent
monologues and cries for mutants uprising against the oppressive powers. In
the X-Men movies, Magneto is appropriately played by Sir Ian McKellen, a gay
actor and public supporter of homosexual rights, first drawn to the X-Men
movies because of their allusions to discrimination based on race and sexual
orientation. In X2, a teenage Iceman comes out to his family, for the first
time explaining to them that he is a mutant. The director of the film and
McKellen worked to make this mirror what it is like for gay teens to come out
to their parents; a way to present the situation to an audience of
predominately straight, red-blooded American males who undoubtedly find
themselves on Iceman’s side, not realizing the underlying implications of the
scene. This is the sort of cleverness that breeds hope within a culture so
seemingly on the cusp of gaining the simple right to marry. If society can
support and love a population of mutants on screen, shouldn’t they be just as
accepting in real life? But every time this question is raised in my mind, I
can’t help but think of all of the movies I have seen and all of the books I
have read in which I find myself siding with the bad guys, if only for the
sake of knowing that after the final frames roll, the consequences are not
ones that I will have to deal with in the real world. I wish I had superpowers. But I don’t, because I’m not convinced that being
attracted to the same sex can really compare to the ability to hurl fireballs
from my eyes. The mutants of the Marvel universe can do amazing things, have
accomplished incredible tasks and saved the world time and time again. Those
labeled as different in my world are fighting too. I hear stories of friends
cut out of the lives of their families and children disowned by their parents
because of the way they were born, and I wonder what they will do without
Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters to run to. I read of murders and
beatings and inhuman oppression and I search the sky for someone in tights or
a cape. I turn off the TV or put down the newspaper and sit idly by,
straining to hear a synthesizer in the distance heralding the arrival of my
costumed friends who have come to battle for equality and peace. But the
X-Men are not coming, and I don’t know that I can do their job for them. For
more than a decade I have dreamed of rising up with my mutant friends and
fighting in the name of justice and freedom, and now that I finally find
myself in that position, I can’t help thinking that the world would be much
easier to save if I had metal claws or the power to control the weather. And
while I have always tried to believe whole-heartedly in Professor Xavier’s
dream of a harmonious existence between humans and mutants, there are those
sinking occasions, fleeting moments of uncertainty, that I find myself
wondering if Magneto is right. |