[LINK] "Kitty Queer"

[rfmcdonald]

X-Men comics bloggers Rachel and Miles shared an affecting and insightful essay by one fan, Sigrid Ellis, describing how the X-Men in the 1980s and the character of Kitty Pryde specifically provided her with a different way of seeing her sexual orientation.

(Chris Claremont really was an interesting author.)

I was sitting on the top bunk when I told Rogue I was gay. This was in the spring of my sophomore year of college, so that meant the bunk bed was in Bigelow Hall on the Macalester College campus. I was in the dorm room by myself, it was nighttime, and the fluorescent gleam of the overhead light reflected off of the Jim Lee X-Men triptych poster stuck to the opposite wall with duct tape. I was crying in horrified humiliation, but the look in Rogue’s eye told me I was going to be okay.

To say I probably ought to have figured out my complete lack of heterosexuality a little bit sooner in life is… a vast understatement. I blame Chris Claremont. Chris Claremont – writer of the various X-Men comic book titles during my impressionable adolescence – and the editorial policies of Marvel Comics at the time. You see, I was raised by liberal parents in a middle-class household, and in my household we did not subscribe to stereotypes. One could not judge a character by their looks or mannerisms or skin color or speech. This meant that I got into a fight with a classmate in sixth grade over the sexuality of pop star Boy George. Just because he looked gay and sounded gay and dressed gay didn’t mean he was gay, I said. When presented with the cases that justified and reinforced cultural stereotypes, I insisted that the presumption could not be true.

I had the Boy George conversation in 1985. By 1992, I went to a college where people wore Act-Up T-shirts, sported Queer Nation pins and buttons, and the GLBU quarterly dances were the best party around. In Marvel Comics, Northstar had just come out as gay. Being queer, in real life and comics, was an act imbued with anger and frustration. Even Northstar was angry. But whatever concern I had for social justice issues was abstract and impersonal. I still didn’t connect gayness, or queerness, with my life. I didn’t want to protest the President or march for reproductive rights; I wanted to spend all of my time in moon-eyed devotion to my best friends and/or dorm-mates. In the same way that Kitty Pryde was devoted to Rachel Summers and Illyana Rasputin.

Some of you reading this essay might not be as all-consumingly familiar with Kitty Pryde’s life in the 80s as I am. She was a teenager, a member of the X-Men, living in the mansion-school-headquarters of the team. She had two best friends during this time frame: Illyana from the New Mutants team, and Rachel. Both were teenage girls, for a value of “teenage” that includes time travel, dimension-hopping, demonic aging and alternate universes. This is, after all, superhero comics. Kitty was passionately devoted to each of them.

This devotion took a variety of forms. In New Mutants #35, the New Mutants are all killed by The Beyonder. Kitty is not merely the only person who remembers the team ever existed, we find out in Uncanny X-Men #202 she is also the inheritor of Illyana’s soul-sword and armor. This is due to the special bond the two girls share. The nature of said bond is never explained. One might think that Peter, Illyana’s fanatically protective older brother, might be the person who gets the sword and the memory. Nope. Those go to Kitty, the roommate.