Matthew Balan
newsbusters.org
April 29, 2014
Gavia Baker-Whitelaw lamented how the movie depictions of Spider-Man and other superheroes are all “straight, white men” in a Tuesday item on Salon.com titled “America deserves better superheroes: Why a straight, white Spider-Man is no longer a real underdog.” Baker-Whitelaw, a “fandom and Internet culture” reporter for the website The Daily Dot, zeroed in on the supposed “ramifications of having eternal underdog Peter Parker remain a straight, white man.”
The writer also complimented Andrew Garfield, the actor who plays the title character in The Amazing Spider-Man 2, for wondering why the superhero “can’t…be into boys,” and contended that Sony, the studio releasing the upcoming movie, “might benefit from listening to…Garfield’s comments on the potential hypocrisy of portraying Peter Parker as being marginalized by society.” She later hoped that superhero movies would catch up with the “reasonably progressive and diverse representation of real-life America” in present-day comic books:
…Marvel movies are often praised for being more progressive than your average summer blockbuster…but they’re still decades behind the comics….none of those movies have starred anyone other than a straight, white man in the lead role. The Avengers franchise has managed a handful of female characters in non-romantic roles, plus Falcon and Nick Fury in the supporting cast, but the mere concept of an openly LGBT character still feels like a pie-in-the-sky dream. Meanwhile in Marvel comics, Northstar came out in 1992, opening the floodgates for a whole host of other LGBT heroes….
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