LETTER: Gay subtext only a side note

Editor,

“X2: X-Men United” did not have a gay subtext. The subtext of the X-Men is discrimination. When the friend became angry and upset because the movie was being taken away from him, his response was accurate; the film was being taken away from him.

X-Men is a story of the fight against discrimination, not discrimination against homosexuals. Those who should be upset by this article are the Jews, African-Americans and women who read the article. The X-Men were created as a symbol for any group being discriminated against by the general public.

The concept of the X-Men was generated in the 1960s during the civil rights movement by a man named Stanley Lieber, aka Stan Lee. The name should give people an understanding of where the X-Men originated; Stan Lieber was born a Jew. One of his fellow artists and coworkers Jacob Kurtzburg also used a pseudonym, Jack Kirby. The pseudonyms were used because during the time that their careers were beginning, being a Jew closed many doors, and so they, not unlike the X-Men, decided to mask what they really were.

While the film can be taken as having gay subtext, it is not a “gay” film, it only can be applied to the situation that exists for homosexuals in our culture today. Bryan Singer may be gay but I don’t believe he targeted gay subtext. He made the X-Men movies in the same manner that any fan of the X-Men would, they are applicable to multiple groups that have been discriminated against. The targeted subtext was discrimination. The article did upset, and perhaps even anger, me. I may not belong to any of the groups I listed earlier, but I have felt the sting of discrimination and it did “try to take my films away from me.”

Matthew Eyre