Loki made his debut in the MCU way back in 2011 and has been a mainstay in the universe for a decade, and yet fans are only finding out now that he is bisexual.
But even as fans celebrate these major steps in reflecting the audience that watches Marvel’s films, it’s unclear whether Marvel’s portrayal of queer characters will live up to fan expectations.
Loki confirmed the character’s bisexuality just a couple weeks after the show seemed to also confirm that Loki is gender-fluid.
Thompson, who has openly spoken about being in relationships with both men and women herself, pitched Ragnarok’s director, Taika Waititi, on the idea based on a comic book storyline in which Valkyrie shares a kiss with anthropologist Annabelle Riggs.
“You don’t want to bite the hand that feeds you,” she told me at the time of her push for queer representation in Marvel movies.
In a flashback scene Valkyrie loses one of her fellow female warriors during a fight with the villain Hela, and the dialogue implies that the fallen soldier may have been a love interest.
Thompson has since promised that Valkyrie will get a love story in the next Thor movie Thor: Love and Thunder.
“He’s married, he’s got a family, and that is just part of who he is,” Marvel Studios Head Kevin Feige said of the character at Comic-Con in 2019.
Astute readers will have noticed that Valkyrie didn’t appear in a Marvel movie until 2017, and even then that character’s queerness was implied not stated.
We felt it was important that one of us play him, to ensure the integrity and show it is so important to the filmmakers that one of us is representing that.
Of course, the lack of queer stories is a direct cause of such speculation—without explicit representation on the screen, fans are left to wish and imagine that it were so.
Often, studios try to have their cake and eat it too by briefly alluding to a same-sex partner or flashing to a short scene of a queer couple and then patting themselves on the back for including those characters at all.
In the live-action Beauty and the Beast, Josh Gad’s LeFou dances with his crush Gaston in what the director called an “exclusively gay moment“—albeit in the story arc of a silly sidekick.
For instance, in 2018’s Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald, a movie in which Dumbledore is a central character, Dumbledore’s love affair with the character of Grindelwald is somehow both central to the plot and yet never explicitly stated.
So far the DCEU has not yet introduced an openly queer character on the big screen, nor did the X-Men films. Other major franchises like Fast and Furious and Jurassic Park, despite having sprawling casts, remain steadfastly hetero.
Several characters that Marvel has already introduced to the MCU are queer in the comics, including Dora Milage warrior Ayo and America Chavez, who will make her big screen debut in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness.