The one place you hope to feel safe as a queer person is LGBTQ+ spaces, but that’s not always the case. Bisexuals are often shut out for ‘not being gay enough’, especially when in straight-passing relationships, and trans people constantly face hate movements like ‘LGB witho💎ut the T’, although many of these are astroturfed (astroterfed?) by outsiders. This exclusion is unfortunately all too common as some in the queer community cling to gatekeeping as a way to find their own purpose. Yet it’s a story that’s rarely unpacked in media, let alone represented, so I was surprised when I f🦄ound a similar narrative unfolding in Across the Spider-Verse.
Miles Morales is a Spider-person who many read as a stand-in for LGBTQ+ people. There’s an entire society of Spider-people that, from the outside, you’d think would all share the same ideals. I know 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Spider-Man, so why would Spider-Man want to hurt Spider-Man? See, it sounds silly. But Miles is excluded from the start, labelled an anomaly just because he’s different to them in all the ways that don’t matter. It means that, in their eyes, he isn’t enough, and so he isn’t welcome. It’s a story that rings true to a lot of LGBTQ+ people. Like Miles, therꦓe’s an immediate excitement when meeting queer people—‘They▨ get it! Nobody else does, but they do’. And like with Miles, things don’t always go smoothly.
My ex introduced me to her lesbian friend when I was visiting America, and my assumption was that I could, for once, be comfortable in my own skin around a stranger. I wouldn’t get those awkward questions straight people have asked me all my life, ‘Do you like men or women more’, ‘Are you 50 percent gay, 50 percent straight?’, or ‘Do you get tired of women or men and feel liꦺke cheating?’. All the stereotypes that fundamentally misunderstand bisexuality. But I was asked 🐭those questions, and because my ex was a woman, labelled ‘not LGBTQ+ enough.’ And this wasn’t a one-time interaction. It happened at university, it happened online, and it happened with old friends.
It’s easy to see that story in Miles. Being bisexual, being non-binary, being all these outliers in the LGBTQ+ community feels like being an anomaly. We’re all in the same fight, with oppressors continuing to strip away our rights, making our lives harder, and telling us we don’t belong. We should be banding together to do the exact opposite and welcome each other into our own spaces regardless of our differences. But that’s not always how it goes. It’s a story we see with Miles in a movie baked in queer storytelling. Pulling off the mask and revealing this other side to yourself, the real you, is as true to superheroes with secret identities as it is to queer people. We watched as Gwen and Miles went through th𝓰at struggle in this film, with Gwen’s scenes🍎 oozing the trans flag’s colours. It’s hard to deny the impl꧑ications.
Spider-people across the multiverse are also hounded by right-wing journalists and demonised in the press like no other superhero; Spider-people’s relationships break and crumble when the mask comes off, and now, we see Spider-people suffering the same exclusion among themselves. It’s no wonder that ✃people read Gwen as trans, Miles as bi, and so much of the world of Spiders as queer. Across leans into it more than ever, and seeing Miles’ exclusion from this world was painful but, in its own way, uplifting. He’s excluded but forges his own identity (‘Imma do my own thing’), becomes stronger for it, and in the end, is finally ready to confront himself - literally - and find out who he really is. It’s a lesson of self-reflection manifested, in finding worth in ourselves, and I can’t wait to see where it goes next.
It’s easy to fall down when pushed out of LGBTQ+ spaces, but it’s just𒊎 as easy to find new queer families. LGB without the T is a small, worthless group, and while it can feel crushing to have people you should be able to trust try to tear you down, you have to remind yourself that there are far more queer people pushing back against them. Likewise, for every biphobic gay I’ve come across, I’ve met ten who accepted me. But that swarm demanding you be cast out feels like the world falling down on you, much as Miles’ did as he was hounded by hundreds and hundreds of Spider-people all at once. Miles ends the film with a new group on his side, ready to defend him, so while he was pushed out of one space, he was welcomed into another. There’s always somewhere to belong, even if it can feel defeating in the moment—Across splatters that message across every scene as much as it does the colourful comic-book spectacle.