UNCANNY X-MEN #331: Interior decorator?

[starwolf_oakley]

Emma Frost once took over Iceman's body, doing amazing things with his powers that he had never done before.
Now he wants to talk to her about it.



Written by Scott Lobdell, art by Brian Hitch and Paul Neary.



This issue was mentioned as an example, just not a very good one, about the theory Scott Lobdell intended Bobby Drake, aka Iceman, to be gay. Which wasn't actually done until 20 years later by Brian Michael Bendis.




Boston native Emma Frost enters her New York City office, thinking about how awesome she is and how she got rich using her psychic powers. So it is hard for her to be surprised. But not impossible.





That "interior decorator" line is annoying.

daningram.insanejournal.com said
Because when Bobby later confronted Emma, she made a joke about him being an interior decorator. And interior decorators can only be gay.

So...logic?

Honestly, I dislike anything that vindicates a Family Guy joke.

There was a TV movie called "Celeste in the City" where title character Celeste thinks love interest Kyle is gay for over half the movie. Because Kyle is an interior designer. That's it.

Here's a link to part of "Celeste in the City."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=87MJFNi9HRU&t=4s

"He's an interior designer!"
"Celeste, just because a guy knows the difference between 50 at Benjamin Moore whites does NOT mean he's gay."
"Isn't that gaydar?"
"No, that's called stereotyping."



At this point, Bobby had changed from "covering himself with ice" to actually "transforming into ice," similar to how he was in "Age of Apocalypse." Which is amazing, ridiculous and creepy all at the same time.

A scene I didn't post has Jubilee and Banshee outside the building, watching but not interfering. One of those "We want to see how this plays out" scenes, where other characters stand around out of sight. I think that trope became rather common with the X-Men, in retrospect. "Let's stand around like dopes while two of our teammates confront each other."



Emma breaks free and kicks Iceman in the head. Hallucination time!



As I've said before, I'm not sure how "bad" William Drake is supposed to be. It is hard to tell if his thing was "I wish Bobby was more normal," or if it was "I wish Bobby didn't have to risk his life to protect a world that hates and fears him."

William stood up for mutants in X-MEN (Vol 2) #56 and got beaten by Graydon Creed's goons for it in UNCANNY X-MEN #340.

As for Opal... Well, making Bobby "look good" has a LOT of connotations in retrospect, doesn't it?





Bobby will just do it if he wants to badly enough? Pep talks are strange.



So, the question is did Scott Lobdell intend to reveal Iceman was gay? Or was he just using a rather
clumsy metaphor that message boards misread back in the 1990s. It continued when Chuck Austen was writing UNCANNY X-MEN. Northstar told Nurse Annie that he thought Iceman was cute, but knew Iceman was straight. Which now means Northstar has terrible gaydar.

Minor point: the issue also has Xavier talking with Warren Worthington III, and Warren commenting that Xavier used to have no problem making people forget they had seen the X-Men fighting Sentinels in their town, or a bad guy getting memory-wiped so he didn't know where the X-Men lived.

Comments

[philippos42]

Well, I'm convinced. Clearly Bobby is straight, because anything Lobdell writes is backwards and wrong. [/kidding]

Seriously, considering that at aoout that time the mutants were being used as a "metaphor for homosexuality," there are multiple layers of meaning that can be interpreted in that scene.

[sarahnewlin]

I will admit Iceman being gay did seem to come out of nowhere but the people who threw fits over it was hilarious to see. The way it was handled was shitty though to be honest.

I guess William Drake's characterization got screwed with a little too?

Has Opal even appeared since he came out?

[starwolf_oakley]

O5!Jean reads O5!Bobby's mind and talks to him about it IN PUBLIC? What is so bad about that? [/sarcasm]

I don't know the issue, but when Bobby decided to tell everyone through a "text blast," Opal responded with "New phone, who this?"

[sarahnewlin]

Damn Opal that's cold............

The X-Men! They mass text! They're just like us!!!!!!

[zylly]

I admit, I never thought Iceman was gay. Never saw any of the signs people would later point to. But I'm also aware enough these days to know it would never have occurred to me to consider that he might be either.

If anything, I've always thought all the stuff with Cloud made for the most compelling evidence, once I started considering it.

[squirle]

I read that issue years ago, and never got why people took so much from that "Interior decorator" line. I just figured it referred to the fact that he filled her room with loads of ice structures.

[beyondthefringe]

I know, right? It was a stupid, throw-away joke that had absolutely no subtext, and honestly, there's no reason to leap from "Oh look, you filled my room full of ice, nice job of interior decorating" to "Iceman is gay."

Bobby has terrible luck with women throughout his long, long history as a character? Surprise, so does almost every other hero who's been around long enough. Hank, Scott, Warren, Peter Parker, Matt Murdock, Steve Rogers--on a long enough comic scale, relationships never seem to last, changing at the whim of the writer, or changing -with- the writer.

Based on the logic used to leap to "Bobby is gay" you could have come to the same conclusions about numerous other characters.

I'm not saying a compelling story about Bobby realizing he's bisexual or gay and coming to terms with it couldn't have been crafted, but this felt so clumsy and arbitrary.

[lilacsigil]

Yeah, I read this issue at the time and thought nothing of it. He covered the room in ice, she made a mean joke about it. Bobby never had a solid, long-term love interest, but neither did Hank, really, and many other characters lose relationships all the time, as you say.

[icon_uk]

I think I took away the implication (because out of all the options he had open to him, Bobby making a statement involved decorating the place with ice scultptures, and to be fair, if anyone was going to know Bobby's innermost secret thoughts it would be the powerful, ethically challenged telepath who lived inside his head for a while, but since it was a throwaway remark I more or less ignored it.

[bruinsfan]

I think the "not a real man" dig Emma delivered via his father is much more tellingly a hint at Bobby being gay than her interior decorator quip. Note the emphasized words in Bobby's response to it in the next panel.

[wizardru]

"As I've said before, I'm not sure how "bad" William Drake is supposed to be. It is hard to tell if his thing was "I wish Bobby was more normal," or if it was "I wish Bobby didn't have to risk his life to protect a world that hates and fears him."

The same William Drake who asks why a good-looking boy like Bobby would 'complicate his life by dating an Oriental'? I'm pretty sure he's supposed to be casually racist, at least. His justification is that it's 'good morals', implying that Opal (and really Asians in general) are lacking them. His disapproval of their relationship was pretty clear. It was Bobby storming out (and Rogue calling him a bigot to his face) that probably led to him confronting Creed directly and calling out anti-mutant sentiment (and getting hurt for it).

Mind you, I also think the point of him was to show that people can change their views and recognize their own bias. He wasn't a neo-nazi, but someone who held racist views without really giving them much thought or analyzing them...in many ways a much more insidious and systemic kind of racism. I don't think he's meant ot be 'bad', so much as 'wrong'...and he strives to be better for his son, after his son makes it clear he is NOT changing and that his father either accept it or lose him.

Mind you, it seems like he repeats this particular arc more than once, which is odd.

[zachbeacon]

In defense of William Drake, the universe he lives in ALSO seems to be causally racist because everyone was attacked by ninjas right after he found out about Opal.

[zachbeacon]

Even before him his completely out of nowhere coming out, I've been seeing this cited as "proof" that they'd been leading to this for quite some time. Maybe there's more to this issue but that's not what I'm reading here.

The "Interior decorator" line is proof of Emma's snarkiness, not Bobby's sexuality.

[starwolf_oakley]

That's the question: Is it proof or just Internet message board read too much into it back in the 1990s? Did Scott Lobdell want to reveal Bobby Drake was gay and was unable to?

No, I'm not sure where "Bobby can do really incredible things with his powers he doesn't fully realize" plus "Bobby has a crappy lovelife, like all the other X-Men" plus "William Drake is a jerk" came to mean "Bobby is gay," but there you go.

[kore]

That repeated from-the-back view of Emma makes my retinas hurt with how out of proportion her legs are.

"I'm sorry I pushed you too hard because you were slacking and not realizing your full brilliant potential. I guess." Emma <3

[mastermahan]

I've always taken the "Iceman is gay" theory as fans seeing what they wanted to see. And hell, I absolutely get why they'd want to interpret an X-Man as not straight. This was published in 1996. The Legacy Virus had been around for three years now, so the mutant as gay metaphor was in full swing.

But at that same time, every single X-Man was officially straight, no matter how much lesbian subtext Chris Claremont had managed to slip under the radar.

It's pretty clear this wasn't Bobby being outed by a nosy telepath, but simply a throwaway joke. At the same time, though, of course people would want a gay character in a franchise that's all about teenagers discovering who they are, coming out as different, and dealing with discrimination for it.