It's there, and it's real, and even James McAvoy is in on it. Now, about that sexual business in the storyline of the film. Don't fight it, folks. But the film can also be easily read as a gay pride allegory, as well as a story of true love gone horribly wrong. (Among other things, by the end of First Class, Professor X affirmatively chooses to stay in the closet and not frighten the straights, while 'mutant and proud' Magneto embraces the 'drag' of a flamboyant costume.) Sure, a lot of stuff blows up, so it's partly just a summer popcorn movie. Xavier's X-Men and Magneto's Brotherhood of Mutants have long represented conflicting approaches to race relations in America, with Xavier standing for a conciliatory integrationist Martin Luther King Jr. approach, and Magneto taking a more militant or separatist Malcolm X approach.īut circa 2011, cultural divisions over race have been supplanted in the popular American consciousness by a debate over gay rights, and the latest X-Men film has updated Professor X and Magneto's adversarial relationship thusly.
