If you happen to pick up a copy of All-New X-Men #40 tomorrow, you could be in for a surprise: in that story, one of the original X-Men characters comes out as gay.
Thanks to Bleeding Cool, several pages of tomorrow's issue of All-New X-Men have leaked, and those pages revealed this bombshell.
Please note that the following contains spoilers.
The character in question is Iceman, aka Bobby Drake. In this particular version of the X-Men universe, Iceman, Cyclops, Beast, Angel and Jean Grey are still young, but they've time traveled to the present. In the pages of All-New X-Men #40, Drake gets called out by Grey for hiding who he is by flirting with his teammates. He denies it, but Grey's psychic: she read his mind.
Eventually, Drake admits that he is gay and that he's attracted to one of his male teammates (as to who that is, though, we still don't know).
Of course, the pages also reveal that Drake's older self isn't gay, so it's interesting how this plays out.
All-New X-Men #40 ends writer Brian Bendis' run, and it looks like he wanted to go out on a surprising note. However, there have been rumors about Drake's sexual orientation for years, so some fans probably won't be that surprised.
Of course, in the real world, at some point, hopefully in the near future, such announcements won't surprise anyone. Even in comics, more characters have come out as gay, including DC's Pied Piper, Midnighter, Batwoman, Bunker and Green Lantern Alan Scott. Marvel introduced gay characters with Northstar, Mystique, Destiny and Xavin. In 2010, Archie Comics revealed its first openly gay character, Kevin Keller. The Buffy, The Vampire Slayer comics featured the TV series' gay couple, Willow and Tara.
Here are the relevant pages from tomorrow's issue of All-New X-Men #40.
[Photo Credit: Marvel]
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