The friendship was revealed during writer J.M. What most people don’t know about the comic books is that Captain America had a longstanding, albeit platonic, relationship with an openly gay friend since the early 1980’s. It’s fair to say Marvel’s Cinematic Universe is indeed lacking in queer representation, which isn’t a fair representation of the source material. And maybe just let people know that it’s okay to be who you are.”Īfter all, the Marvel Cinematic Universe is a multi-billion dollar franchise about a disparate group of people uniting to save the world, but their concept of diversity is specifically hetero-normative men and women. “It sucks that people in the LGBT community don’t get the representation that they deserve and it would be so amazing for something like Captain America or Marvel to be able to portray that. As she explained in her own words to Metro U.K.: She felt that Cap needed to be more inclusive to queer fans and an American icon in a same sex relationship would fold queer representation into popular consciousness. #Givecapaboyfriend was started by a fan named Jess Salerno on May 10. It is unknown whether the backlash against the cliffhanger was organic or manufactured by the Disney marketing machine, but it got people talking about the meaning and representation of Captain America and his role in pop culture - a role many feel is behind the times. The first refers to the controversial twist ending of Cap’s new monthly comic, Steve Rogers: Captain America, where Steve throws his partner (Jack Flagg) out of a plane and greets a kidnapped scientist on board with, “Hail Hydra,” the secret salute shared between members of Marvel’s villainous agency, Hydra. He recently kicked off two hashtags on Twitter which snowballed into bigger and broader conversations across the internet: #Saynotohydracap and #Givecapaboyfriend. Let’s acknowledge the fact that Captain America was conceived as a propaganda piece for a war that ended more than 75 years ago, but has managed to stay more relevant than most contemporary fictional characters. If that sounds like a busy schedule for a nonagenarian, then consider his third movie, Captain America: Civil War, which was released on and is already the highest-grossing film of the year, while also sporting a 90 percent rating over at Rotten Tomatoes. Captain America is a 75-year-old comic book owned by Disney about a 98-year-old super soldier who was recently dead and might currently be a fascist.