More Gay Stucky Subtext

Today's post quotes some more excellent, perceptive and witty commentary by Andrew Wheeler from his post "Super: The Gayest 'Stucky' Moments in the 'Captain America: Civil War' Trailer" found here at Comics Alliance.

6. ACTUAL LOVE

The real meat of the movie (I probably could have put that differently) appears to be that Bucky is wanted for some terrible act he claims he didn’t commit, and Steve and Tony go to war over what should happen next. Steve’s devotion to his oldest and dearest friend is the very core of the film. There’s more to this than loyalty or fondness; more even than friendship, when taken to this extreme. This is a movie about Steve’s love for Bucky.

Now, maybe it’s not love between two gay men. Steve and Bucky are not actually lovers, and the suggestion that they are is not something that the text of the movie is going to explicitly deliver. That is why we have subtext. That is why we have fan fiction, and fan art. That is why there are online communities dedicated to building fictional worlds in which Steve and Bucky (or Steve and Sam, or Steve and Tony) are lovers. It’s not just that the text isn’t going to deliver a gay romance in this one movie; it’s that the text never delivers in this type of movie.

I’m not being glib when I call these screenshots the gayest moments in the trailer. Stucky fans had already dissected these little moments a hundred times over before you got up for breakfast this morning, because these breadcrumbs are all they get.

Yet if Bucky Barnes were a woman, this would be a love story, played out with all the same narrative beats. If Peggy were the brainwashed assassin kept frozen through the decades, this movie would definitely end in a kiss. Everything about the love, pain, and intimacy of the Steve/Bucky relationship on the big screen is typical of a romance, and that’s something fans are right to respond to — something the filmmakers may even be playing into, though surely not with any formal sign-off from Disney.

The world is increasingly more free, fair and tolerant for people in same-sex relationships, especially in countries like the US. Yet imagine this; if we lived in a world that had no hang-ups about same-sex relationships, no hate, no prejudice towards the idea of two men or two women together; do you doubt for a second that this movie would actually be a romance?

If everything else about this movie were the same, but we were different, wouldn’t it make sense for Steve and Bucky to kiss?

This movie looks about as gay as it’s allowed to be. One day we’ll get a movie like it that’s actually gay enough.