While Marvel has developed other queer characters since, Northstar remains nothing more than a temperature gauge for how a straight gaze views a queer community. His coming-out issue ( Alpha Flight #106 in 1992) concluded with an in-universe press conference that mirrored what happened in the real world with Ellen Degeneres or Rosie O’Donnell. In the 1980s he was portrayed as dismissive of women to the point of misogyny, while in the aughts, gay men were so often portrayed in fiction as the gay best friend that Northstar was portrayed almost solely in the company of women. Northstar’s publication history shows a cross section of 40 years of the United States’s mainstream view of the gay community. Sean Guynes argues that a national controversy convinced the Marvel editorial team not to kill their only queer superhero for the sake of discussing AIDS through the lens of the superhero genre. In the ’80s Northstar’s creator left his flagship and the subsequent writer, Bill Mantlo, thought he could publicly discuss Northstar’s sexuality by killing him off through a long, drawn out illness.
