Ā So after the many many posts mourning the passing of Stan Lee earlier today Iāve started seeing an inevitable wave of backlash about how he actually wasnāt a good person and we shouldnāt be mourning them. And these posts are par for the course when a celebrity dies because no one is all good or all bad, and thatās fine. And Stan Lee was human, he was a person with a complicated life and a complicated legacy, and Iām not here to whitewash any of that. However, Iād like to refute a couple of the points Iāve seen people making.Ā
The first is that Stan Lee sexually harassed nurses who were taking care of him. This story came from the Daily Mail, which is not a credible news source. The original story does not name any of the nurses who supposedly came forward with the story, or their employer, and the legitimacy of this story is pretty shaky. Iām not saying it categorically isnāt true, but I am saying that we should take stories from the newspaper that ran a headline about the discovery of theĀ āgay geneā with a grain of salt.
The second is that Stan Lee was told that Andrew Garfield wanted to play Peter Parker as bisexual, and as retaliation forced Sony to only depict Peter Parker as straight and white. This isnāt quite true. There is a contract from 2011 that lists mandatory character traits for Spider-Man, and in that list is included that Spider-Man is ānot a homosexual (unless Marvel has portrayed that alter ego as a homosexual).āĀ Whether Stan Lee himself personally was involved in writing up this contract is pretty doubtful seeing as his role in the company was fairly limited by that point (and thatās not to mention the fact that in his later years he was being abused and manipulated by the people closest to him), but he did mention it in an interview with Newsarama. What he specifically said was,Ā āI wouldnāt mind, if Peter Parker had originally been black, a Latino, an Indian or anything else, that he stay that way, but we originally made him white. I donāt see any reason to change that (ā¦) I think the world has a place for gay superheroes, certainly, But again, I donāt see any reason to change the sexual proclivities of a character once theyāve already been established. I have no problem with creating new, homosexual superheroes (ā¦)Ā It has nothing to do with being anti-gay, or anti-black, or anti-Latino, or anything like that,ā he said. āLatino characters should stay Latino. The Black Panther should certainly not be Swiss. I just see no reason to change that which has already been established when itās so easy to add new characters. I say create new characters the way you want to. Hell, Iāll do it myself.āĀ
And while your mileage may vary on how much you agree with him there, itās a far cry from him cruelly declaring Peter Parker having a boyfriend would be an affront before God and man and an insult to his authorial intent or whatever. Also, I think the original post that started this story was about Andrew Garfield saying something while doing press for Amazing Spiderman 2 and Stan Lee writing the contract as a result, but the contract is from 2011 and the first Amazing Spiderman came out in 2012, so the timeline doesnāt work. I could be misremembering the post though. Thereās also this implied narrative that Andrew Garfield got axed for saying his Peter Parker was bi, but uh, no. No, they cancelled the franchise because Amazing Spiderman 2 bombed at the box office.Ā
Now, to wrap it up, was Stan Lee a good and perfect man? No. His legacy is very much a mixed bag, especially when it comes to his relationship with his long-time co-creator Jack Kirby (although thatās a whole other suitcase to unpack some other time). I would like to point out, however, that the posts praising him arenāt all just blindly hero-worshipping him and being willfully ignorant. When someone you admire dies itās natural to forget about the bad parts of them for a bit and get a little misty eyed, and not everyoneās gonna be totally objective about this man that they never met but who represents something important to them. I think that speaks more to the way we interact with celebrity as a culture than it does about the way Marvel fans see Stan Lee frankly.Ā And hey, we gain nothing by pretending that Stan Lee wasnāt an important figure in comic book history, one who co-created the first black character in mainstream comics just two years after the Civil Rights Act was passed, who fought the Comic Code Authority censors to use comics to tackle heavy subject matter, who helped bring legitimacy to the art form and humanity to its characters. So as long as Iāve got you here Iām gonna leave you with his thoughts on racism in 1968, words that feel just as relevant today:
āRacism and bigotry are among the deadliest social ills plaguing the world today. But, unlike a team of costumed supervillains, they canāt be halted with a punch in the snoot or a zap from a ray gun. The only way to destroy them, is to expose them ā to reveal from the insidious evil they really are.ā
May his memory be a blessing.
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