Autor: candelariaturrella

missfortune1977:

 So after the many many posts mourning the passing of Stan Lee earlier today I’ve started seeing an inevitable wave of backlash about how he actually wasn’t a good person and we shouldn’t 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 that’s fine. And Stan Lee was human, he was a person with a complicated life and a complicated legacy, and I’m not here to whitewash any of that. However, I’d like to refute a couple of the points I’ve seen people making. 

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. I’m not saying it categorically isn’t true, but I am saying that we should take stories from the newspaper that ran a headline about the discovery of the “gay gene” 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 isn’t 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 “not a homosexual (unless Marvel has portrayed that alter ego as a homosexual).” 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 that’s 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, “I wouldn’t mind, if Peter Parker had originally been black, a Latino, an Indian or anything else, that he stay that way, but we originally made him white.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 don’t see any reason to change that (…) I think the world has a place for gay superheroes, certainly, But again, I don’t see any reason to change the sexual proclivities of a character once they’ve already been established. I have no problem with creating new, homosexual superheroes (…) It has nothing to do with being anti-gay, or anti-black, or anti-Latino, or anything like that,” he said. “Latino 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 it’s so easy to add new characters. I say create new characters the way you want to. Hell, I’ll do it myself.” 

And while your mileage may vary on how much you agree with him there, it’s 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 doesn’t work. I could be misremembering the post though. There’s 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. 

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 that’s a whole other suitcase to unpack some other time). I would like to point out, however, that the posts praising him aren’t all just blindly hero-worshipping him and being willfully ignorant. When someone you admire dies it’s natural to forget about the bad parts of them for a bit and get a little misty eyed, and not everyone’s 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.  And hey, we gain nothing by pretending that Stan Lee wasn’t 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 I’ve got you here I’m gonna leave you with his thoughts on racism in 1968, words that feel just as relevant today:

“Racism and bigotry are among the deadliest social ills plaguing the world today. But, unlike a team of costumed supervillains, they can’t 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 — to reveal from the insidious evil they really are.”

May his memory be a blessing.

dramaticdragon:

drawnsheep:

dramaticdragon:

Shoutout to my 90 year old grandma with dementia (she thinks she’s back when she was 20) and she misunderstood us when we said her nursing home cook didn’t make food for OTHER people and she thought we said “colored people” and she got so mad she was ready to steal food so she could feed everyone. Keep in mind she thinks she’s in like 1940s and she is READY to defend poc. Shout out to you grandma.

I also appreciate that she’s sure she can steal food from the cook

90 year old thief. She doesn’t play when it comes to equality

chronically-illustrated:

viostormcaller:

kirbylover246:

mister-christmas:

100acrewoods-girl:

rainbowloliofjustice:

It’s amazing how there is a generation of people who hate Stan Lee for ???

The man, even in his early years denounced racism as a special type of evil that can’t be defeated with a bullet. 

Marvel was the first mainstream comic to show a gay marriage. 

And the accusations of him sexually harassing a nurse were false. and proven to be false. 

The man has denounced racism and promoted tolerance and diversity for years, much more than what most people who age would have ever dared consider. Hell, he created Black Panther, the first black comic hero. 

But all because the man didn’t want to make Peter Parker black and bisexual he obviously is a racist and homophobe… Despite…

Luke Cage

Falcon 

Storm 

Spider Girl (Corazon) 

Miles Morales

Moonstar

Karma

Black Panther

Shuri

Kimura

Lady Deathstrike

Echo

Jubilee

Monet St. Croix

Hulkling

America Chavez 

Northstar and hosting the first gay marriage depicted in mainstream comics IN 1992 WAY BEFORE GAY MARRIAGE WAS EVEN LEGALIZED

Valkyrie  

Wiccian and many others…

But y’all asses over here fucking ignoring the shit out of them like the only thing Stan Lee and Marvel ever made was Spiderman and Peter Parker all because the man doesn’t think that you should redefine established or preexisting characters. Why?

Because he believed in creating NEW characters, new characters who had their OWN personalities, who had their OWN stories, who had their OWN fans

He wanted to make new things, not redefine what already exists. He wanted to make NEW characters and stories that people could connect to. NEW characters who could stand on their own as opposed to just being “This character but now xyz.” 

He wanted characters who had their own life and vibrancy to them. 

Yet y’all asses fucking mad he didn’t make Peter Parker black while you ignoring the fuck out of Miles Morales. Yet y’all asses are mad he didn’t make Peter Parker bi or gay while ignoring the fact that the Marvel comic version of Deadpool and Loki are both bisexual. 

Y’all fucking ignoring the POC and LGBT+ characters that exist in the Marvel universe all because you wanna be like ~~uwu 20gayteen~~

Until y’all asses start recognizing POC and LGBT+ characters THAT ALREADY EXIST you don’t get to say shit about anything else being gay. 

DON’T SIT THERE AND IGNORE CANON LGBT AND POC CHARACTERS AND THEN ACT LIKE STAN LEE WAS A RACIST OR HOMOPHOBIC BIGOT

Fucking exactly. Fucks who hate just to hate and purposely ignore facts piss me the fuck off. If you do that shit fuck you.

Thank you for this. I’ve been really distressed about the discourse saying he was racist/homophobic/sexually harassed people, and I haven’t had the energy to do more of my own research, so I appreciate someone with a broader knowledge sharing this information.

explorelatinamerica:

uruguayanabombada:

cacafueg0:

dasakuryo:

uruguayanabombada:

cacafueg0:

Also those ‘cuban women in Virginia’ he mentioned who helped in the american revolution? Bitch they were slave owners. White Cubans also helped in the confederacy during the US civil war bc they wanted to preserve slavery in Cuba : )

“I WANT HEROES!!!” THEN LOOK AT LATIN AMERICA FOR THEM. THEY ARE THERE.

So many came to my mind, he was mentioning all that shit about USA generals with Spanish surnames and barely mentioned Bolivar at the end, I was like….bitch, give me Micaela Bastidas,Tupac Amaru II, Artigas, Delimira Agustini, Frida Kahlo, Salvador Allende, Isabel Allende, Rigoberta Menchú, Juana Azurduy,…….

Our history is so rich and complex and brutal, and he did that….ridiculed it and turned it into another Hollywood shit…. What you think we depend on the US to have our heroes?? Are you so delusional that you believe the history of Latin America be that of the US and not its own?

I truly hate him

If I might add some other Latin American heroes… María Remedios del Valle, Sgto Juan Bautista Cabral, Mariano Moreno, Juan José Castelli, Manuel Belgrano, José de San Martín, Atahualpa Yupanqui, Mercedes Sosa, Jorge Cafrune, there are so many historical (and also cultural) figures pivotal to Latin American and respective Latin American countries history to choose from, to uplift. Like srsly, he didn’t even try.

José Martí, Augusto Sandino, Rubén Darío, Antonio Maceo, Mariana Grajales Cuello, Toussaint L’ouveture, Pedro Albizu Campos, Víctor Jara, Cécile Fatiman, Violeta Parra, Dutty Boukman, Maximo Gomez ….etc etc etc!!!!

LIKE!!!!!! HEWWO!!!!! THEY ARE THERE!!!!

Continue the list everyone, let’s make latine history and our heroes truly known!

Remember when Zumbi dos Palmares and Dandara started refugee zones for enslaved black people in Brazil who ran away from slavery? Heroes