July 18, 2022
One Million Moms Clutches Pearls over 'Thor' for Barely-There LGBTQ+ Content
Kilian Melloy READ TIME: 2 MIN.
One Million Moms is demanding another boycott. We'll pretend to be shocked.
This time it's for "Thor: Love and Thunder," the "so gay" movie that isn't.
IndieWire reported that the massively misnamed group (which falls short of 1 million by about 970,000 members) has called for a boycott of the Taika Waititi-directed film – which kept hold of its No. 1 box office spot for a second weekend in a row – because of what the group called "blatant LGBTQ content."
Evidently the group were so tuned in to star Natalie Portman's claims that the movie is "so gay" and Taika Waititi's declaration that the film is "super gay" that they missed the critiques from just about everyone else who pointed out that, actually, no, it isn't.
Making the claim that "Marvel Studios is pushing the LGBTQ agenda on families," the group said that the newest "Thor" film "includes many LGBTQ innuendos and an abundance of euphemisms, but a few scenes are not downplayed at all."
Such as?
"The alien character named Korg mentions having two dads, and he has hand sex with another member of his species," the group enumerated, according to IndieWire.
Also: "The bisexual goddess, King Valkyrie, kisses another woman's hand to show interest."
What's more: "An Asgardian kid insists on going by a gender-neutral name."
And – OMG! – "the gay romantic tension between Thor and Star-Lord is apparent but played off as a gag." As opposed to the gay tension between, say, Jack Lemmon and Joe E. Brown in the classic 1959 Billy Wilder film "Some Like It Hot," which is... um, also played off as a gag.
Bleeding Cool effortlessly picked apart the group's talking points of outrage, noting that the sexual practices and gender identities they are complaining about are exhibited by aliens that have only one gender in their species in one case and are gender-fluid in the other.
Moreover, the site added, "there is no gay romantic tension between Thor and Star-Lord."
"Star-Lord does not appreciate how Thor seems to assume he is worthy of leading the Guardians; even when he doesn't, it's with the belief that he clearly should," Bleeding Cool asserted. "Thor believes everyone should naturally love him because he is Thor, including Star-Lord. But there is not a scintilla of romantic tension between the two."
Bleeding Cool also pointed out that the group seemed to have completely missed a much bigger (and more thoroughly present) talking point about "Thor: Love and Thunder" – namely, that the movie "depicts a pantheon of gods, all of whom are vain, unworthy of belief and clearly a stain on the concept of the one true God."
"But no," Bleeding Cool summarized, "instead, they have gone with two rock men holding hands."
It's par for the course, however, for a group that has found reason to fulminate over snack food companies directing advertising to a significant share of their markets in unapologetically capitalist style, Pixar producing a sweet short film about an adult son coming out to his parents, a dating site that dares show two frisky users sharing a slice of toast, and Jonathan Van Ness wearing a leotard.
Kilian Melloy serves as EDGE Media Network's Associate Arts Editor and Staff Contributor. His professional memberships include the National Lesbian & Gay Journalists Association, the Boston Online Film Critics Association, The Gay and Lesbian Entertainment Critics Association, and the Boston Theater Critics Association's Elliot Norton Awards Committee.