BY ROB SALERNO – Rumour has it that Marvel Comics’ Astonishing X-Men will see mainstream superhero comics’ first same-sex marriage in just a few short months, when longtime X-Man Northstar marries his human boyfriend, Kyle. 
Which, now that I think about it, makes it a same-sex, interracial and inter-species marriage. How’s that for tolerance?
Well, Northstar, you’ve come a long way since the days when writers planned to have you die of AIDS only to be forced by editorial mandate to abandon that plot by revealing that the real reason you’re sick is that you’re half-elf and fairies can’t survive in the real world. </nerd>
Northstar was the first major mainstream superhero to come out of the closet, way back in 1991 — although hints had been dropped from his earliest appearances in the 1980s. He’s a Québécois mutant, born with the power of superspeed and flight. After a brief flirtation with separatist terrorists in Quebec, he renounced his former ways and became an Olympic gold-medal skier. He later joined Canada’s superteam Alpha Flight and eventually became a member of the X-Men. (I probably shouldn’t have close-bracketed the “nerd” tag so early.)
True fact: Superspeed is not an asset in bed.
Northstar’s been dating Kyle since the team relocated to San Francisco a few years ago, although their relationship appears open enough that Northstar has managed to have sex with the superhero Hercules, who is supposed to be the actual son of Zeus in the Marvel Universe.
This wedding takes place in June’s Astonishing X-Men #51, just in time for Pride! But will the wedding take place in the X-Men’s homestate of New York, where same-sex marriage was made legal last year, or in Northstar’s native Canada?
It’s not the first gay superhero wedding. In Wildstorm Comics’ superhero satire The Authority, Apollo and Midnighter (loose analogs for Superman and Batman) got married back in 2002.
The wedding follows on the highly popular gay marriage of Kevin Keller in Archie Comics earlier this year.
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