The first time I saw the poster for X2: X-Men United at the nearby mall, I was enthralled. The 11-year old me couldn’t believe how someone who was blue could look so beautiful – and that was before I had ever seen Rebecca Romijn utter a single word on screen. I realised the movie was a sequel and immediately went to my local cassette shop to hunt down the original.

I’m not sure how many times I watched the movie over the course of the week, but I remember being completely engrossed by Hugh Jackman – yes, he was hot but he was also a loner. His journey of finding people like him and finally agreeing to be a part of something bigger struck so many chords I was too young to decipher back then.  Rogue’s shame at just having to exist was another highlight from the original movie. There were so many themes of loneliness, alienation and found family in that first movie that connected with me deeply, and this was long before my queer self had even realised I was queer, long before I had any kind of vocabulary to make sense of myself.

Over the years, having watched all the original X-Men movies, the X-Men Evolution animated series and countless YouTube videos exploring the queer themes within the X-Men universe I realised what my 11 year old self had no means of understanding – the whole world of X-Men was one big queer analogy.

Everything from Mystique’s shape shifting abilities, a clear dissection of traditional gender norms, to Nightcrawler’s religious dilemma, a parallel to many queer individuals’ difficult spiritual journeys, the X-Men universe seemed like the canvas for unleashing a motherlode of queer ideas.

With Marvel’s latest revival of X-Men ’97 and Morph being identified as a non-binary character, there has been quite a bit of buzz online about how the series has forcefully gone woke, like so many other shows and movies. It’s hilarious to see this reaction knowing for a fact that Wolverine, Gambit, Mystique, Rogue, Jean Grey and so many others have always been fictional queer icons – sometimes because they are themselves beautiful stories of queer liberation and other times because their journeys reflect so much of real life queer action, pushback and freedom.

As a young queer person growing up surrounded by Abrahamic religions telling me my existence was less than desirable, the X-Men were one of the few safe places for me to feel safe in. It’s stayed that way for a long time, and I hope it continues to be a haven for lost souls, real and otherwise.