The world is made up of all sorts of different people and slowly but surely Hollywood is making their characters on screen better represent those differences. Could this greater inclusion mean that The Guardians of the Galaxy could include a gay member one day? James Gunn has already thought about this. Recently, the director made comments that we're close to introducing a gay hero in the movies. However, he's now clarified his comments to say it's entirely possibly that his team already includes a gay member because we simply don't know the orientation of all of them. According to Gunn...
What I meant to say is this: There are a lot of gay people in the world. There are a lot of bisexual people in the world. There are a lot of characters in the MCU. We've barely gotten to know the sexuality of any of those characters. We know Gamora and Quill are interested in each other. That's about the only sexual relationship that exists within the Guardians. We know Drax has a past with a wife so he's got some sort of interest in women. But we don't really know who's gay and who's not. It could be any of them.
The man has a point. At the end of the day, we simply don't know a great deal about these people personally. The same ultimately goes for every other movie character whose attractions are never discussed in the story. Why must we assume that every character is straight unless it's specifically stated otherwise? Even those characters for whom we know who they're attracted to, many could just as easily be bisexual, we don't know that they aren't.
If anything, James Gunn's comments to Digital Spy highlight one of the difficulties in trying to broaden representation in film. While it's true that any character whose orientation is not specifically stated could be gay as likely as straight, you have to make that aspect of the character known if you want to increase the visibility of LGBTQ characters in movies, even if the character's orientation is irrelevant to the story being told. At some point, the world needs to see a gay superhero in the movies, the fact that we might technically already have one only goes so far. If this detail is left in the shadows then the people who most need to see that hero on screen never really do.
Still, it's not like romance never happens for superheroes. For many it's a significant part of who they are, so the more we see them, the more likely it is that this aspect of their character will come out, and eventually we'll very likely discover that a few members of the MCU fall into the LGBTQ category.
