The Invisible Woman - Long Time No See
By Jack Mauro

I’m forty-five years old. All right, forty-six. I can do a Saturday Times crossword – the “bitch mother of all crosswords”, as Paul Sorvino would have it - in under an hour. I’m reading Proust these days because I like Proust. I will find in my lifetime someone else who does on, I imagine, the same day Christian Bale asks to shower with me. I’m as at home with Dickens and Eliot as J Lo is with an entourage. Just for kicks, I read again one of the dozens of bios of Elizabeth I on my shelves.

Not to put to fine a point to it, I’m hot shit, intellectually. Thank you. Thank you, really. And I am looking forward to seeing The Fantastic Four this weekend with such glee, my sensibilities have a hard-on.

The reviews already out – and who are these weasels, anyway, to prematurely and cavalierly trash the gold of my childhood brought to life? – are not kind. They say it’s flat. They say it lacks development of character and story and everything. They say, in a word, that it sucks. Well, then. Stop the presses. Rather, keep them rolling. I’m quite sure the privileged weasel battalion is right.

It don’t matter. Because what they can’t say is that Johnny Storm isn’t dreamy, or that Sue Storm isn’t just the coolest thing ever. Screw Dickens, at least for two hours: one of the American myths of my generation is now made flesh. And it’s all mine, or ours. Keep your Hulks, toss your Spidermen on the wall and see if they stick. Kiss my ass, Bruce Wayne. The very first comic heroine to resonate with gay displaced youth is here, and she’s fantastic.

In my boyhood she was the Invisible Girl. (The amending to ‘Woman’ came late, even by non-feminist reckoning; I think the switch was made in the ‘80’s, and only after Sue had been traumatically possessed by a nasty and non-corporeal bitch called Malice. One assumes that the wrestling within herself earned her the more adult, ‘liberated’ designation.) I didn’t love her. I just pretended to be her. How cool was it - and how convenient to a kid who wished to be unseen because others might spot what he in fact was – to simply disappear? There was more: in a fight, Sue Storm could render her opponent’s limbs invisible. Untrained to the mental disciplines of manipulating what was not apparent, even when attached to one’s own person, caused the toughest thugs to flail, and freak.

As Freudian percs go, this was a blast. For a boy working his way through an emerging homosexuality in a world not entirely welcoming of such things, it was the cosmic-ray-induced equivalent of beating up a basher with a rolled-up Playgirl.

And it got even better. The Marvel creative team shortly twigged onto the limitations of such a relatively passive power in the face of world-eating bastards, and gave Susie her ability to generate invisible force fields. My loyalty was, I confess, torn for a time between Sue and the Avengers’ Scarlet Witch. Wanda arrived later on the pulp scene, and was more of an Eastern Euro babe. This, I liked. Her costume, moreover – cape, boots, one-piece bathing suit, wimple, and opera gloves – beat the crap out of the blue spandex long johns Reed Richards dreamed up for his crew. (If there’s any doubt about Reed being straight, look at those damn uniforms. Then buy Johnny more shots.) Besides, her mutant, often lame, but always unpredictable hex power was the only wild card in the entire arsenal of any team’s super powers. It was different. It was us. With fabulous opera gloves, to boot.

But those force fields of Sue’s turned the tide, and Wanda took a back seat in my fantasies. They were wonderful. They were perfect protection, when invisibility fell short. Handy, that. Loved ones, even manly loved ones who could lift cars or stretch like Johnny Depp playing yet another freak, sometimes needed a shield. Enter Sue, kick-ass caretaker of the studs. Hot, and distanced. Passive, but mighty. Desired by many, yet true to Reed. Which was boring, which made it OK to sleep with him.

Put it all together. Sex with a man could be all right, as long as it didn’t seem exciting and as long as it wasn’t ever referred to. If there’s trouble, you vanish but you don’t actually disappear. There are three guys and you, you are part of the team, but you are evidently different. You have a hot figure. Your power is not blatant – the manifestation of it cannot ever actually be seen (see ‘indirect lighting’) – and it is surprisingly strong.

Jesus Christ. Susan Storm knocked Judy Garland off the stage in the hagiography of gaydom.

Since Hollywood had that stroke years back and was incapable of coming up with anything not lifted from a comic book, we’ve had to take what we were given, fantasy-wise. We’ve had to make do with wise-ass pin-up boys in tights, essentially. Only the frustratingly narrowed gifts of Famke Janssen’s Jean Grey in the X films – and the dismally unexplored goldmine of Anna Paquin as Rogue – have been there to whet our appetites, as the rest of America manhood sunk into theater seats and whomped bad guys in their heads. Yes, Phoenix, by all reports, will be born in the next X. I’ll be there, bells on and psionics set to high.

But, until then, the lady who started it all is here. Jessica Alba’s portrayal will, I’m sure, have lots of modern spin to it. Not a problem. For a couple of hours this weekend, I can at last be as one with every macho asshole who, in a dark cinema, spun webs, cracked sidewalks, or struck terror with tiny rubber ears on his headpiece. Enter the Emma Peel of the pulp, the modest blonde who kept house, kept quiet, and saved her man’s ass before Samantha Stephens first contorted her nose on the tube. The first of the female icons to give us power, for sixty-five cents a month. Sue Storm.

Oh. Her kid brother, Johnny Storm? Bored the shit out of me. But then, that was on paper. That was not Chris Evans in a towel. Flame on, dude.


© Jack Mauro, All Rights Reserved. Article provided by GayLinkContent.com