Andrew Garfield may not be Spider-Man anymore, but he’s renewing his call to see a gay man wear the mask.
Garfield’s renewed call came in an Entertainment Weekly interview on Monday, where the star of “The Uprising” spoke about his resurfaced comments from 2013 calling for a queer spin on Peter Parker.
“Why can’t he be gay?” Garfield asked EW at the time. “Why can’t he be into boys?”
“It was an exercise in rebellion that I felt passionate about,” Garfield added Monday. “I just still believe that anyone can be in that suit.”
Garfield’s first comments on Peter Parker’s sexuality came in July 2013, just over a week before San Diego Comic-Con and less than a year before his film “The Amazing Spider-Man 2” swung into theaters. At the time, Garfield asked producer Matt Tolmach, “What if MJ is a dude? Why can’t we discover that Peter is exploring his sexuality?” He additionally ran the idea by director Marc Webb, specifying a now-Oscar-winning actor for the part.
“I’ve been obsessed with Michael B. Jordan since ‘The Wire.’ He’s so charismatic and talented,” Garfield said. “It’d be even better—we’d have interracial bisexuality!”
Garfield didn’t back off of his comments, saying that he wanted to know at the time why Spider-Man couldn’t be gay. He noted the character’s history of inclusivity, saying that it’s helped him remain relevant across generations.
“That’s the point of why it’s such a kind of universally beloved character, one of the greatly beloved characters in the history of fiction, is because you don’t see skin color, you don’t see gender, you don’t see sexuality,” he said. “Anyone can project themselves into that suit.”
“You’ll be telling on yourself if you have a strong opinion either way,” he later added.
While Garfield is keen on this idea, Marvel reportedly was not. A leaked document from the Sony hacks, found on WikiLeaks and first reported by Gawker, revealed a list of “character integrity obligations” shared by Marvel with Sony, saying that the company “no longer has any creative approval rights” so long as Sony follows a set of guidelines.
Per this list, Peter Parker must be “Caucasian and heterosexual,” and Spider-Man must not be homosexual “unless Marvel has portrayed that alter ego as a homosexual.” Spider-Man also must not torture, smoke or abuse alcohol — unless he’s in the black symbiote suit.
While this list would have ruled out Garfield’s pitch, there are a few Spider-People outside of Peter Parker who could be portrayed as homosexual in film. Web-Weaver, for example, is a gay Spidey character from Earth-71490, introduced by Steve Foxe, Kei Zama and Kris Anka in 2022’s “Edge of Spider-Verse #5.” Jessica Drew from Brian Michael Bendis and Mark Bagley’s “Ultimate Spider-Man” is a female clone of Peter Parker who shows romantic interest in women, one of the bigger cases of queer representation among the Spider-people.
