Ban Marvel’s gay kiss? You might as well ban the Sistine Chapel
The mayor of Rio de Janeiro’s attempts to censor an Avengers comic isn’t just bigoted. It ignores the fact that Christian artists pioneered same-sex snogging
The mayor of Rio de Janeiro’s attempts to censor an Avengers comic isn’t just bigoted. It ignores the fact that Christian artists pioneered same-sex snogging
He may be an evangelical bishop, but you do have to wonder how much Christian art the mayor of Rio de Janeiro has seen. Marcelo Crivella ordered an Avengers comic book to be removed from a book festival, because it featured two men kissing – a move that triggered a dramatic response from Brazil’s biggest newspaper, Folha de S Paulo, which reproduced the image on its front page, to highlight this attempt at censorship.
The mayor was so incensed by Avengers: The Children’s Crusade, he insisted it be given a black plastic wrapper. In a video posted on Twitter, he said it was not right for children “to have early access to subjects that do not agree with their ages”. But to find fault with this kiss is not just bigoted. It shows an ignorance of the origins of same-sex kissing in
For it was Christian artists who pioneered the gay kiss. Long before Dmitri Vrubel portrayed Communist leaders Leonid Brezhnev and Erich Honecker snogging on the Berlin Wall, or Banksy stencilled his Kissing Coppers on a pub wall in Brighton, it was Catholic art that first explored the joys of men kissing men. Rather than trying to censor Marvel, maybe Crivella should turn his easily offended eyes to the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican. For here, at the very heart of the Catholic world, Michelangelo portrayed men kissing, nearly 500 years ago.
