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Source 1,
2,3, and 4.Chris Claremont, argubably
the definitive X-Men writer, attended the "Pride and the X-Men" panel at FlameCon, a LGBTQ Comic/Geek Convention.
Says he didn't always intend for the X-Men to be a stand-in for the LGBT community, but "y
ou know there’s a space between every panel. You can go wherever you want. And who am I to get in the way?”On Magneto and Xavier's close friendship, “My thinking was god bless ambiguity. Sexual orientation in that instance is irrelevant, they are best friends."
“The Comics Code tried to restrict everything. But with a certain measure of visual subtlety and ambiguity you could actually achieve everything you wanted.” He talks about the issue of
New Mutants where a young mutant named Larry kills himself over the fear of being outed, and says “gay people could look at it and find resonance in terms of who they were and what they were standing for.”
When asked about "the queerest character [he's] ever written," he responded “In
X-Men: The End volumes one through three,
a certain character is notable for being the 50th President. And for being a historic first, not because she’s a mutant.”
Though it wasn't brought up at the panel, Claremont was also the creator of Mystique and Destiny, a lesbian couple (he couldn't come out and say it at the time due to the restrictions, but in one issue he had a character refer to Destiny as Mystique's "leman," which is an archaic term for "lover") and Rogue's foster parents.
