Black Panther movie not diverse enough, says LGBT community

While Marvel’s action hero blockbuster “Black Panther” is making headlines for being the most diverse superhero movie that Hollywood has produced to day, it is sparking outrage in the LGBT community for its lack of openly gay characters.

It satisfied the identity checklist in a number ways with its healthy cast of strong female characters and for its overwhelming majority of African American characters, including the primary protagonist. However, it failed the inclusivity test by failing to include a lesbian relationship that was a part of the original comic book series.

It’s not as though the studio was wholly insistent on this outcome, however, as some scenes were indeed shot which portrayed the lesbian flirtation, but which simply didn’t make the cut in the final production.

Vulture observes:

…one thing it lacks is openly queer characters. This has caused a bit of frustration among fans of Black Panther comics, who point out that one of the film’s minor characters, Ayo, is a woman who has a romantic relationship with another woman in series like the Ta-Nehisi Coates–written Black Panther and the Roxane Gay–written Black Panther: World of Wakanda. In the film, she’s played by actor Florence Kasumba, and shows no signs of romantic involvement with anyone.

Last April, Vanity Fair writer Joanna Robinson reported that she’d seen footage from Black Panther in which Ayo flirts with Okoye (Danai Gurira), a fellow member of King T’Challa’s elite Wakandan warrior squadron, known as the Dora Milaje. A few hours later, a Marvel representative said their relationship was not intended to be romantic, but the rumor of romance reappeared earlier this week. E. Oliver Whitney of ScreenCrush asked the film’s co-writer, Joe Robert Cole, about whether the script ever showed Okoye and Ayo as being involved, and Cole said, “I think the short answer is yes,” but that he couldn’t remember the scene Robinson wrote about.

Vulture caught up with Kasumba and asked her about all of this, and she seemed to say the scene existed, but that it was cut for reasons she wasn’t privy to:

The thing is, if the makers would have wanted everyone to see the scene, it would have been in the movie. The final result that we’ve seen, there were a few scenes that have been cut. Different scenes, also. They didn’t make it into the movie for certain reasons, and at that point, I have to say: What their reason is, I can’t tell you, because nobody told me about whether it’s in or not.

But at this point, I personally think people have no idea who T’Challa is, who are the Wakandans, what is Wakanda, where is Wakanda, what is their culture. There are so many important things that had to be told in these two hours. So the focus was on what is so important for T’Challa. What happens after the last movie that we saw. I know all the other scenes that we have also filmed that are not in the movie. People have their reasons why not.

Vulture then asked her if she, personally, would have liked to see Ayo’s sexuality played out in the film’s universe. She replied:

I’d love to, at some point. Not now, because it’s too soon. At this point, the focus is somewhere else. I started reading World of Wakanda towards the end of filming and I loved reading the comics. I loved reading about, Okay, how do the Doras become Doras? … That’s the whole reason why we had a boot camp [to train for the movie]: In order to be physically able to move as a unit. That was more important. That’s what I’m saying, right? Who is in love with whom and whatever — that was not important in this movie.

Marvel films have been on a roll lately in advancing powerful female figures as heroins, without whose powerful aid the villain would never be defeated, and this one takes down yet another pin on that lane.

The movie gave a powerful minority representation, and, with it, has shattered box office records at over $200 million on its opening weekend. But even this massive stride isn’t enough. It’s just too hard to placate the hard left.