However, pretty much every time a character is written with a shade of queerness to them, very sweaty-looking folk in the comment sections ask why they don’t just create a new character instead of sullying the pristine heterosexuality of their favorite characters.
If she hits the overall personality beats, the character works. Aunt May is Aunt May if she’s Peter’s Aunt and mother-figure. Developing a character in a new direction doesn’t fundamentally change the character fundamentally. Would Lesbian Aunt May Still Be Aunt May? It’s funny that the same people frothing at the mouth at the idea of Aunt May loving women were quiet when she was romantically involved with Happy.
But that doesn’t matter either because making her bi wouldn’t change the character in any way they haven’t already changed her. If there are infinite Aunt Mays, some of them are going to be gay. In reaction to the news that Marisa Tomei wanted to make Aunt May a lesbian, some fans argue that this shows Tomei didn’t understand the character, which is fundamentally silly when there’s a multiverse of villains and nephews duking it out on the streets of New York. However, another buried gay is the start and end of the list for reasons it would have been a bad idea for Aunt May to be gay. Selfishly, I’d almost rather she remained straight if only to not add to the legions of characters for whom coming out is a way to add quick emotional depth before they die.
The film industry loves killing off gay characters, so it’s almost a surprise they didn’t follow through and make Aunt May gay.
Lesbian Aunt May died before she could ever come to the big screen but would it have been cruel to give this character a chance to have a happy romance only to kill her in the same movie that’s revealed. The character almost feels incomplete without a cool girlfriend, and Marisa Tomei as lesbian Aunt May probably would have gotten Spider-Man: No Way Home to a billion dollars faster than Endgame. She very much had the cool Aunt energy which played off Peter being a strait-laced nerd boy. She was younger, more energetic, and lively than she has been in the comics. Marisa Tomei’s Aunt May was an interesting take on the character. They still did that a little bit by having the whole relationship with Happy being a way for May to find some joy of her own, but why be with Happy when she could be with Sony Producer Amy Pascal? Tomei wanted the longtime Sony and Spider-Man producer to play the role of her girlfriend. Aunt May as she’s often depicted is a very externally driven character, and this change would have given her something she wanted that wasn’t based on the tragedy that’s hovering around her. She still loved Ben, and now she’s dating again. Whether this means she was always Bi or, like many adults, didn’t realize she was super gay until later in life doesn’t really make a difference in the story. Tomei said “There was a moment, where I felt that May - maybe she should just be with a woman because Ben is gone,” which is an interesting idea that would have worked well with this interpretation of Aunt May. According to Tomei, that was her reasoning for arguing for May to have a girlfriend. In the MCU’s Spider-Man, Uncle Ben has been out of the picture for a while, and Aunt May is living a quiet life raising Peter to be the best (Spider) man he can be. In a recent interview, Marisa Tomei revealed she campaigned for Aunt May to be a lesbian in No Way Home, and we kind of have to talk about what a gay Aunt May would have meant in the context of the series. Spider-Man: No Way Home somehow changed a lot with the MCU’s Spider-Man while also keeping him very in-line with the comics, and they almost did the same with May. Good mother, dead husband, endangered child, and she’s nice. There have been many iterations of Aunt May in comics and film, but overall the recipe remains the same. Aunt May is one of the most iconic characters in comics, and she does that by barely even punching anyone.