“Besides men coming in and out of his home, or lingering shirtless in the background of panels, Northstar was coded through the unique perspective of how straight men typically view gay men. As Ben Bolling points out, he was portrayed as vain, sarcastic, and reckless….”

Okay, class, what’s missing here?

As I have made clear many times in the decades since I created him, Northstar was Gay from “day two”. The character was not homosexual when I first conceived him. That came later, when Alpha Flight got their own series and I was looking for ways to give them depth beyond being able to survive a fight with the X-Men. I decided to make one of them Gay, and by a process of elimination settled on Northstar. Those “cliche” attributes were in place before I’d given any thought to his sexual orientation.