Twitter Demands Gay Captain America

The Twitterverse's effort to force Disney to make one of its iconic characters gay continued this week as a new hashtag focused on the central character of Captain America: Civil War. #GiveCaptainAmericaABoyfriend followed on the heels of #GiveElsaAGirlfriend, a campaign to encourage Disney to give the central character of Frozen a same-sex partner.

The reasoning behind the Captain America hashtag is that since Cap has had a decades-long friendship with Bucky Barnes, that relationship could be easily altered to include a romantic component and turn Cap into Disney's first openly gay superhero.

For his part, Captain America creator Stan Lee doesn't think rewriting the character's history is the right way to go.

"I think the world has a place for gay superheroes, certainly,” he told Newsarama last year. “But again, I don’t see any reason to change the sexual proclivities of a character once they’ve already been established. I have no problem with creating new, homosexual superheroes.

Lee does have a point. Captain America and Bucky Barnes have always been just friends, and in the Disney Marvel movies, Cap's heart has definitely belonged to Peggy Carter. Chris Evans, the actor who brought Cap to the big screen, is a bit disappointed that his heterosexual protrayal of the character seems to have gone over some fans' heads.

"Maybe I just didn’t do my damn job very well. But that’s what I was going for," Evans told Flickering Myth earlier this month about his performance in the first Captain America movie. "I think it was very clear that Peggy Carter was the first woman not just to give him the time of day, but to believe in him and to give him support and trust and honesty, and all these things I think he was hungry for. And I thought I put all that in the final scene, but maybe I didn’t."