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The ongoing X-Men saga has basically been one long, overreaching superhero allegory for growing up gay in an unwelcoming world: Imagine Brokeback Mountain, but replace Jack and Ennis' forbidden love with the mutant ability to singe sheep with their eye-lasers. With Hollywood's hottest new web presence Brett Ratner's third installment, X-Men: The Last Stand (you can view the trailer here), the metaphor reaches its natural conclusion: the "curing" of these mutant teens of what makes them different. In a roundtable discussion on SciFi.com featuring the film's leads, things got rather heated between Ian McKellen and co-star Hugh Jackman when Jackman argued that perhaps curing one's self of mutation isn't necessarily such a bad thing:

"There are people who think gay people can be cured," said McKellen (Magneto), who has spoken publicly about his own homosexuality. "My reaction to the idea that I can be cured as a mutant is as contemptuous as my view of people who say I need curing of my sexuality. The idea that black people could take a pill that would cure them of being black is abhorrent to me." [...]

Hugh Jackman, who plays Wolverine, took the other side, pointing out that there are other characters for whom the cure is more attractive. "Rogue [Anna Paquin], as amazingly powerful as she is, lives a potentially very lonely life," said Jackman. "Never being able to touch anyone, never being able to have a physical relationship, never able to have children. Now, as politically abhorrent as something like the cure is, it's also humanely, socially, incredibly understandable that a character like that would take it."

"It isn't necessarily her mutancy that's the problem," McKellen shot back. "It's other people's reaction to it. Maybe it's society that's wrong, not her."

Call us crazy, but it would appear that McKellan seemed to be using the opportunity of this X-Men junket to take a very thinly veiled swipe at Jackman, and his personal choice to deny his own, uh, "mutantness," which seems rather ridiculous in light of how he enjoys the company of handsome mutants and tends to act really mutanty in mutant-themed Broadway musicals.