Queer Superhero History: Arnie Roth
It’s time for another installment of Queer Superhero History, where we look back at queer characters in mainstream superhero comics, in (roughly) chronological order, to see how the landscape of LGBTQ+ rep in the genre has changed over time. Today: Arnie Roth!
We’ve talked before about how the prohibition against queer characters was more rigidly enforced at Marvel, home of Jim Shooter’s alleged “no gays in the Marvel Universe” policy. But as I mentioned last time, there were a number of creators at Marvel (and DC) sneaking queer characters under the radar before the rules changed, and that coding could be…unsubtle. And by “unsubtle,” I mean “we’re just going to say this man is in a relationship with another man and then pretend we didn’t.” Such was the case with Arnie Roth, Captain America’s gay best friend.
If you’re thinking, “Hey, I’ve seen this movie"“…stay tuned. [Captain America #270 (June 1982), art by Mike Zeck and John Beatty.]
Arnie first appeared in Captain America #268 (April 1982), and was created by J. M. DeMatteis and Mike Zeck. He and Steve Rogers were childhood best friends, but polar opposites: while young Steve was scrawny, frail, and awkward around girls, Arnie was strong and popular, protecting Steve from bullies and dragging him around on double dates—the more stereotypically “masculine” of the two. When the war came, Arnie enlisted, and Steve, of course, became Captain America.
Decades later, the two run into each other again. Steve is…well, still Captain America, and Arnie is a balding, overweight guy in his sixties who drinks too much, gambles too much, and has basically nothing going for him.
Except Michael.
“For the past ten years, I’ve been…rooming with a guy, my—my best friend. With him along for the ride, I’ve been able to handle the hard times without going nuts,” Arnie tells Steve, wiping a tear away. And in case you think they’re just really close roommates, Arnie also mentions that marriage “just never seemed like…the right thing for me.” Ahem.
But Michael’s been kidnapped by Baron Zemo, and Arnie needs Captain America’s help to rescue him. Cap rescues Michael, naturally, and then watches awkwardly as the two, uh, “roommates” embrace, exchanging totally normal roommate dialogue like: “It…was like my soul’d been ripped out…and stuffed in a black hole. But…you were there somehow, Arnie…you got me out.” Pals!
Steve’s posture in the third panel always makes me laugh. That is a man who knows he is a third wheel right now. [Captain America #270 (June 1982), art by Mike Zeck and Vince Colletta.]
Unfortunately, Arnie and Michael’s domestic bliss is not long-lived. Soon after, they are both kidnapped again by Zemo, and this time Michael is killed. Arnie is naturally devastated; meanwhile, the narration has given up all pretense, referring to Michael as Arnie’s “beloved” and “a love [he] once knew.”
Shortly after this, Arnie is kidnapped again by Zemo, the Red Skull, and the Red Skull’s daughter Mother Superior. The villains dress Arnie up as a clown, call him a pansy (probably the harshest word Marvel could get away with at that point), and force him to declare himself “A pot-bellied, bald-headed wretch—who doesn’t know a thing about real, human love. I’m a strutting freak… I’m a menace to society…a disease!”
Arnie collapses in tears and Steve races to his side to hold him, declaring: “You are not a freak! You’re as good and decent a man as I’ve ever known! …They can’t corrupt your love for Michael with their lies any more than they can corrupt my love for Bernie! Do you hear me, Arnie? They’re the pariahs! They’re the disease!”
This page is just as painful now as it was in 1984. [Captain America #296 (August 1984), art by Paul Neary and Sam de la Rosa.]
This isn’t subtext anymore; this is text. I have trouble imagining how anyone in 1984, even the most sheltered little kid, could have read this comic and not understood that Arnie was gay, CCA prohibitions or not.
But even more significant is whose comic this is all taking place in. Captain America is meant to represent the best in all of us: the loftiest ideals of what America could and should be. It would have been a big deal for, say, Spider-Man or Wolverine to announce that being gay is okay. For Captain America to say it—to flatly declare that the love between two gay men is just as pure and incorruptible as his own heterosexual romantic relationship, and condemn homophobia as a disease—is a mission statement. And it’s a mission statement at odds with Marvel’s own editorial policies, in a year when AIDS was still known as “the gay cancer.”
J. M. DeMatteis, who wrote all of Arnie’s appearances in the 80s, has said that his goal in developing Steve’s supporting cast was to show that Steve “had surrounded himself with people who represented American diversity.” In that context, DeMatteis, says, it “made sense to me that he would have a gay friend, too.” This could have come across as tokenizing, and DeMatteis stumbles with some of the other representation in the book, but Arnie and Michael are written with zero stereotypes; their love story has a tragic end, but it’s still astonishingly progressive for the time.*
You know how sometimes people think Captain America is a Republican? Those people should read a comic sometime. [Captain America #296 (August 1984), art by Paul Neary and Sam de la Rosa.]
Even the language in that very blatant #296 wasn’t an accident. When I first read it, I thought DeMatteis must have somehow slipped it past the radar, but according to him, his original version of the script actually went so far as to explicitly state Arnie’s sexuality. In a 2011 comment on his own blog, he said “a page or two of the story was rewritten by Other Hands,” while in an interview in this year’s Pride, he contradicted himself slightly by saying “the editor in chief [Jim Shooter] asked me to tone down this language.” I don’t expect anyone’s memory of one comic they wrote decades ago to be perfect, so the discrepancy, while interesting, doesn’t concern me (and it’s possible that Shooter made the request and then just did it himself, making both statements true). What’s wild to me is that this is the censored version; I’m not sure who Shooter or anyone else thought they were fooling.
DeMatteis left the book soon after this storyline, and as is often the case, the next writer had little use for much of his supporting cast. Arnie was promptly written out and didn’t appear for another decade, where he revealed that he had cancer and then died—not terribly shocking for a character who was canonically born in the 1920s, but still sad. (The art’s a little hard to parse, but Steve appears to kiss him on the forehead to say goodbye—a pretty bold gesture from a company who only let Northstar come out three years prior.)
You see what I mean about the art being hard to parse? Still, the intimacy of the hand-holding and maybe-kiss is startling in a superhero comic, especially one from the ultra-macho 90s. [Captain America #443 (September 1995), art by Dave Hoover and Danny Bulanadi.]
Surrounding Steve and Arnie with heterosexual couples kissing goodbye is a suggestive and extremely interesting choice. Subtext is alive and well in 2025. [Avengers Academy: Marvel’s Voices Infinity Comic #21 (November 2024), art by Carola Borelli.]
But there was a third act to Arnie’s story yet to play out. If his early friendship with Steve seems familiar to you, you’ve probably seen 2011’s Captain America: The First Avenger. In the comics, Captain America fought World War II with a kid sidekick, Bucky Barnes. Bringing a preteen into a warzone to fight Nazis is not a concept that has aged well, so the filmmakers made Bucky Steve’s childhood best friend instead: his more masculine friend, who protects him from bullies, brings him on double dates, and is as close as family. They’ve never confirmed that they drew from Arnie’s comics appearances to create the MCU’s Bucky, but many people, including DeMatteis, have noted the similarities. (Frankly, they’re so similar that if it wasn’t intentional, I’ll eat Steve’s stupid little helmet.)
If you’ve gone anywhere near MCU fandom in the past 14 years, you’ll know that Stucky is by far the most popular pairing out there, which seems to have led to more interest in Arnie as a character—or maybe it’s just the increased presence of queer characters in general. Either way, Arnie’s shown up surprisingly frequently in the past five years for a dead guy.
A storyline last year in Avengers Academy: Marvel’s Voices Infinity Comic (that’s a terrible title, Marvel) retold Arnie’s story in more detail, with the interesting implication that Arnie was in love with Steve. (Honestly, some panels imply that the feeling is mutual, which is fascinating.) We see Arnie meeting Michael while in the Navy—a retcon, as originally they had only been together for ten years in 1982, but certainly not one I’m complaining about. We also see some of the realities a gay man might have faced at the time: Arnie is given a blue discharge, denying him veteran’s benefits despite heroic service, which puts a different spin on the financial struggles he describes in those 80s comics.
I’m obsessed with this reimagining of Arnie as a Nick Fury/Sgt. Rock-style hero. [Avengers Academy: Marvel’s Voices Infinity Comic #38 (March 2025), art by Pablo Collar.]
In another storyline set during the war, we get to see Arnie as a dashing young sailor, punching Nazis and having sexy doomed romances with Japanese supervillains. Arnie even starred in his own story in this year’s Pride special, along with the aforementioned interview with DeMatteis. Not bad for a guy who’s been dead since 1995!
(Side note: besides openly celebrating Arnie’s sexuality, modern comics tend to emphasize his Jewish heritage, which was explicit but only mentioned in passing in the 80s. Multiple issues show characters leaving rocks on his grave, a Jewish tradition, and at one point Steve asks a Jewish character to say the Mourner’s Kaddish for Arnie. It’s a nice touch.)
Until recently, Arnie Roth was a mostly forgotten character. But he was groundbreaking in his time, and it’s been lovely to see him showing up again, and for writers to get to explore facets of his character that DeMatteis didn’t have the space or permission to show 40 years ago. In Judaism, when a person passes, we say “May their memory be a blessing.” Arnie is a fictional character, of course, but his memory has managed to be a blessing anyway.
*While Captain America #296 was groundbreaking for 1984, it still centers the heroism of a straight gentile with a “perfect” body. I highly recommend this excellent Shelfdust article by Holly Raymond, which asks what it would look like to reframe the story around Arnie himself, in all of his abjectified otherness.