Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-25684889-20150822230425/@comment-995426-20150824043656

Mikey's a very different character with a different situation. And no, I'm not talking about hugging Leatherhead, though that didn't "help." :P I'm talking about sleeping and spooning romantically with him. Even my 71 year old dad took one look at that and thought they were gay. Two people past puberty don't sleep and spoon like that unless they have romantic feelings for each other or are in some kind of intimate relationship. I don't think Mikey's given to casual intimate relationships, so I'm inclined to think romance is more likely. XD But unlike with Raph, none of us actually thought Mikey was gay, because we could still totally imagine him with a girl. And you're right that Mikey's something of a teen-child, but he's also still a teenager after all. And it's possible he may not have himself understood his own feelings&mdash;in our day as LGBT teenagers, our first love often took us by surprise, and it could even take a while to realize it if we'd never been in that situation before. I should also stress that I never thought Mikey and Leatherhead were not having sex, if at least because Leatherhead might be afraid of hurting Mikey, and also more practically because Nick would never say as much. TeenNick, maybe, but not Nick. And they may have never even kissed either. But assuming they were both relatively young when they started out, their relationship looked very much like non-sexual first young love.

Interesting fact: The real-life Renaissance artist Michelangelo had deeply emotional romances with men over his lifetime (being in love, being romantically attached, all of that), but he was famously asexual about them. He was celibate as a monk. Of course, this doesn't necessarily equate to the personalities of fictional turtles named after them, since the artists Leonardo da Vinci, Donatello and Michelangelo were all gay. Ironically, the artist Raphael was the only heterosexual among them. They were all very famous for painting so many beautiful men though, so Splinter trips my bidar just a little. Not that it matters either way anymore, since Splinter doesn't seem to have been in love with anyone since Tang Shen, and it's not like he's in the best position to ask anyone out on a date.

And though fiction need not conform to realism (something I've come to appreciate a lot recently), it can still be influenced by what writers understand as realistic, especially if it helps the audience relate to the story and characters. A recent YouGov poll found what a lot of us have suspected for a long time: A large percentage (in this case about one-third) of people under 30 admit to not being 100% heterosexual. Which means that, in principle, it's not far-fetched that, in a family of four siblings, one or even two of the siblings may have non-hetero feelings (whether or not they also have hetero feelings). And if one brother is LGBT, it's statistically more likely that one of their younger brothers will also be LGBT. I'm not even the only LGBT person in my own extended family. So, again, while fiction can be whatever a writer wants it to be, those writers are still human beings who live in the world and still perceive their surroundings (and are often even younger than I am), and it's not really a big surprise to find a family of four siblings where two are hetero, one is gay, and one is bi/pan. If anything, it feels more like real life, and to see it portrayed is a refreshing departure from such suffocating stigmas of the past that kept LGBT feeling so invisible.