Iceman Finishes His Coming Out Storyline

Marvel's Iceman is finally done living in an ice closet (sorry).

As with many coming out stories, the one of the X-Men's founding member took a while to come full circle and full acceptance - 52 years and hundreds of issues.

The initial confrontation about Iceman, aka Bobby Drake's, sexuality came back in April when, in the midst of a convoluted time-travel arc, Jean Grey uses telepathy to find out that he's gay. This complicated things because while the younger version of Drake was discovered to be gay, his older counterpart wasn't and was even dating fellow X-Man Kitty Pryde.

Instead of open the can of worms that is the nurture-versus-nature debate, it was revealed that the older version of Drake had compartmentalized his homosexuality and buried it deeply within himself, hiding that part of him from his teammates and the world alike. It's suggested that he didn't want to deal with being gay at the same time he was maturing as a mutant - two things that society in the X-Men universe frowned upon.

The completion of the story arc marks the end of writer Brian Michael Bendis' run on the X-Men, so the way Iceman is treated and how his homosexuality will affect future character development is up to Marvel.