Dear Johnny, I am writing to explain how I feel about the X-Men character Anil, who is a mutant lizard boy.

His name refers to a certain common lizard found in places like Florida.

It sounds a lot like anal, and as the phonetic suggestion implies, he is gay.

I told you I don't like Anil, but what I really meant is I don't like how he's used.

He is a charming lizard boy.

He's got a scaly horn hair situation, green skin.

His face is rounded and boyish most of the time.

He can do what lizards do, regenerate, while crawl, use their top. His face is rounded and boyish most of the time.

He can do what lizards do, regenerate, wall crawl, use their tongues.

His non-X-Men name is Victor, and he has nice parents.

They enrolled him in the Xavier Institute in the early 2000s when it was Academy X, and they had all these new students and squads run by different X-Men. I loved it. A million

mutant teens with problems and superpowers. It was fun, but kind of a mess. You couldn't keep

track of all the students, and then the school got attacked by terrorists who blew up half the

school and killed half the students on a bus. Victor wasn't one of them, so he got to be in the traumatized

survivor team support group, and through that he officially came out as gay by being outed

by another student. They all seem gay to me, I should say. Annel has been in a lot of comics

since then, and yet he has never actually had anal sex. He has only kissed one guy

on panel, and it was an illusion. His sexuality is so faintly and rarely addressed. It's like

long-ago lore, you know if you know, and yet he functions as a queer token, an amalgamation of

non-normative qualities that disallow him from occupying

any kind of center, even if they get him on the page. But as I write this, these faults

remind me a lot of myself and how I function in institutional settings, my representational

...