15 Comic Book 'Firsts' You Didn't Know
3. Northstar - First Same-Sex Marriage
Jean-Paul Beaubier debuted as Northstar in Uncanny X-Men #120 in 1979. He is a member of Alpha Flight, which is like a Canadian version of The Avengers. Although Northstar was always meant to be gay, it wasn't acknowledged until 1992 since the Comics Code banned any reference to homosexuality for decades.
In this issue where he came out, Northstar finds an abandoned baby and brings it to a hospital. When the doctor tells Northstar that the child is dying from AIDS, he decides to publicly come out of the closet to help bring awareness to the disease.
When he married his husband, Kyle Jinadu, in 2012, he became the first superhero to have a same-sex marriage. In fact, it was the first same-sex marriage of any person in a mainstream comic.
Interestingly, Batwoman could have been the first person to have a same-sex wedding in comics. She was meant to marry Maggie Sawyer weeks before Northstar's marriage but the higher-ups at DC interfered and the arc ended prematurely, prompting the series' creators - W. Haden Blackman and J. H. Williams III - to leave in protest.