Fact check: Insomniac has not made Wolverine gay or bisexual in Marvel’s Wolverine. The game never labels Logan’s sexuality or gives him a male romance. It does, however, frame one moment with Sabretooth in deliberately intimate language, and pretending that subtext is not there is just as misleading as calling it a confirmed coming-out scene.
It took one hand on the back of Logan’s head to send the internet feral.
A line from a pre-release review of Marvel’s Wolverine is now ricocheting through forums and culture-war accounts. Depending on who is reposting it, Insomniac Games has either revealed a daring new bisexual Wolverine or humiliated Marvel’s most aggressively masculine hero to score a proverbial dunk on “chuds.” Both readings race well ahead of what the game actually says.
The viral screenshot is real. The conclusion attached to it is doing considerably more work than the evidence.
Where the ‘gay Wolverine’ claim came from
The source is Gene Park’s review in The Washington Post. While discussing Logan’s relationship with Sabretooth, Park describes the villain grabbing the back of Wolverine’s head during an attack on a military base in a “brief moment of yearning.”
Insomniac narrative director Walt Williams then explains that Logan feels the yearning, becomes frightened and pulls away. Sabretooth experiences it too, but responds by turning hurt into aggression. Williams describes hate and love as intertwined, with the pair remaining connected through shared pain.
That is unusually romantic vocabulary for Wolverine and Sabretooth. It permits a queer or homoerotic reading. It may even encourage one. What it does not do is establish sexual attraction, a relationship, a kiss or an identity. Love between two damaged men can be romantic, familial, obsessive, abusive or some poisonous mixture of all four. The scene appears designed to resist a neat label.
This also did not come from a ratings board. The official ESRB listing mentions blood and gore, intense violence, partial nudity, strong language, a drug reference and in-game purchases. It contains no descriptor for sexual content or sexual themes. Ratings labels cannot settle a character’s orientation, but the ESRB certainly did not “confirm” the claim.
What the game actually shows
The clearest romance in Insomniac’s story is with Jean Grey. Reviews describe a budding relationship between Jean and Logan, and an earlier hands-on preview had him looking for a gift for her. Insomniac has placed Jean at the centre of the story from the beginning: the official prequel comic, also written by Williams, follows Logan and Jean as its leads.
A male character being drawn to a woman does not prove he is straight, of course. It simply means the game gives us evidence of Logan’s interest in Jean and ambiguity around Sabretooth. “Insomniac confirmed bisexual Wolverine” is therefore false. “Insomniac wrote a charged moment between Logan and Sabretooth” is fair.
That emotional mess fits the version of Logan Insomniac has been advertising. The studio calls this an identity-driven story beneath the claws and rage. As we noted when looking at the game’s violence and accessibility settings, the brutality is meant to expose his anger rather than replace his personality. Williams has repeatedly described Logan as an outsider even among outsiders.
Would a bisexual Wolverine even break Marvel canon?
Mainline Earth-616 Wolverine has a long, explicit history of relationships with women: Jean Grey, Mariko Yashida, Silver Fox, Itsu and Storm among them. Marvel’s own history of Logan and Jean leaves little doubt about that attraction.
Marvel has also already published a Wolverine who loved a man. James Howlett of Earth-12025 was in a relationship with Hercules, a variant Marvel includes in its official guide to Wolverines across the multiverse. The Krakoa-era comics also invited years of speculation about Jean, Scott Summers and Logan, although Marvel never turned that suggestive domestic arrangement into an unambiguous declaration that the main Logan is bisexual.
Insomniac’s universe is its own continuity. The X-Men do not yet exist here, Team X has a different shape and the studio is free to reinterpret relationships. Making this Logan bisexual would be a creative choice, not the destruction of an untouched 50-year canon. But the released evidence still stops short of saying Insomniac made that choice.
The writers, their politics and the theory of a deliberate dunk
The name attached to the viral quote matters. It is Walt Williams, the current narrative director, not former associate narrative director Mary Kenney. Williams wrote Spec Ops: The Line, a game famous for taking the power fantasy of the military shooter and forcing players to sit with its consequences. His public comments about Wolverine follow the same instinct: violence is more interesting when it grows out of guilt, attachment, fear and self-loathing.
Williams also presents himself as a lifelong Wolverine reader. In the D23 interview, he recalls discovering the character in 1991 and argues that nobody suffers or cares as deeply as Logan. That is evidence of a writer interested in cracking open the macho shell. It is not evidence of a partisan order to make Wolverine like men.
Kenney did co-lead story development earlier in production and publicly argued that game makers should use every available part of the medium to improve LGBTQ representation. She left Insomniac for CD Projekt Red in July 2024, more than two years before release. Her comments show that inclusive storytelling mattered to at least one senior writer on the early team. They do not prove she wrote this Sabretooth scene, set Logan’s orientation or engineered a prank on conservative fans.
Could some people at a modern California studio enjoy watching the usual anti-“woke” accounts melt down over vulnerable Wolverine? Almost certainly. Could turning Marvel’s hairiest masculinity machine bisexual be read as a dunk on the chuds? Absolutely. But possibility is not authorship, and politics is not a substitute for what appears on screen.
If the goal were a grand culture-war humiliation, Insomniac chose a remarkably timid way to deliver it. There is no coming-out scene, male kiss, boyfriend or bisexual label. The marketing foregrounds Jean Grey, while the contentious moment lasts long enough for Logan to recoil from Sabretooth’s touch.
So, did Insomniac make Wolverine gay?
No. The claim is not supported by the game. “Bisexual” remains possible as an interpretation, but it is not confirmed canon for Insomniac’s Logan.
The honest answer is messier and better. Insomniac let two hypermasculine men share a flash of need, then had fear and violence swallow it. That gives players something to argue about beyond how many limbs Logan can remove—useful timing as the PS5 exclusive sits days from launch and Australian players prepare for its full uncensored Berserker Mode.
If Insomniac wanted to make Wolverine bisexual, it could have said so. Instead, it put one hand on the back of Logan’s head and let the internet draw claws.
The conversation
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