Did Ti West cut an entire gay subplot from Maxxxine?

polygon.com:

Ti West’s new horror-thriller Maxxxine, the third movie in his trilogy starting with X and Pearl, includes an odd detail that’s easy to miss, since no one ever remarks on it: The title character’s best friend, Leon (Moses Sumney), has a cast on one arm. It’s grubby and inked-up, suggesting that his arm was broken far enough in the past that he’s had plenty of time to get it signed and dirty from use, but not far enough back that it’s healed. On top of that, his glasses are broken and held together with prominently placed tape. What happened to him isn’t part of this story — but there are hints of it on the screen.

Viewers learn very little about Leon over the course of Maxxxine, even though he’s clearly meant to be a vital part of her life, as one particularly emotional scene suggests. Piecing together what we do learn about him — particularly from elements that don’t entirely add up unless you’re reading between the lines — it feels like either Maxxxine had a Leon subplot that was trimmed out at some point, or West wants us to assemble the puzzle pieces to pick up on what’s going on with him. Let’s dig into the clues.

[Ed. note: Major spoilers ahead for Maxxxine.]

X, an ode to 1970s horror movies like The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, centers on the doomed production of a porn movie being shot on a rural Texas farm in 1979. Its featured player: Maxine Minx (Mia Goth), a ruthlessly ambitious wannabe movie star whose motto is “I will not accept a life I do not deserve.” In that movie, Maxine survives a massacre of the film crew, engineered in part by one of the embittered, elderly farm owners, Pearl (also played by Goth). The second film, Pearl, is a flashback to when Pearl (Goth again) was young and had her own ambitions of stardom, and it’s visually styled after classic ’50s musicals.

Maxxxine, taking place after Maxine’s escape in X and her arrival in Hollywood, is set in 1985. Like the other two movies, it takes visual and narrative inspiration from movies made