Let us bow our heads and thank Beyoncé — the most successful Black superhero franchise since Blade is here.

Black Panther hit theaters last weekend, shattering box office records with a beautiful, insightful, and elegant ode to Blackness. As the first, franchise-building film in a series, it had a lot of ground to cover, from introducing the majesty, traditions and history of Wakanda, the fictional African nation where the movie is set, to establishing the backstory of our hero, T’Challa, within the existing Marvel canon. And with so much work to do, it was amazing what the film was able to accomplish in just 135 minutes.

It’s a movie that stands as a triumph for Black viewers, gay or straight, a moment of unchecked visibility that made many viewers feel empowered and represented in profound ways. And as a Black and Latinx gay man, I feel an immense amount of pride in what this film has accomplished. Having lived the struggle that is a lack of visibility for people like me, it’s refreshing to see Blackness celebrated like this. It’s refreshing to see Black people at the helm of an uncolonized power structure, as the Wakandans are in the film. It’s refreshing to see Black people be the heroes of a story for themselves. It’s refreshing to see examples of effective white allyship on screen, where they can hopefully reach those who need to see them most.

But it’s time for a reality check. People of color who watched this exaltant, unabashedly Black cinematic feast knew that the Black-lash was coming. We can rarely, if ever, have or celebrate anything as Black people without white people getting upset and feeling the need to insert themselves into our narratives. The recent explosion in visibility of and power for people of color represents a major cultural paradigm shift, one that white people are clawing at the margins of. And the response to Black Panther has made it all too clear: from racists who falsely claimed they were attacked and berated at screenings to the slew of conservative critics who were up in arms that an unapologetically Black film could be this successful, events this week showed that a movie this beautiful and joyful would not rise quietly. The LGBTQ+ community has been no different; this week, LGBTQ+ publications and various queer people online have found issue with the perceived straightwashing and/or queer erasure of the character Ayo, who is canonically queer in the comics.

The reaction concerns a scene, cut from the theatrical version of the film, in which detractors claimed that Ayo, a queer black woman, gave a flirtatious stare after a ritual dance to the character Okoye (who is heterosexual and married). This cut scene, the detractors purport, was meant to contextually present Ayo as queer — and that cut, to take it from reactions that have circulated online over the past week, seemed to sting.

But this kind of surface-level representation isn’t the best kind of queer representation in the first place. One could say the proposed scene is more like queerbaiting, since it would be a queer character lusting after a straight one, and it peddles the dull, outdated stereotype that LGBTQ+ people are constantly lusting after or falling for their heterosexual counterparts — stereotypes that are the baseline of many homophobic beliefs.

We deserve better than that. We should demand better than that. If Ayo was meant to be queer in this film, she would deserve a fully-developed girlfriend and storyline. Treating table scraps of queer representation like an entrée only incentivizes directors and filmmakers to do the bare minimum to satisfy our need to be seen and have our stories told.