Gay batman comic

Several characters in the Modern Age Batman comic books are expressly gay, lesbian, or bisexual. [1] The early Golden Age Batman stories were dark and violent, but during the late s and the early s they changed to a softer, friendlier and more exotic style that was considered campy. Freely adapted from The Caped Crusade: Batman and the Rise of Nerd Culture by Glen Weldon, out now from Simon and Schuster.

Let’s get one thing absolutely clear: Robin isn’t gay. Don’t let the. Tim Drake is the Robin who isn’t really sure how to be Robin anymore — but in this week’s Batman: Urban Legends, he’s figured at least one thing out. A nice boy asked him out on a date, and Tim. Robin has come out as bisexual in the latest Batman comic. Tim Drake – a.k.a. the third Robin – realized he’s bi in the newly released issue Batman: Urban Legends #6.

With the recent passing of Kevin Conroy, the voice of the caped crusader in Batman: The Animated Series and gay icon, it felt like a good time to discuss LGBTQIA+ representation in comic books, specifically in Superhero comics. In part this is due to the fact that the movie focuses on the early years of the Caped Crusader. It seems like a stale old joke, albeit one that can still produce a smirk in the immature. Yet the gayness of Batman has been a topic of serious debate over for nearly 70 years now.

The history of this idea shows how once-marginal notions can quickly become mainstream. The first writer to suggest that the superhero genre has a gay subtext was Gershon Legman in his self-published polemic Love and Death. The truth is a little bit more complicated. As a young man Legman had experimented with homosexuality and he was certainly very familiar with gay culture he published a still useful lexicon of homosexual argot in But over time Legman became very homophobic for complicated ideological reasons.

Inclined towards pacifism, he concluded that American culture was screwed up because it celebrated violence associated with masculine virtue while denigrating sexuality associated with feminine weakness. In short, American culture was deeply misogynist and violent. For Legman, male homosexuality was a manifestation of this misogyny boys were trained as young that girls were icky and grew up gay and therefore should be opposed for the sake of a psychologically healthy culture.

The conflation of male homosexuality with misogyny was a commonplace psychological observation at the time. Neither is in the explicit Samurai subservience of the inevitable little-boy helpers — theoretically identification shoe-horns for children not quite bold enough to identify themselves with Superprig himself — nor in the fainting adulation of thick necks, ham fists, and well-filled jock-straps; the draggy capes and costumes, the shamanistic talismans and superstitions that turn a sissified clerk into a one-man flying lynch-mob with biceps bigger than his brain.

It is not even in the two comic-book companies staffed entirely by homosexuals and operating out of our most phalliform skyscraper. Stan Lee, an editor at Timely, is said to have been particularly miffed by this accusation. In his bestseller Seduction of the Innocent , psychologist Fredric Wertham took up the idea that Batman and Robin have an unhealthy homoerotic subtext.

At home they lead an idyllic life. They live in sumptuous quarters, with beautiful flowers in large vases, and have a butler, Alfred.

gay batman actor

Batman is sometimes shown in a dressing gown. Wertham also found a lesbian subtext to Wonder Women. Wertham was clearly picking up from where Legman left off. This is highly unlikely, For one thing, Legman had left the United States in the early s after the government tried to convict him as a ographer. More likely, Wertham was influenced by one of his colleagues, Hilde Mosse, who was quite homophobic.

Mosse was the sister of George Mosse, the great historian who in the s was very much in the closet but who came out as openly gay later in life, after his beloved sister died. Since comics were internationally popular, the great Batman debate issue soon started skipping across borders. In the early s Italian cultural critics, developing the new field of semiotics, also started writing about the homoerotic subtext of superhero comics two prominent scholars on this subject were Roberto Giammanco and Umberto Eco; Eco, of course, would go on to write the bestselling novel The Name of the Rose.

Yet the attempt to straighten up Batman was only partially successful. The camp aesthetic, as readers of Susan Sontag will know, emerged out the gay subculture. The show did try to defuse the gay issue by having Batman and Robin live with their Aunt Harriet but this half-hearted and ambiguous gesture was counterbalanced by the general campiness of the whole production. They share many secrets and spend long hours alone in remote areas….

Holy homophobia! In response to the Batman TV show, which they felt demeaned the Caped Crusader by turning him into a clown, many subsequent comic book writers and cartoonists have tried to emphasize the grim, noir Batman while keeping Robin discretely out of sight.