Sasha Selavie peeks under the tights of comic-book icons and asks, ‘Who’s zooming who?’
Think comic books are kid stuff? Think again! For Dr. Frederic Wertham, the hugely influential US psychiatrist who authored Seduction of The Innocent in 1953, they were Cold War, video nasties! Why? Three words, darlings – drugs, perversion and criminality, all featured monthly in no-holds barred sensationalism, in titles nudging circulations of a million copies each!
So what images, pray tell, floated adolescent American boats in the gory, nuke-all-living Commies 1950s? Oh, nothing that extraordinary – just deranged, full-colour covers of deranged junkies injecting smack with viciously sharp, hypodermic syringes directly in their eyeballs! Elsewhere, and so exquisitely drawn you’d swear they came pumping from Michalangelo’s gorgeously gay pen, you’d find hanged men’s faces in close-up, all burst, protruding eyeballs and tongues! Christ, who needs lame, internet atrocity porn to beat off? Me, I envy those 50s comics fans – nowhere on earth, even in stills of 9/11 jumpers, do colours match the rainbow frenzy of comic-book bloodshed!
No wonder Donald Trump – a sociopathic cunt par excellence – grew up so profoundly warped, raised on casual, graphic ultra-violence as shockingly routine as sexual bigotry. Gay men, especially, typified everything deviant and suspect to a rigidly uptight, 1950s America, and Dr.Wertham saw comic books as blatantly endorsing homosexuality, Werthams’s biggest, role-model fear.
Batman, especially, terrified him, a grown man in skin-tight leather enjoying an upmarket ménage a trios with a young boy and older butler. Add a Joker portrayed as undeniably gay (Batman 250) and a psychotic tranny (Arkham Asylum) and it’s shocking the Batcave’s not Gotham’s own Fire Island! And Wonder Woman, Wertham reasoned, raised on a women-only island of Amazons addicted to bondage in chains, was surely a deviant dyke’s wet dream!
That was the 1950s, however. Since then, heterosexual phobias have (arguably) subsided, with gay characters at least accorded dignity, if not huge sales, in mainstream comics. Take Marvel’s imminent, 2016 movie blockbuster, Dr. Strange, a slim, mustachioed dandy living in Greenwich Village with a manservant, who memorably swept into a local pharmacy wearing full, magician’s drag in Strange Tales 146 demanding pills! Well, how many boxes do you have to tick to state the obvious?
In Kathy (Batwoman) Kane’s case, none; she’s a bad-ass, Nikita clone in black and red spandex, and a thoroughly modern, matter of fact pussy magnet by day. But hey, let’s not get too celebratory here – even Batwoman’s hardly the Ellen DeGeneres show of comic-books! Typically, publisher DC Comics, fearing reactionary, redneck backlash, axed a pivotal story with Batwoman marrying her passionately demonstrative girlfriend.
Rival publisher Image Comics, however, had far more, out-there gay guts and grit. Fittingly, their characters Midnighter and Apollo are dark, noir takes on Batman and Superman who just happen to be a gay couple, with their sexuality simply presented as an everyday, non-contentious fact of life.
Well, Holy Happy Hallelujah! Thank Big Daddy Jesus that comic-books have dumped their snide, whining, milk-toast parodies of gay men. Sure, you’ll still find one-note nothings like Alpha Flight’s Northstar and X-Force’s Shatterstar, for whom being gay’s their only point of interest, but who could resist the manic, militant and shaven-headed Batman of The Dark Knight Strikes Back screaming ‘Pull on your tights!’ to all and sundry? It’s a call to arms no queen should ignore, so slip on those super-suits and pouting pantyhose ASAP!
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