Sometimes I think they redesign iconic characters just so, years later, you’re rereading a book and think, “oh yeah, they did that dumb thing for a while”. Morrison had to deal with electric blue Superman in the first bit of his JLA. Civil War has the Iron Spidey suit in it. Now Wonder Woman.
With a new volume of Young Avengers around the corner, I wanted to go back and look at that series again. What I’ve always loved about that book was how writer Allan Heinberg managed to make all of its characters seem like real people. In 2006 GLAAD honored the series for its depiction of the relationship between male characters Wiccan and Hulkling. Similarly, GLAAD awarded Greg Rucka and J.H. Williams III for their work on Batwoman in Detective Comics last year. I lent my copies of both series to Red Fuzzy Jesus’s Gabriel Hudson and this week we chatted about homosexuality in comics.
Before we get into the characters’ sexuality, how did you feel about the stories overall?
I like both story lines a lot. I do not have nearly as much experience reading comics as you so I was a little surprised by some of the storytelling. Mainly I was impressed by how well emotion and character development can be conveyed through very concise dialogue. I think in both instances there’s a lot of assumed back-story or familiarity with the characters that I lacked. But, without exposition, I was able to pick up and follow along pretty quickly.
Young Avengers I think is a bit less standalone than Batwoman, who is an almost brand new character at this point. She was created in 2006 in a comic called 52 and had almost no appearances between then and this run of Detective Comics. As Batwoman she’s kidnapped by a cult and stabbed, which is referenced in Detective Comics. Her appearances as Kate Kane in 52 were as the rich ex-girlfriend of Renee Montoya. The first scene was a fancy dress party so the initial impression she gave was as a lipstick lesbian. Still, her debut got a small bit of mainstream press attention (with headlines like “Holy Lesbian, Batman!”) and the rumor was always that DC Comics got cold feet about how to use a gay character and shelved her for three years.
Both stories allude to gay criticism by the public and press. There’s a brief discussion of changing Asgardian’s name to Wiccan to avoid providing the press with an automatic joke. [“Ass-Guardian”] There’s also disapproval of Kate at a ball when she wears a tuxedo. Her line about taking criticism in stride refers to her character and the inevitable criticism of having gay characters.
However, that criticism was slight at best. Focus on the Family and Laurie Higgins of the Illinois Family Institute made harsh criticisms about the “homosexual agenda” finding a new pop culture vessel. But otherwise there was not much hysteria. This is another sign that gay people have moved toward greater acceptance. A gay character provokes more of a yawn than an outcry. Still, the direct address of criticism acknowledges its potential. The authors seems to be recognizing that there are people out there that may have a problem but their scorn is not factoring heavily into their decision making.
Writer Greg Rucka made a point of underplaying her sexuality in interviews. One quote:
Yes, she’s a lesbian. She’s also a redhead. It is an element of her character. It is not her character.
Reading the first few issues of the story, I had the feeling, though, that he was almost over-underplaying her sexuality, like he had something to prove. He makes it a point to show guitars and music posters in her house, to display her menorah. Like he’s saying, “there’s more to this character, I swear!”
It could be that he was just delaying her sexuality… because it’s featured more prominently later on. I think the comparison to straight characters is fair here. Some comic book characters are immediately introduced as ladies’ men (Tony Stark) or awkward around girls (Peter Parker) but for most their romantic side stories develop later. It could just be that he was establishing other things about her character first the way other superheroes are established before their attractions are introduced. That doesn’t necessarily indicate cold feet about including a lesbian storyline, just a hesitance to kick it off by announcing her lesbianism, which is a good use of restraint.
As the second story arc comes along, Rucka brings her sexuality to the front, in the present with her dancing with Captain Sawyer and in the past with “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”. How did you feel about the flashback sequences with her at West Point?
I think it’s interesting how hard she tries to be a “legitimate” hero. By that, I mean, she doesn’t start out trying to help people with vigilante activities. She wants a career in the military. But, she is faced with the impossible choice of denying who she is and hurting others. This eventually leads her to vigilante justice because she cannot deny who she is for a career.
I think this part of the story rings particularly true. For the most part, arguments against DADT have been phrased as counterarguments toward attacks on gays that have limited direct applicability to the military. But there have been fewer affirmative arguments in favor of repeal. Lately, military leaders testifying before Congress and in other venues have argued in favor of honor and integrity; two qualities long associated with military service. It is unfair to ask military members to sneak around, to call their partners “roommates”, and live double lives. The choice between a life of service and a life of honor is an unfair choice to be imposed.
Similarly, outside the military, many LGBT people find themselves in the gay catch-22. One is simultaneously condemned for not participating in institutions from which there is exclusion. Often, anti-gay groups deride the gay community universally as promiscuous and insincere about relationships. They then turn around and use the purported promiscuity to support bans on same-sex marriage. It is contradictory to criticize people for not mirroring relationships they are told they cannot have.
Today’s younger gays see long-term, committed relationships as an option for them in adulthood previous generations did not perceive. So they are “free” to pursue the typical heterosexual norm. As a result, the stereotype of the back alley gay man is fading away. In the same way, had Kate seen a military career as an option she might have gone on to achieve a high rank and legitimate heroism. Likewise, it is unfair for the military, police, or Kate’s military father to criticize her vigilantism because she’s told legitimate service is not an option. Fortunately, her father eventually came around to support what she was trying to do.
Yet Kate, in putting on a mask every night, is quite literally hiding part of who she is from the world.
With good reason. If she didn’t wear a disguise she could easily be harmed in her regular life. Or worse, those close to her that lack super powers could be harmed as a way of getting back at her. So, there’s a practical concern behind wearing a mask.
Gay people still face something similar. As much progress as we’ve made, there are still many situations in which it is not safe to come out. And safe is not put in quotations there because it really is a question of harm. Gay people used to be asked whether they were out or not. Now, more commonly, they are asked how out they are. Meaning, there are varying degrees of disclosure. A person might be out among close friends but not out at work. A person might be out to some relatives but not others.
And there is real harm at stake. Losing a job or being denied a promotion is harm. And as tolerant as many people profess to be, there’s a more subtle exclusion from the old boys network or male bonding rituals in professional life that need to be considered. A lot of what contributes to career progress is collegial relationship building with superiors. Coming out can inhibit that. Also, gay people have to be concerned if their kids will be made fun of at school or if their parents will be embarrassed in their community. This is similar to the concern superheroes have for the well being of those around them.
Much has been made about the volume of gay men in white collar executive or artistic positions. Some have suggested that whatever predisposes one to be gay also endows them with the qualities necessary for professional work, or deprives them of whatever is necessary for manual labor. Others hypothesize that, because gay men do not have families to support, they are freer to focus on careers and climb the corporate ladder more quickly. I think a more reasonable conclusion might be that there are more gay men in white collar and arts-based professions because it is safer to be out in those lines of work. It is easier for a gay man to be out as an attorney than a construction worker.
Acceptance of gay people, while not universal, is a lot more common now than just a few years ago. For that reason, shame or social rejection is not enough to keep most in the closet. If one is rejected by friends and family there is enough of a supportive environment out there to minimize the hurt of rejection. What keeps many GLBT in the closet now, even partially, is real, measurable, demonstrable harm. It’s the same thing that keeps the mask on Batwoman. She’s out to some. Her dad knows her full identity. But, there’s still too much risk to be completely unmasked. As much progress as we’ve made, there is still a risk to being out that has to be calculated. And, for each gay person that calculation is varied and personal. That’s why I don’t like forced outings by the politically opportunistic. You never know what harm you may be causing to someone by revealing things about there identity. This is true even if you believe the world would be a better place if all gay people were out.
Turning to Young Avengers, we see the younger generation in Billy and Teddy’s relationship. Kate faced real adversity because of her sexuality, giving up a promising career as an Army cadet. Billy and Teddy come out to their friends and parents are immediately accepted. Do you think it’s more common now for teenagers to be able to admit their sexual orientation, or even be able to have it figured out by high school?
Oh absolutely! It’s a fairly new phenomenon but for many gay people adolescence now occurs during adolescence. For so long people typically didn’t realize they were gay, or couldn’t tell anyone until their late 20s. Now it is more and more common for young people to come out and for their friends and family to be supportive. When I read the scene in which Billy and Teddy discuss whether they should tell their parents about their super-heroism, and are subsequently affirmed in their relationship, it was moving.
I’ve had several conversations with gay friends in which there are two coming out stories, the real event and the fantasy. Often, the latter is more detailed. People really do dream about their family meeting their partners or their parents not just being tersely accepting but celebrating in their gay child finding love. I can’t help thinking that the author of this storyline has a lot of familiarity with the gay experience.
The best news is, the story had resonance because it’s actually happening. Parents often know their kids are gay before their kids tell them. And when they do, it’s a chance to build the relationship, not destroy it.
Sometimes GLAAD will give recognition for just showing up. Inclusion of a gay character is enough. But I think we’re to the point where there needs to be more. Giving characters dimensionality or mirroring actual changes in the gay community is praiseworthy. There’s a new gay narrative being written and it’s refreshing to see that narrative appearing in a medium marketed almost exclusively to young men.
Right. Comics tend to be filled with women in tight-fitting costumes posed in impossible contortions. I don’t know how much you ever played XBOX live games, but you can’t go five minutes without someone calling you a “faggot” over voice chat. It’s not the most progressive community and comics are filled with ads for video games.
That’s what makes it even braver. Immediately adjacent to the coming out scene between Teddy and Billy there’s an ad for Bod Body Spray that shows a cartoon guy with women swooning around him. I’ve always thought that gay rights would reach an apex when professional male athletes felt comfortable being gay. This is close to that. A publication, with very masculine advertising, has young gay men being close and expressing their love for each other.
I wasn’t as surprised by Batwoman. She’s a lesbian but she’s also hot with a skin tight costume and giant breasts. Lesbianism can easily be folded into a male fantasy world. Your average sorority girl can become a lesbian after a few shots but it’s mostly for the entertainment and pleasure of men. For two male characters to be gay in a male dominated medium is quite progressive. Acceptance has been a double-edged sword for gay men. On one hand, people are more comfortable with a gay man being around. But on the other, they require him to be sassy, funny, or flamboyant. It is for this reason I never considered Will & Grace a big step forward. It was gay men on prime time network TV but it was the type of gay court jester that’s easier to swallow. A heroic, competent, complex gay man is still a rare thing to see.
I should also note the dimensionality of these characters. I would similarly not be surprised if two gay men in a comic book flitted around fulfilling every type of swishy, prissy stereotype. But these young men are masculine. They literally engage in acts of heroism. They’re tough and they know how to fight. They just happen to be gay. The dimensionality within their individual characters and their relationship belies the usual treatment of gay men when straight men are present.
Yeah, both Billy and Teddy are drawn in sports jerseys at different times. It’s not like Kurt on Glee who’s always wearing ascots and talking about his skincare routine (though I think that show has done a good job with his relationship with his father).
A few weeks ago I saw a sketch on The Soup in which a woman wants to find a “real man” i.e., not gay. I know it’s just a silly sketch but it caused me to think inside, “I am a real man!” Gay men sometimes have to remind people that they can be fully capable leaders and gay. These characters do that well. They are guys. They just happen to love other guys.
And fight crime! Despite their secret origins Batwoman, Wiccan, and Hulkling are all typical superheroes, complete with tragic origins. The Batman books practically require a hero to have dead parents, and Billy was bullied as a kid, making him want to protect others. And many in our society still think homosexuality is a result/response to abuse.
That is an unfortunate misconception that has stuck around. Many profess a supposed link between childhood trauma—sexual or not—and being gay or lesbian. Opponents of gay rights use this to undergird arguments claiming gayness is not an identity trait but a defect. Returning to the topic of DADT, that has been an argument out there that the presence of same-sex attraction is evidence of damage making one disqualified from military service. It is surprising today that that kind of thinking still gets any traction.
However, gay people can have a good deal of trauma. Whether it’s getting bullied in school, familial rejection, or just a generalized feeling of being different, there are some common developmental experiences. At the beginning of the Young Avengers series I assumed the shape shifter might be gay because he talked about being different and wanting to pass as one of the guys in the locker room.
Superheroes also have a common theme of trauma in youth. Bruce Wayne’s parents are gunned down in front of him. Peter Parker’s uncle is killed by the assailant he could have stopped. And these traumas are instrumental in their new identities as superheroes. But, these traumas did not make them superheroes. A bite from a radioactive spider or a toxic spill or something else gives the hero his or her powers. The trauma usually inspires what they do with those powers. Batman, Spider-Man, and others want to fight crime because they are familiar with the pain it causes.
In the same way, childhood trauma doesn’t make a person gay. But it can shape how one handles it. Many gay people empathize with other outsiders and outcasts because they know the pain of rejection. In Billy’s story, he accepts his bullying and learns to live in quiet avoidance until he sees someone else being bullied. His decision to use his powers to help others comes after he recognizes his pain in another. Many gay people live similar lives until they see someone else trapped in a closet. It was an open secret for years that Rosie O’Donnell was gay. But she didn’t officially come out publicly until she identified with a pair of adoptive parents in Florida forced to live in the closet or risk losing their children. The trauma is not what makes the superhero. Likewise, the trauma is not the cause of gayness but it can lengthen the road to personal acceptance and inspire many to activism.
Following up from last week, DC Comics has now released its own iPhone/iPad app, also powered by comiXology (iTunes Link). Newsarama has the full list of its launch titles.
Recommendations:
Runaways by Brian K. Vaughn is a series I always meant to read but never got around to. Last week Marvel posted the first issue for free on its iPad app, so I figured I’d read it to see if the series was as good as I’d heard (short review: not as good as Vaughn’s Y: The Last Man, but good enough that I bought the rest of the issues Marvel had online). It gave me a chance to see how reading comics on the iPad is.
Marvel’s app is done by comiXology, which also has an app called “Comics” and one for Boom! Studios. The basic principle is this: you can read the comic page-by-page, or you can double-tap on a panel and enter “guided view”. The iPad’s screen is about 80% the size of a standard American comic book, which makes the size of most letterers’ text just a smidge too small for my eyes to comfortably read. For some it might be great. If you hold the iPad sideways and and stretch the image to fit its width, it’s a nice large size. You have to scroll up and down to read the bottom half of each page, but I don’t mind. Unfortunately, Marvel’s app doesn’t remember your zoom level, so each time you turn the page you have to zoom in again. (Marvel: Comic Zeal does this perfectly.) In “guided view”, the app zooms in to show you just one panel at a time. It ends up feeling halfway between reading a very, very long newspaper comic strip and watching a slow-moving cartoon. Guided view by default “letterboxes” the rest of the page, so you only see the one panel you’re reading. I prefer to see the neighboring panels, so I turned letterboxing off.
Design-wise, Marvel’s app places too much focus on its store and not enough on reading the comics you’ve already bought. There’s a “Browse” button in the upper-right that lets you navigate by series or authors, but the main pane needs a few options for sorting by read/unread status, publication date, etc. Marvel oddly requires you to sign up for a free account with them before you can buy anything, despite transactions themselves being made as in-app purchases with your iTunes account. I assume Marvel wants you to make an account so it can track your reading habits more precisely than whatever Apple provides. You have to buy issues individually and can’t subscribe to a series. The app claims that it will send a push notification when new issues go up for sale but I haven’t seen one so far. The ability to download a batch of issues at once would be very nice.
Comics cost $1.99 from Marvel’s app. That’s one or two dollars cheaper than new comic singles, but if you consider that most storylines run 4-6 issues, the digital price winds up being about the same as buying the trade paperback from Amazon. Indie publishers in comiXology’s Comics app charge $0.99 for some books. Comic retailers are terrified that readers are going to stop going to comic book stores and go digital. Rhetoric from the publishers to retailers is that the digital copies will help get new readers interested in comics and drive them to stores, but I can’t see that happening all that often. Maybe people will sample an issue online and decide to buy paperback or hardcover collections, but are they going to pay full price in a comic book store, or get 35% off and free shipping from Amazon?
In general, the comics industry doesn’t know exactly how to react to digital distribution. It’s sort of fun to watch all the different publishers play around in this new frontier. Smaller publishers are more willing to experiment. DC doesn’t have any digital offerings at all. Marvel has a few hundred books in its store, but it’s still experimenting. One of the big debates is around how quickly new comics should show up online. Personally I don’t think it’s a big deal for there to be a lag of six months or so (like DVD releases vs. movie theaters), but so far Marvel is just publishing older stories from a few years ago. Ideally they’ll start a regular publishing schedule so people can start following ongoing series. In time the publishers really need to make sure all of their output is online, not just a few flagship titles.
Verdict: I don’t personally intend to stop buying physical comics, but if you’re someone who has interest in a few series, iPad reading will be great for you. No need to go into a specialty store every week. Quick gratification. The art looks nice on the iPad’s bright, colorful screen (though I wouldn’t complain if both the artwork and the screen itself had more resolution).
Con: Anything you buy is locked in the app, so your ability to read the comics again in a few years hangs on how long Marvel keeps the service going. Record companies eventually agreed to do away with copy protection, but I don’t see publishers just offering PDF copies of their books. Personally this makes me very wary of investing in the platform heavily, but for light, casual reading, it’s probably okay.
Recommendation: Immortal Iron Fist by Ed Brubaker, Matt Fraction, and David Aja. Doesn’t require much foreknowledge of the character, has lots of kung fu action.
Twin Peaks is now for sale on iTunes, in HD. I’m not quite sure what “HD” means in this context, since it aired long before HDTV existed. The important thing is that the proper US pilot is for sale. The version of the pilot on many VHS and DVD copies contains footage from later episodes, which is very confusing.
If you’ve never seen it, I can’t recommend the series enough. I like the whole series, but there’s no question it does down hill in season two. Watch the complete first season and the first nine episodes of season two (through “Arbitrary Law”).