#nor should Glen Weldon (or Andrew Wheeler) be taken as the authority or only voices on the subject

[dynamic-duo-deposit]

On the subject of The Caped Crusade, it’s probably worth sharing this article by Glen Weldon (The author of that book, and a gay man himself) on the subject of Batman/Robin subtext.

To be clear-- Glen Weldon is not arguing that Batman and Robin are gay or should be a couple. In fact, there’s an earlier section of the book which I have already posted, about the importance of Bruce as a father figure.

But while the article is fairly light and tongue-in-cheek, the book delves into the subject a little bit more deeply and I wanted to add a few passages from the book as supplementary material.   

The first excerpt I wanted to share is about Seduction of the Innocent by Fredric Wertham, the book that helped inspire the Comics Code Authority.

“In Seduction of the Innocent, Wertham tells of one “young homosexual” who showed him a copy of Detective Comics that featured ‘“a picture of ‘The Home of Bruce and Dick,’ a house so beautifully landscaped, warmly lighted and showing the devoted pair side by side, looking out of a picture window…. ‘At the age of ten or eleven,’ [the boy said,] ‘I found my liking, my sexual desires, in comic books.  I think I put myself in the position of Robin.  I did want to have relations with Batman…’ ’’

It’s safe to say that in this, he was an outlier.  It is only the rarest of precociously self-actualized gay kid who ever gets as far as imagining himself getting his freaky pubescent relations on with the Caped Crusader.  He may admire Batman’s arms, and his medicine-ball deltoids, the wide V of his torso, and the perfect quadrants of his abdominal muscles, drawn so square and even they look like the window on a Chiclets box.  But for most gay kids, especially in this era of American history, any confusing attraction they may have felt toward Batman stayed exactly that-- an interest that seemed to well up from some deep place below the stomach, a blunt, preverbal ache.

[...] There’s just one problem, and it’s a damning one: as Carol Tilley points out, that young man didn’t exist.  Wertham combined the case studies of two young men-- who, it turns out, were engaged in a relationship with one another.  He also deleted the boys’ statements that they were far more strongly aroused by Tarzan and the Sub-Mariner than they were by the Dynamic Duo as that notion didn’t fit his thesis.”

Here’s a bit about the tonal difference in camp,  RE: the Schumacher films vs 60’s Batman-

“Just as William Dozier ensured that the sixties television show addressed itself to both kids who lapped up the derring-do and adults who keyed into the humor, Batman forever also enjoyed a bifurcated appeal.  Schumacher’s two audiences, however, were split not by age but sensibility: 1) gay men and 2) everyone else.

In the years since the sixties television show had gone off the air, camp had come out of the closet.  It called itself irony now; the era of elaborately coded messages, shibboleths, and innuendo, of embracing the tawdry and tasteless with a fervid flamboyance, of relegating one-self to the role of grotesque, sexless clown, was over.  The Stonewall riots and the AIDS crisis had abraded those filigree edges away, leaving something harder, angrier, and more unambiguously and unapologetically sexual.

Thus the much-discussed “campiness” of Batman Forever feels fundamentally different than that of the old television show-- less quant and more defiant.  Queerer.”

On the history of gay men being drawn to Batman-

“Morrison understands the same essential truth that Wertham did-- the one that every ten-year-old gay kid worriedly understands as he gazes at a panel of Batman placing a friendly hand on Robin’s shoulder:  Intention doesn’t matter.  Imagery does.

Heterosexuals see themselves reflected in media so consistently and thoroughly that such representations cease to consciously register in their mind as representations.  To them, movies are just movies, comics just comics.  That’s because their innermost selves exist in a state of perpetual autonomic agreement with the outer world as it’s commonly depicted.  This cognitive equilibrium produces a closed, continuous circuit of reassurance, harmony, a sense of belonging.

But to gay readers, those same representations matter-of-factly assert a vision of the world not only in which they do not belong, but in which they do not exist.  Gays have always looked for their reflections in media, seeking the same sense of affinity and belonging, but until very recently, they’ve failed to see them: the circuit of reassurance is broken.  So they patch it in with whatever they can find, by looking more deeply.  Every exchange, every glance, every touch, is hungrily parsed for something they recognize, for fleeting glimpses of themselves, their desires, and the world they know.

This is an oblique, allusive process; it’s not like Batman comics are deliberately encrypted by their makers with coy messages-- ideas in which gay men historically find affinities: the constant threat of a secret self’s exposure, the cloak of night, a muscular physicality, a homosocial friendship-- and, yes, okay, fine, a flair for interior design that includes some pretty rocking velvet drapes that are actually, now that we’re looking at them under better light, not dusky emerald but more of a forest green.

Batman is an inkblot; we see in him what we want to-- even if we aren’t ready to admit it to ourselves.”

As a bonus, I would add this article by Andrew Wheeler, another gay Batman writer, who Glen Weldon actually quotes in the book-

THE GAYNESS OF BATMAN: A BRIEF HISTORY 

“The concept of Batman may be open to endless reinvention, but any effort to make him less gay only adds layers upon layers to his gayness. Make him light and you emphasize his campness; make him dark and you emphasize his repression; give him a girlfriend or a female sidekick and you reaffirm his bachelorhood. He is both camp and butch; repressed and sexualized; erotically fetishistic and homoerotically anti-feminine.

Batman is not gay. The writers will line up to tell you that. But when there were no explicitly gay characters to identify with 70 years ago, the bachelor hero with the boy sidekick stepped in to the vacuum, and gay readers were not the only ones who saw it, and now his gayness is indelible.

More than 70 years after his debut, Batman has emerged as the best known patient of Dr. Wertham's New York clinic for sexually maladjusted individuals, and also its most successful failure. Batman will always have his gayness, however straight they write him.”