![]() So I changed their bedrooms and I added Aunt Harriet-sort of a mother to both of them.īefore Kane finished things off with an awful conclusion.Įven so, I suppose the homosexuals like the TV show because of those tight outfits Adam West and Burt Ward wear. It was all hogwash but I had to do something about it anyway. Kane then took credit for the introduction of Aunt Harriet (despite obviously having no input on the comic books when Schwartz and Infantino invented the character). The doctor read homosexuality into it, through his eyes, but for that matter he also put down the WONDER WOMAN comic as a lesbian invention. Wertham read homosexuality into this thing because I had a man and a boy living in a big house together-in the same bedroom-with just a butler and no female around. ![]() One of them had to go and Alfred Pennyworth drew the short straw (technicaly, he hadn't yet been given the last name Pennyworth).īatman is the epitome of virility and manliness-just the opposite image of the fag. In other words, there were too many single guys in Wayne Manor. Since Schwartz felt that the outlandish extra characters like Bat-Woman and Bat-Girl were too much, he decided that he wanted to spotlight the home life of Bruce Wayne and Dick Grayson and make a change. He just dealt with them in a different fashion. However, even though it was now a decade past Seduction of the Innocent and the implementation of the Comics Code Authority, Schwartz still felt the same pressures that Schiff felt. That meant no more Bat-Woman or Bat-Girl. Julius Schwartz took over the books in 1964 (along with Carmine Infantino as a new artist and also sort of a creative consultant) and one of the first things that Schwartz and Infantino did on the titles was to jettison most of the supporting cast from Schiff's era. Things got so bad that National decided to bring in a new editor to shake things up. However, the problem was that sales on the Batman titles were struggling in the early 1960s. So that was how the Batman titles dealt with the Comics Code for years under the editorship of Jack Schiff. Tilley writes, these quotations actually come from two young men, ages 16 and 17, who were in a sexual relationship with each other, and who told Wertham they were more likely to fantasize about heroes like Tarzan or the Sub-Mariner, rather than Batman and Robin. From an article about Tilly's brilliant work in the NY Times:Įlsewhere in the book Wertham argues that the superheroes Batman and Robin represent “a wish dream of two homosexuals living together,” and cited a young gay man who says that he put himself “in the position of Robin” and “did want to have relations with Batman.”īut in Wertham’s original notes, Dr. Carol Tilly looked into Wertham's many ridiculous pieces of "science" and one of the major made-up points was regarding Batman. Of course, even there, he just flat out made things up to prove his point. So Wertham's point was not that Batman and Robin WERE gay, but that they represented an image that would inspire kids to pursue being gay. ![]() He doesn’t care-he’s more interested in hanging out with and. All these women fancy him and they all wear fetish clothes and jump around rooftops to get him. Obviously as a fictional character he’s intended to be heterosexual, but the whole basis of the concept is utterly gay. Grant Morrison certainly has read into the gay imagery of Batman, as he explained in an interview with Playboy magazine: Authorial intent doesn't matter (outside of discussions about authorial intent, of course), read into it what you like. It's like discussing what actually happened at the end of The Killing Joke. That panel of a be-toweled Bruce and Dick lounging together in their solarium, for example, would not carry the potent homoerotic charge it does, were the same scene simply described in boring ol’ prose.Īnd that's totally fair. Images can assert layers of unspoken meanings that mere words can never conjure. This is why, as a visual medium filled with silent cues like body language and background detail, superhero comics have proven a particularly fertile vector for gay readings over the years. And when queer audiences don’t see ourselves in a given work, we look deeper, parsing every exchange for the faintest hint of something we recognize. ![]() Remember: Queer readers didn’t see any vestige of themselves represented in the mass media of this era, let alone its comic books.
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