AUGUST 9.2008 • Q-NOTES 15
WHEN BATMAN WAS GAY
Wayne Manor: ‘A wish dream of two homosexuals’
frt
from page I
Wertham was the chief psychiatrist for the _
New York Department of Hospitals and an
important figure among the New York City lib
eral intelligentsia. His writings were respected
enough to help form part of the legal strategy
for Brown v. Board of Education.
In r954, Wertham published a scathing
indictment of comic books, “The Seduction
of the Innocent,” which
argued that comic books
were an insidious influence
on American youth, respon
sible for warped gender atti
tudes and all manner of
delinquency.
Wertham’s accusations
garnered the attention of
Tennessee Sen. Estes
Kefauver and his Senate
Subcommittee on Juvenile
Delinquency, where
Wertham repeated many of
his central claims.
Batman and Robin,
Wertham charged, inhabited “a wish dream of
two homosexuals living together.” They lived
in “sumptuous quarters,” unencumbered by
wives and girlfriends, with only an aged butler
for company. They cared for each other’s
injuries, frequently shared quarters, and
lounged together in dressing gowns.
Worse still, both exhibited damning psy
chological characteristics: proclivities for cos
tumes, dressing up, and fantasy play; secretive
behavior and double-lives; little interest in
women; and, most damning of all, neurotic
compulsions resulting in their violent vigilan-
tism.
Indeed, Wertham argued, depictions of
Batman and Robin were frequently homoerot
ic, visually emphasizing Batman’s rippling
physique and
Robin’s splayed,
bare thighs.
“Only
someone igno
rant of the fun
damentals of
psychiatry and
psychopatholo
gy of sex can
fail to realize
the subtle
atmosphere of
homoeroticism
which pervades
the adven
tures,” wrote Wertham. “The Batman type of
story may stimulate children to homosexual
fantasies.”
Batman’s creators and writers were
aghast. They noted that the character had a
series of dalliances with several Gothamite
ladies, even if he’d never settled down. Nor,
they argued, had there ever been any explicit
homosexual affection between Batman and
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Robin, much less a portrayal of anything
beneath their tights.
Besides, they asked, what sense did it make
to interrogate the sexual practices of a charac
ter who lived only in the frames of a comic
book? Any “sex life” Batman might possess
was purely the imagination of his critics and
had nothing to do with Batman himself
Right? Right! Imagination, as they say, is a
powerful thing.
As literary critic Mark Best notes,
“Wertham did correctly identify the possibili
ty of a queer reading of the superhero, albeit
as an example of what was wrong with the
comics.”
If Bruce Wayne was a paragon of upper-
middle class white masculinity — wealthy,
cultivated and amiable — his secret identity
represented the dark liberation found in the
lurid city cruising strange corners. Even if
Batman’s genitals were never portrayed com
ing into contact with Robin, Batman’s crime
fighting lifestyle still embodied a fantasy of
freedom from male familial responsibilities
and, in a very real sense, from women alto
gether. Batman’s world of the 1940s was
almost exclusively male.
The few females who appeared in the
pages of “Detective” were usually for show or
comic relief (Bruce Wayne’s earliest fiance,
Julie Madison, was frequently duped by his
double-identity and played for laughs). Like
many closeted men, Bruce Wayne dated
women to keep up appearances, so that no one
would suspect that beneath his placid veneer
lurked the sort of fellow who wrestled with
criminals in dark alleys.
Batman vs. the Nuclear Family
At a time when social norms dictated that
men and women should form nuclear families
and settle into comfortable domesticity.
Batman’s homosocial world presented no
small challenge to the “normal” family.
Of course, only a decade before the publi
cation of “The Seduction of the Innocents” the
idea of men living only with other men for the
purposes of fighting other men was not just
uncontroversid, but, in the midst of World
War II, it was the norm. Under war conditions,
soldiers lived and slept together. They depend
ed upon one another for comfort and support,
emotional and physical.
As John Ibson argues in “Picturing Men,”
male-male physical affection in the wartime
context was normal and captured frequently in
photography of the era. As Allan Berube has
documented, soldiers frequently also found sex
ual companionship with other soldiers, often
with the knowledge of — and without causing
much consternation among — their peers and
superiors.
The military actually did little to aggres
sively police male-male sexuality until the end
of the war, when the branches dishonorably
discharged tens of thousands of service peo-
see Lavender Scare on 16
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