Homophobia & Comics

TW for homophobia, pedophilia, and fictional deadname use

[I will not be using their deadnames personally, but I will talk about them being used]

I recently was tasked with writing a 10-page essay on a social topic of my choice for my sociology course. I chose LGBTQ rights within society and how the view on queer people shifted multiple times throughout the 1900s alone. This will mainly focus on the comic industry, and how homophobia nearly put them out of business, because I think it's an insane story that's not often told.

Section 1: And It's All Batman's Fault

Batman today is loved by pretty much everyone, from the toughest men to the smallest child. Hell, I grew up with comics and Batman games and I thought he was the coolest person to ever live. Well, the same thing happened in the 1940's, a couple years after Batman debuted. Kids were a target audience for comic books (some of my comics have an old marketing slogan: 'DC comics aren't just for kids') and many young people were flocking to the shelves to buy their 10 cent monthly issue. Even if the content at the time was pretty tame, the action was more than enough to satiate the young fans.

This all changed with one 'study', if you could even call it that, and the published book of results. A researcher named Frederic Wertham in his 1954 study on homosexual mental asylum patients found a common theme — all of these boys had a crush on Batman. He published a book called 'Seduction of the Innocent' that stated Batman and horror comics were influencing a generation of children to become gay or that they were glorifying the act of crime. Well, how could Batman be gay if he was engaged to a woman in the first comics he ever appeared in? The answer was apparently Bruce Wayne's eight year old ward, Robin.

There's s of young Robin (Dick Grayson) sleeping in a bed next to Bruce or hugging him in a framed picture on a . People took this as a codependent homosexual relationship, although Dick was just eight years old. They viewed Bruce as a predatory gay man, although as I mentioned earlier, he was actually engaged to a woman named Julie Madison at the time. Even so, the bright colors of Robin's costume convinced people he was also homosexual. So, how did the public react to this information?

Section 2: And The Crowd Goes Wild

Parents went wild when the study released, going as far as even burning their children's comics and protesting against them publicly. As a result, sales plummeted and the industry had no choice but to introduce something that would ease the minds of the culture of the times. Their solution? The Comics Code Authority (CCA). This list was originally super long, banning things such as comics that have the words 'horror' or 'crime' on the front, bad guys could never win, police officers could not be shown in a bad light, and no 'perverse or reference to same' romantic and sexual attraction. The CCA has been amended and changed multiple times, though, and eventually the industry stopped using it in the 2000's.

But it took a long time to re-establish trust in the modern world. Comics weren't booming again until the 1966 Batman show, a final attempt to save his character. This show was an immediate hit... but in return, Batman's character was looked at as a joke. He was no longer taken seriously and was seen as a character for children to watch on a Saturday morning. This bloomed into the Bronze Age of comics (my FAVORITE), an era in the 1970s-1980s that focused more on real-world issues and established characters with feeling and complexity. Robin was this traumatized child who had watched his parents die in a horrific incident, which mirrored Batman, who had seen his parents die as well.

The Teen Titans were established as a fun, versatile group of teenage sidekicks in the 1960's, but got a major revamp with the series, 'The New Teen Titans' in 1980. These fun-loving, worry-free kids received heart and courage. They were no longer kids — now, a majority of the team was eighteen or nineteen — and they were beginning to ditch their old sidekick names and become something bigger. The series focused on some pretty intense stuff, from racism to youth drug dealing. One of the Titans even struggled with an addiction... not to say it was always handled well.

All this to say... comics were pretty much back!

Section 3: The Integration of Queer People in Comics

Now, I'm not saying that DC was shy at all when it came to their representation in characters. Their first openly gay superhero, Extraño, debuted in 1988, while their first transgender superhero, Coagula of the Doom Patrol, debuted in 1993, although Coagula was far from being the first transgender character in their comics. Neil Gaiman's hit comic, The Sandman, is known as part of DC's subgenre 'Vertigo'. DC Vertigo is where all the extraordinary stories that were geared for adults were published. In 1991, a transgender woman named Wanda debuted in The Sandman #32.

Many people have sent hate to Gaiman for this story — either for the inclusion of Wanda or for her eventual demise, where her deadname is written on her tombstone. In my opinion as a transgender person, I think that the inclusion of her deadname is not in a transphobic context at all and actually brought a lot of awareness to the issue of legal deadnames. A great modern comic without the explicit use of a deadname is Spirit World (2023), where they blur out Xanthe Zhou's deadname as they're nonbinary and haven't seen their family since before they came out.

Section 4: Modern Comics

And that brings us to present-day comics, where DC is able to publish a compilation of queer stories every year called DC Pride. Famous character such as Green Lantern (Alan Scott and Jessica Cruz), Superman (Jon Kent), Robin (Tim Drake), Poison Ivy, and Harley Quinn are now able to be openly queer and the CCA was abandoned. Woo! Essay over!