I’m just amused by people who fetishize imagined romance. Reylo!
Returning to Batman and Robin…not being gay I can’t speak for what gay readers took away from those comics. A Batman/Robin sexual relationship seems to reinforce the old stereotype that homosexual men prey on young boys, something that pisses my gay friends off rather than amusing them.
You can’t consider BM&R apart from the entirety of Golden Age comics. Almost every superhero had a boy sidekick. Their relationships to adults (ward, nephew, adopted child) were mostly convenient ways to keep the pair together so they could go into immediate action. Some of these relationships were stranger than the Dynamic Duo’s. Take Quality Comics’ Arizona Raines and his boy sidekick Spurs. In countless stories a beautiful woman falls for the handsome cowboy. Spurs panics and creates some kind of shenanigan to “rescue” Arizona from her. The cowboy is usually grateful for the rescue, ostensibly because he doesn’t want anyone tying him down.
The thing is, comics writers (mostly heterosexual men) used this sort of situation so often in Golden Age comics that it’s obvious they saw nothing wrong, or even unusual, about it. It was just a shtick. Too often subtext is imposed after the fact by people who analyze stories much more carefully than their authors. My parents, who lived through this period, often contended that “back then” people simply didn’t spend much time discussing issues of sexual preference and gender identity.
I acknowledge arguments that a culture imposes its own subconscious subtext. Frankly I’m neither erudite nor smart enough to debate that. A few Golden Age features (notably Wonder Woman) were upfront about their subtexts. But I suspect that most of the time these guys just cranked the shit out without giving much thought to how the audience took it.
3 Likes
Just because the creators might not have meant it doesn’t mean it’s not there.
What's interesting about it from a queer subtext standpoint is that the people involved in creating the art and stories universally insist that there was never any nudge-nudge-wink-winkery going on in their work.
I don’t think that’s right. I seem to recall that, in The Ten-Cent Plague, David Hajdu quotes Jerry Robinson (Robin’s creator) as saying something along the lines of “What they did behind closed doors was their business.”
Of course, it’s possible that Robinson was just joking; Hajdu didn’t provide the full context of his remarks, and I’m pretty sure he said Robinson laughed when he said it.
So I’d say there’s ambiguity there; I wouldn’t say that “the people involved in creating the art and stories universally insist” that the subtext was unintentional.
(Of course, there’s no ambiguity at all in Wonder Woman’s subtext. At this point it’s inarguable that the queer/BDSM overtones in Marston’s work were completely intentional.)
3 Likes
Of course not!
*lolz
1 Like
I mean he’s a billionaire who owns a mansion and he can’t give Robin his own bedroom?
5 Likes
“Keeping a pants-less boy in a cave” is usually more than enough justification to end up on a sex offender registry. Only a billionaire could get away with that kind of thing for so long.
6 Likes
Let’s not forget the time that Wonder Woman had to chew through a gimp mask.
4 Likes
10 Likes
The tedium and lack of being paid doing work in the field drove me to work in insurance. I developed a taste for money in my pocket and living in a place where my parents didn’t pay the mortgage.
1 Like
The only time any sort of literary analysis falls down is when it’s a) weakly supported by the main text or b) proponents try to claim it’s the only true interpretation.
In the BM&R canon, as with the Sherlock Holmes canon, the gay subtext analysis is supportable by the main text (great examples in this thread!), but it annoys me a lot when people use the strength of it to say things like, “Batman and Robin are gay and if you don’t always agree you’re homophobic!” I just don’t see how nullifying any other interpretation furthers discourse.
2 Likes
Also: even if the creators didn’t mean it, that doesn’t mean it’s not there.
Homopareidoilia?
2 Likes
This topic was automatically closed after 5 days. New replies are no longer allowed.
