who cares about the sexuality of superheroes?
One of the Green Lanterns was just rebooted as gay.
A gay couple from the X-Men is getting married.
And, predictably, there’s a camp of people who poop their collective pampers about these things.
Never mind that this particular Green Lantern is a particular character I’ve never even heard of; Alan Scott, and that he only exists in an alternate universe in DC canon. Or that Northstar and Kyle have been together for years in Marvel canon. Or that for fuck’s sake, I can’t believe it’s 2012 and we’re still arguing about gay marriage.
People need to freak out about these things like it’s their job.
And the knee-slappingly hilarious thing is, most of the people doing the bulk of the complaining are not comic-book readers.
Sure, we have silly little mis-named groups like One Million Moms (who you may remember freaking out about literally everything else tangentially related to LGBT representation in the media.) releasing a statement saying “Can you imagine little boys saying, ‘I want a boyfriend or husband like X-Men?’”
First we have to figure out who, exactly, the character of X-Men is and whether he’d be a good husband or boyfriend (haha, grammar-police jokes.)
Then, the crux of their argument is that their precious little assumed-straight kids are going to be turned gay by reading about two dudes engaging in, at worst, a PG-13 rated relationship. And the PG-13 will come more from people getting blown up and shot and Wolverine getting his skin burned off all the time than any non-hetero sex.
So won’t somebody think of the children, essentially. That’s excluding the notion that there’s lots of little kids who already aren’t straight and may or may not know it yet; little nerds who would probably love to have an awesome LGBT superhero to look up to, and yes, as a role model. In the same way that it’s important to kids to have positive representations of their race and gender in the media, it’s important for kids to know that there’s some gay, lesbian, or bisexual characters they can relate to.
As such, this whole thing reminds me of when Ultimates Peter Parker was replaced by Miles Morales as Spider-man.
Everyone had a damn thing to say about it.
And a few of the bigoted voices did indeed come from comic book readers, a group that has dug themselves into a hateful little niche and pine for a Golden Age when nobody in comics was gay and a superhero could throw around racial/ethnic slurs like there was no racist tomorrow.
Thankfully we’ve been inching away from that steadily over the last few decades. Captain America let Hulkling and Wiccan (two teenage boys in a canon relationship) bunk in the same room at one point without even questioning it. Of course, this was in Young Avengers: Children’s Crusade, geared predominantly toward the teenage/young-adult crowd, but these readers are going to grow up and they’ll be expecting the same kind of narrative when they move on to heavier titles.
But so many of the complaints and whines and bigoted tirades come from people who have no stake in comic books; people who haven’t picked up an issue in years, if at all, people whose knowledge of any particular character comes from half-remembered children’s cartoons and current gritty film reboots. All they hear is “Green Lantern is gay now” and if they have a prejudiced bone in their body they don’t bother to remember or find out that there’s a bazillion Green Lanterns, or that DC just rebooted their entire continuity and this is honestly a pretty minor change considering, or that this is all taking place in a universe separate from the mainstream. Green Lantern is gay and everything is terrible because of Reasons.
So, like the post title asks; who do these characters belong to? Is it Marvel and DC? Is it Stan Lee or Jack Kirby’s estate? Is it the bevy of current writers and editors? Is it the people who go down to the comic book store every Wednesday to empty their box out? Is it anyone and everyone who has ever loved or called themselves a fan of any particular character regardless of how much or how little they actually know about that character’s canon?
If you’re involved in literary criticism or fiction writing at all, you know that once someone reads your work and absorbs your characters, they no longer really belong to you. Sure, you legally own the rights to them until your death plus seventy years, but once people have taken your words and your characters and stories to heart they own a piece of them too; for better or for worse. You see it on tumblr all the time; we latch onto a single word or glance and write reams of prose around what we believe this character is thinking, completely disregarding the intent of the author.
So these people who hate, with every fibre of their being, that DC would reboot a character as gay or that Marvel has two men getting married soon, or that Spider-man is some new kid they’ve never heard of; they don’t care that there’s caveats to all of this and that the two comic houses are actually being pretty conservative with their treatment of lgbt or of-color characters. (Imagine if they had Captain America came out as gay or bisexual. Just sit down and imagine that shitstorm.) They own a piece of these characters too, unfortunately.
I mean, hopefully the Class-A bigots will be driven out of the comic book fandom eventually. I know that the industry is struggling to keep readers, but I certainly don’t want close-minded asses polluting my fun, and broadening the spectrum of characters and stories will most definitely bring in new readers. I don’t know that I understand the insistence that we keep telling the same tired stories for Spider-man that we already know, when Miles has a fresh new origin story that certainly got me interested in the Ultimates universe I’d all but abandoned. There are other narratives, other points of view, that have been mostly ignored until recently.
The Marvel and DC universes reflect our own world, and it’s important that that reflection is complete, otherwise it’s not a reflection. These latest steps are, like I mentioned above, extremely small in the grand scheme of comic books, but they’re necessary if these companies want to keep up with the status quo of society.
I guess what I’m trying to say is, you can’t pretend that LGBT issues aren’t important enough for representation within comic books, not with millions of kids identifying as such. Comic books and comic book characters belong to them too, and you can either read the six thousand other titles that feature straight super heroes or you can leave, and we won’t miss you.
