Is batman gay

Several characters in the Modern Age Batman comic books are expressly gay, lesbian, or bisexual. [1] The early Golden Age Batman stories were dark and violent, but during the late s and the early s they changed to a softer, friendlier and more exotic style that was considered campy. This possibility was first teased 16 months ago, but in Batman the Night #8, out this week, Bruce Wayne is apparently confirmed to be gay, bisexual, or at least bi-curious as a youth.

Reader suspicions began in Batman: The Knight #5 which saw Bruce share a moment with his teammate Anton. Batman is gay according to George Clooney who once played the Dark Knight with Chris O’Donnell as Robin. Proof: Evident homosexual subtext in superhero comics. Batman is straight. Over the years, all of his romantic interests have been females, which means that Batman is heterosexual. There’s no indication that he was ever involved with a member of the same gender across any of the incarnations of the character.

Freely adapted from The Caped Crusade: Batman and the Rise of Nerd Culture by Glen Weldon, out now from Simon and Schuster. Let’s get one thing absolutely clear: Robin isn’t gay. Don’t let. Batman is very, very gay. There's just no denying it. Obviously as a fictional character he's intended to be heterosexual, but the basis of the whole concept is utterly gay. As we reported last week, this was the claim made by Batman, Incorporated writer Grant Morrison in an interview with Playboy where he offers his insights into the psychology of superheroes.

In Morrison's view, Batman's attachment to Alfred and Robin and his alleged detachment from the women in "fetish clothes" who "jump around rooftops to get to him" is symptomatic of his conceptual gayness. That's a very selective framing, but as Morrison told the LA Times in , "Batman can take anything. You can do comedy Batman, you can do gay Batman.

That's not true, of course. As Morrison himself says, Batman is intended to be heterosexual. And yet there is a gayness to Batman, and it has been part of his identity since his earliest days. You may ask how one can talk about "gayness" as a concept distinct from sexuality. That's a perfectly good question, but it has a simple answer. Our culture has not always been comfortable presenting the realities of sexuality, but it has always found ways to explore its fascination with manifestations of sexuality.

The cultural markers associated with being gay were fair currency for fiction even when talking about gay people was not, and thus gayness, with all its broad strokes and stereotypes, was detached from sexuality, with all its nuance and diversity. When we talk about Batman's gayness, we talk about presentation and perception. It's not a question that generally gets asked about other heroes, but in the public imagination it's one of the first questions asked about Batman.

Psychologist Travis Langley, who co-wrote a book on the psychology of Batman, says it's the question he was asked most often when he told people what he was working on. Something about Batman begs the question, and there are multiple possible triggers. There's the high camp of the s Adam West TV show, with its tongue-in-cheek dialogue and theatrical villains; but it didn't start there.

And there's the scandalized innuendo of the s Senate witch hunt into the deviant influence of comics on juvenile delinquents ignited up by psychologist Fredric Wertham's notorious study Seduction of the Innocent ; but it didn't start there. It started in , a year after Batman's debut, and it started with a sensible solution to a writer's problem.

As Bill Finger recalled it in an interview shortly before his death, there was a frustration that Batman did not have anyone to share his deductive reasoning with. He needed a Dr. Watson to his Sherlock Holmes. In the model of dime novel sporting hero Frank Merriwell , whose sidekick and ward was his younger half-brother Dick, the writers decided to give Batman a junior Watson to talk to.

is batman gay for joker

Batman and Robin. A wealthy bachelor living with a young boy. That's where it started. The implication is not merely that Batman is gay, but that he is a pederast and a predator - concepts that have too often been conflated by prejudice. Wertham perceived the gayness of Batman, and perhaps even went looking for it, but he did not invent it. He found it in the patients at his New York clinic for "sexually maladjusted individuals," many of whom were gay, and many of whom read comics.

In Seduction of the Innocent he notes, "A number of them knew these [Batman] stories very well and spoke of them as their favorite reading.