The Superhero Reader

by Worcester, Kent, Hatfield, Charles, Heer, Jeet

  Batman and I drifted apart after those early days. Every now and then I’d see a repeated episode and I soon began to understand and share that once infuriating parental hilarity, but this aside I hardly thought about the man in the cape at all. I knew about the subculture of comic freaks, and the new and alarmingly pretentious phrase “graphic novel” made itself known to me, but I still regarded (with the confidence of distant ignorance) such texts as violent, macho, adolescent, and, well, silly.

  That’s when the warning bells rang. The word “silly” reeks of the complacent condescension that has at various times been bestowed on all the cultural forms that matter most to me (Hollywood musicals, British melodramas, pop music, soap operas) so what right had I to apply it to someone else’s part of the popular cultural playground? I had to rethink my disdain, and 1989 has been a very good year in which to do so, because in terms of popular culture 1989 has been the Year of the Bat.

  This essay, then, is not written by a devotee of Batman, someone steeped in every last twist of the mythology. I come to these texts as an interested outsider, armed with a particular perspective. That perspective is homosexuality, and what I want to try and do here is to offer a gay reading of the whole Bat-business. It has no pretension to definitiveness; I don’t presume to speak for all gay people everywhere.

  I’m male, white, British, thirty years old (at the time of writing) and all of those factors need to be taken into account. Nonetheless, I’d argue that Batman is especially interesting to gay audiences for three reasons.

  Firstly, he was one of the first fictional characters to be attacked on the grounds of presumed homosexuality, by Fredric Wertham in his book Seduction of the Innocent. Secondly, the 1960s TV series was and remains a touchstone of camp (a banal attempt to define the meaning of camp might well start with “like the sixties Batman series”). Thirdly, as a recurring hero figure for the last fifty years, Batman merits analysis as a notably successful construction of masculinity.

  NIGHTMARE ON PSYCHIATRY STREET

  Seduction of the Innocent is an extraordinary book. It is a gripping, flamboyant melodrama masquerading as social psychology. Fredric Wertham is, like Senator McCarthy, like Batman, a crusader, a man with a mission, an evangelist. He wants to save the youth of America from its own worst impulses, from its id, from comic books. His attack on comic books is founded on an astonishingly crude stimulus-and-response model of reading, in which the child (the child, for Wertham, seems an unusually innocent, blank slate waiting to be written on) reads, absorbs, and feels compelled to copy, if only in fantasy terms, the content of the comics. It is a model, in other words, which takes for granted extreme audience passivity.

  This is not the place to go into a detailed refutation of Wertham’s work, besides which such a refutation has already been done in Martin Barker’s excellent A Haunt of Fears.1 The central point of audience passivity needs stressing, however, because it is crucial to the celebrated passage where Wertham points his shrill, witch-hunting finger at the Dynamic Duo and cries “queer.”

  Such language is not present on the page, of course, but in some ways Seduction of the Innocent (a film title crying out for either D. W. Griffith or Cecil B. DeMille) would be easier to stomach if it were. Instead, Wertham writes with anguished concern about the potential harm that Batman might do to vulnerable children, innocents who might be turned into deviants. He employs what was then conventional psychiatric wisdom about the idea of homosexuality as a “phase”:

  Many preadolescent boys pass through a phase of disdain for girls. Some comic books tend to fix that attitude and instill the idea that girls are only good for being banged around or used as decoys. A homoerotic attitude is also suggested by the presentation of masculine, bad, witchlike, or violent women. In such comics women are depicted in a definitely anti-erotic light, while the young male heroes have pronounced erotic overtones. The muscular male supertype, whose primary sex characteristics are usually well emphasized, is in the setting of certain stories the object of homoerotic sexual curiosity and stimulation.2

  The implications of this are breathtaking. Homosexuality, for Wertham, is synonymous with misogyny. Men love other men because they hate women. The sight of women being “banged around” is liable to appeal to repressed homoerotic desires (this, I think, would be news to the thousands of women who are systematically physically abused by heterosexual men). Women who do not conform to existing stereotypes of femininity are another incitement to homosexuality.

  Having mapped out his terms of reference, Wertham goes on to peel the lid from Wayne Manor:

  Sometimes Batman ends up in bed injured and young Robin is shown sitting next to him. At home they lead an idyllic life. They are Bruce Wayne and “Dick” Grayson. Bruce Wayne is described as a “socialite” and the official relationship is that Dick is Bruce’s ward. They live in sumptuous quarters, with beautiful flowers in large vases, and have a butler, Alfred. Batman is sometimes shown in a dressing gown. … It is like a wish dream of two homosexuals living together. Sometimes they are shown on a couch, Bruce reclining and Dick sitting next to him, jacket off, collar open, and his hand on his friend’s arm.3

  So, Wertham’s assumptions of homosexuality are fabricated out of his interpretation of certain visual signs. To avoid being thought queer by Wertham, Bruce and Dick should have done the following: never show concern if the other is hurt, live in a shack, only have ugly flowers in small vases, call the butler “Chip” or “Joe” if you have to have one at all, never share a couch, keep your collar buttoned up, keep your jacket on, and never, ever wear a dressing gown. After all, didn’t Noel Coward wear a dressing gown?

  Wertham is easy to mock, but the identification of homosexuals through dress codes has a long history.4 Moreover, such codes originate as semiotic systems adopted by gay people themselves, as a way of signaling the otherwise invisible fact of sexual preference. There is a difference, though, between sporting the secret symbols of a subculture if you form part of that subculture and the elephantine spot-the-homo routine that Wertham performs.

  Bat-fans have always responded angrily to Wertham’s accusation. One calls it “one of the most incredible charges … unfounded rumors … sly sneers”5 and the general response has been to reassert the masculinity of the two heroes, mixed with a little indignation: “If they had been actual men they could have won a libel suit.”6 This seems to me not only to miss the point, but also to reinforce Wertham’s homophobia—it is only possible to win a libel suit over an “accusation” of homosexuality in a culture where homosexuality is deemed categorically inferior to heterosexuality.

  Thus the rush to “protect” Batman and Robin from Wertham is simply the other side to the coin of his bigotry. It may reject Wertham, cast him in the role of dirty-minded old man, but its view of homosexuality is identical. Mark Cotta Vaz thus describes the imputed homosexual relationship as “licentious” while claiming that in fact Bruce Wayne “regularly squired the most beautiful women in Gotham city and presumably had a healthy sex life.”7 Licentious versus healthy—Dr. Wertham himself could not have bettered this homophobic opposition.

  Despite the passions aroused on both sides (or rather the two facets of the same side), there is something comic at the heart of this dispute. It is, simply, that Bruce and Dick are not real people but fictional constructions, and hence to squabble over their “real” sex life is to take things a little too far. What is at stake here is the question of reading, of what readers do with the raw material that they are given. Readers are at liberty to construct whatever fantasy lives they like with the characters of the fiction they read (within the limits of generic and narrative credibility, that is). This returns us to the unfortunate patients of Dr. Wertham:

  One young homosexual during psychotherapy brought us a copy of Detective comic, with a Batman story. He pointed out a picture of “The Home of Bruce and Dick,” a house beautifully landscaped, warmly lighted and showing the devoted pair side by side, looking out a pictu
re window. When he was eight this boy had realized from fantasies about comic book pictures that he was aroused by men. At the age of ten or eleven, “I found my liking, my sexual desires, in comic books. I think I put myself in the position of Robin. I did want to have relations with Batman … I remember the first time I came across the page mentioning the ‘secret batcave.’ The thought of Batman and Robin living together and possibly having sex relations came to my mind. …”8

  Wertham quotes this to shock us, to impel us to tear the pages of Detective away before little Tommy grows up and moves to Greenwich Village, but reading it as a gay man today I find it rather moving and also highly recognizable.

  What this anonymous gay man did was to practice that form of bricolage which Richard Dyer has identified as a characteristic reading strategy of gay audiences.9 Denied even the remotest possibility of supportive images of homosexuality within the dominant heterosexual culture, gay people have had to fashion what we could out of the imageries of dominance, to snatch illicit meanings from the fabric of normality, to undertake a corrupt decoding for the purposes of satisfying marginalized desires.10 This may not be as necessary as it once was, given the greater visibility of gay representations, but it is still an important practice. Wertham’s patient evokes in me an admiration, that in a period of American history even more homophobic than most, there he was, raiding the citadels of masculinity, weaving fantasies of oppositional desire. What effect the dread Wertham had on him is hard to predict, but I profoundly hope that he wasn’t “cured.”

  It wasn’t only Batman who was subjected to Dr. Doom’s bizarre ideas about human sexuality. Hence:

  The homosexual connotation of the Wonder Woman type of story is psychologically unmistakable. … For boys, Wonder Woman is a frightening image. For girls she is a morbid ideal. Where Batman is anti-feminine, the attractive Wonder Woman and her counterparts are definitely anti-masculine. Wonder Woman has her own female following. … Her followers are the “Holiday girls,” i.e. the holiday girls, the gay party girls, the gay girls.11

  Just how much elision can be covered with one “i.e.”? Wertham’s view of homosexuality is not, at least, inconsistent. Strong, admirable women will turn little girls into dykes—such a heroine can only be seen as a “morbid ideal.”

  Crazed as Wertham’s ideas were, their effectiveness is not in doubt. The mid-fifties saw a moral panic about the assumed dangers of comic books. In the United States companies were driven out of business, careers wrecked, and the Comics Code introduced. This had distinct shades of the Hays Code that had been brought in to clamp down on Hollywood in the 1930s, and under its jurisdiction comics opted for the bland, the safe, and the reactionary. In Britain there was government legislation to prohibit the importing of American comics, as the comics panic slotted neatly into a whole series of anxieties about the effects on British youth of American popular culture.12

  And in all of this, what happened to Batman? He turned into Fred MacMurray from My Three Sons. He lost any remaining edge of the shadowy vigilante of his earliest years and became an upholder of the most stifling small town American values. Batwoman and Batgirl appeared (June Allyson and Bat-Gidget) to take away any lingering doubts about the Dynamic Duo’s sex lives. A 1963 story called “The Great Clayface-Joker Feud” has some especially choice examples of the new, squeaky-clean sexuality of the assembled Bats.

  Batgirl says to Robin, “I can hardly wait to get into my Batgirl costume again! Won’t it be terrific if we could go on a crime case together like the last time? (sigh).” Robin replies, “It sure would, Betty (sigh).” The elder Bats look on approvingly. Batgirl is Batwoman’s niece—to make her a daughter would have implied that Batwoman had had (gulp) sexual intercourse, and that would never do. This is the era of Troy Donohue and Pat Boone, and Batman as ever serves as a cultural thermometer, taking the temperature of the times.

  The Clayface-Joker business is wrapped up (the villains of this period are wacky conjurors, nothing more, with no menace or violence about them) and the episode concludes with another tableau of terrifying heterosexual contentment. “Oh Robin,” simpers Batgirl, “I’m afraid you’ll just have to hold me! I’m still so shaky after fighting Clayface … and you’re so strong!” Robin: “Gosh Batgirl, it was swell of you to calm me down when I was warned about Batman tackling Clayface alone.” (One feels a distinct Wertham influence here: if Robin shows concern about Batman, wheel on a supportive female, the very opposite of a “morbid ideal,” to minister in a suitably self-effacing way.) Batwoman here seizes her chance and tackles Batman: “You look worried about Clayface, Batman … so why don’t you follow Robin’s example and let me soothe you?” Batman can only reply “Gulp.”

  Gulp indeed. While it’s easy simply to laugh at strips like these, knowing as we do the way in which such straight-faced material would be mercilessly shredded by the sixties TV series, they do reveal the retreat into coziness forced on comics by the Wertham onslaught and its repercussions. There no doubt were still subversive readers of Batman, erasing Batgirl on her every preposterous appearance and reworking the Duo’s capers to leave some room for homoerotic speculation, but such a reading would have had to work so much harder than before. The Batman of this era was such a closed text, so immune to polysemic interpretation, that its interest today is only as a symptom—or, more productively, as camp. “The Great Clayface-Joker Feud” may have been published in 1963, but in every other respect it is a fifties text. If the 1960s began for the world in general with the Beatles, the 1960s for Batman began with the TV series in 1966. If the Caped Crusader had been all but Werthamed out of existence, he was about to be camped back into life.

  THE CAMPED CRUSADER AND THE BOYS WONDERED

  Trying to define Camp is like attempting to sit in the corner of a circular room. It can’t be done, which only adds to the quixotic appeal of the attempt. Try these:

  To be camp is to present oneself as being committed to the marginal with a commitment greater than the marginal merits.13

  Camp sees everything in quotation marks. It’s not a lamp but a “lamp”; not a woman but a “woman”… It is the farthest extension, in sensibility, of the metaphor of life as theatre.14

  Camp is … a way of poking fun at the whole cosmology of restrictive sex roles and sexual identifications which our society uses to oppress its women and repress its men.15

  Camp was and is a way for gay men to re-imagine the world around them … by exaggerating, stylizing and remaking what is usually thought to be average or normal.16

  Camp was a prison for an illegal minority, now it is a holiday for consenting adults.17

  All true, in their way, but all inadequate. The problem with camp is that it is primarily an experiential rather than an analytical discourse. Camp is a set of attitudes, a gallery of snapshots, an inventory of postures, a modus vivendi, a shop-full of frocks, an arch of eyebrows, a great big pink butterfly that just won’t be pinned down, Camp is primarily an adjective, occasionally a verb, but never anything as prosaic, as earth-bound, as a noun.

  Yet if I propose to use this adjective as a way of describing one or more of the guises of Batman, I need to arrive at some sort of working definition. So, for the purposes of this analysis, I intend the term camp to refer to a playful, knowing, self-reflexive theatricality. Batman, the sixties TV series, was nothing if not knowing. It employed the codes of camp in an unusually public and heavily signaled way. This makes it different from those people or texts that are taken up by camp audiences without ever consciously putting camp into practice. The difference may be very briefly spelled out by reference to Hollywood films. If Mildred Pierce and The Letter were taken up as camp, teased by primarily gay male audiences into yielding meaning not intended by their makers, then Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? is a piece of self-conscious camp, capitalizing on certain attitudinal and stylistic tendencies known to exist in audiences. Baby Jane is also, significantly, a 1960s film, and the 1960s were the decade in which camp swished out
of the ghetto and up into the scarcely prepared mainstream.

  A number of key events and texts reinforced this. Susan Sontag wrote her Notes on Camp, which remains the starting point for researchers even now. Pop Art was in vogue (and in Vogue) and whatever the more elevated claims of Lichtenstein, Warhol, and the rest, their art-works were on one level a new inflection of camp. The growing intellectual respectability of pop music displayed very clearly that the old barriers that once rigidly separated high and low culture were no longer in force. The James Bond films, and even more so their successors like Modesty Blaise, popularized a dry, self-mocking wit that makes up one part of the multifaceted diamond of camp. And on television there were The Avengers, The Man from U.N.C.L.E., Thunderbirds, and Batman.

  To quote the inevitable Sontag, “The whole point of Camp is to dethrone the serious. … More precisely, Camp involves a new, more complex relation to ‘the serious.’ One can be serious about the frivolous, frivolous about the serious.”18

  The problem with Batman in those terms is that there was never anything truly serious to begin with (unless one swallows that whole portentous Dark Knight charade, more of which in the next section). Batman in its comic book form had, unwittingly, always been camp—it was serious (the tone, the moral homilies) about the frivolous (a man in a stupid suit). He was camp in the way that classic Hollywood was camp, but what the sixties TV series and film did was to overlay this “innocent” camp with a thick layer of ironic distance, the self-mockery version of camp. And given the long associations of camp with the homosexual male subculture, Batman was a particular gift on the grounds of his relationship with Robin. As George Melly put it, “The real Batman series were beautiful because of their unselfconscious absurdity. The remakes, too, at first worked on a double level. Over the absorbed children’s heads we winked and nudged, but in the end what were we laughing at? The fact they didn’t know that Batman had it off with Robin.”19