From the ‘Batman-Makes-Sissies’ file, the online magazine Slate (Apr. 4), in an off-hand review of David Hajdu’s new book, The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic Book Scare and How It Changed America, has a long article on Hajdu’s main character, the prissy psychiatrist Frederic Wertham and how he nearly managed to shut down the vibrant (violent, messy, endlessly inventive) American comic book industry. After first declaring in the ’50s that ‘… the adventures of Batman and Robin had homoerotic overtones’ and ‘…Wonder Woman threatened to turn healthy young girls into lesbians,’ he revved himself up (you can practically see him frothing at the mouth) to say ‘Sometimes Batman ends up in bed and young Robin is shown sitting next to him. … They live in sumptuous quarters … and have a butler, Alfred. … It is like a … dream of two homosexuals living together.’ The article says ‘ …the Caped Crusader was irresistibly attractive to young readers whose sexuality was already inclined away from heterosexuality. But for many of us today, that’s an argument in favor of Batman. Isn’t it good for gay kids to have a role model like the Dark Knight? … Batman didn’t make readers gay, gayness made Batman attractive to readers.’ The review goes on to state that Wertham ‘ …was following down the path of villains like Lex Luther and Dr. Doom who start off with good intentions only to become prisoners of their own blind arrogance.’
From the ‘Pink Triangle’ file, the Chicago Tribune (Apr. 9) highlights a traveling ‘ [e] xhibit [which] documents war Nazis waged against gays.’ Gays were castrated, subject to crude medical experiments and, in concentration camps, ‘assigned back-breaking labor that often killed them.’ Weimar Germany (1918-1933), which existed before the Nazis, had a flourishing gay culture (think Cabaret) of slightly more than a million people. The Nazis closed all gay nightclubs, caused police to keep lists of anyone believed to be gay and expanded the notorious anti-gay law known as Paragraph 175 to arrest many gay men. (Lesbians were not criminalized.) This law was not rescinded until long after the Nazis were defeated. To see a viciously different view of homosexuality in Germany during this era, Google any one of the numerous fundamentalism Web sites on the subject that insist that the Nazis were themselves gay, and that gay people caused, ran and promoted the Holocaust (that is, if they admit it took place at all).
From the ‘Dragged-Into-the-19th-Century’ file, USA Weekend Magazine (Apr. 4-6) has a three-and-a-half-page article on Billie Jean King and her lesbianism is, at least, mentioned. She says people in the gay community still come up and thank her. She also thinks her palimony case is the big reason they remember.