So, I’ve come across a few people here and there expressing confusion over what, precisely, is meant by the term “gay-baiting.” I think it’s easiest to demonstrate by the compare and contrast method. So, for example, here is ‘King Herod’s Song’ from Jesus Christ Superstar as it was filmed in 1973 and again in 2000.

1973

2000

In the first, Herod is a mincing queen, surrounded, yes, by women, but also by effeminate men with pursed lips and make-up. In the second, he’s more of a thirties showman. There are other significant differences in the stagings as well. In the former, we’re meant to despise Herod for his queerness decadence. In the second, we’re supposed to fear him.
In the former portrayal, all we’re meant to see is a rather tired gay joke.

With some of the rather silly and strained defenses I saw for the “gay-baiting Batman” scene, I’m half-surprised no one went with the obvious defense; that it actually is in character for Batman to be a gay-baiting asshole.

To wit, Detective #570:

So, we have a villain who is coded as gay. How do we know that? Only his right ear is pierced, and he sticks his pinky out when he drinks. Both are accepted visual cues for homosexuality. If you don’t know that, well, your media illiteracy is not my fault.

And how does Batman act when dealing with a character that’s coded as gay?

Let’s go over that again, for the slow of thinking who need symbolism painfully pointed out to them:

Ah yes…”subtle.”

Some of the recent talk about gay representation reminded me that I wanted to point out an example of someone doing it right. I usually read light fantasy and humor novels on my lunch breaks. It gives me something to get my mind off of managing inventory and purchasing for half and hour to forty minutes, and so I want something I can open, read a bit of, and finish, without having to feel any pressure to really think about what I’m reading. For this, the “young adult” aimed novels that tie into the Doctor Who show are great. I can get through two or three chapters of easily digestible prose while I eat, then go back to work.

Now, one of the hallmarks of the latest incarnation of the show has been the commitment to racial and sexual identity diversity. Not every character on the show is white, not every character on the show is straight. It’s a science-fiction program that actually acknowledges that not everyone in the world now is a straight white male, much less everyone in the future or the past. In one of the recent batch of books, Forever Autumn, by Mark Morris, there’s a gay character. It’s a minor role, just a hapless townsperson the Doctor and Martha must rescue, but he’s there. And the text acknowledges he’s gay. It’s just his interesting back-ground detail, something to keep him from being Mr. Generic Town Guy.
This is a young adult novel that ties into a massively popular (in its home country) television show. And it deals with gay characters (and black characters and Asian characters and female characters) as just yet another aspect of the world.

The Doctor Who franchise can do this because the producers and creators want to do this. They could very easily have brought the show back and had a curious dearth of characters with melanin. They could have avoided those icky sexuality discussions entirely. They chose not to. And that’s the difference.

In much the same way, one of the most successful authors of our time, an author that has already borne much undeserved scorn for her works by closed-minded people, found time to obsessively detail every adolescent heterosexual crush of her characters, but decided that openly dealing with the fact that some boys like boys and some girls like girls wasn’t something she was interested in doing. In much the same way, a major American comic book publisher could have decided not to hire the outspoken homophobe to write a book featuring two lesbians of color. But for that author and that publisher, dealing realistically and positively with issues of sexual orientation, well…it’s simply something they didn’t want to be bothered to do.

I was going to make a post about how little J.K. Rowling “outing” Dumbledore matters, but Kalinara beat me to the punch and said just about everything I was inclined to say anyway. This was not a “brave” move on her part. Waiting until after the character has been killed off, and after the book series is complete, to throw out, as an after-thought, “oh yeah, and Dumbledore was gay” is actually kind of craven. It suggests to me that, mindful of the occasional “why are there no gay characters in the Harry Potter books” complaints she gets, she decided to throw the queers a bone and let them have Dumbledore. So, let’s not rush to congratulate Rowling for her bravery or her commitment to diversity. She had seven books in which to make the barest suggestion that Dumbledore was gay, and couldn’t be bothered to.

Hey, check out this cute scene from the most recent issue of Justice Society of America:

It’s the JSA having a pancake breakfast with a bunch of firemen and kids. Only, someone’s missing. Give it a moment’s thought, I’m sure it will occur to you.

That’s right, where’s Obsidian?
What really drove home his absence for me, though, was this panel:

So…firemen hitting on an underage Stargirl is played for laughs, but Obsidian is, yet again, a no show.

Now, setting aside that unfortunate “saving Obsidian from being further molested by other writers” talk before the series launched, and setting aside the creepy symbolism of putting a gay character in the book and then never showing his face and (almost) never having him talk (I think he’s said all of two sentences in nine issues)…Geoff Johns apparently expects us to believe that Obsidian turned down a chance to have breakfast with hunky firemen!

So Johns has no clue how to write gay characters is what I’m getting from that. It’s time to either give him more to do in the book than imitate wallpaper or let other writers use him.

This year’s ad for the Folsom Street Fair (site probably NSFW) has generated some controversy. Well, I say it’s generated controversy. Really, the only significant complaints I’ve found have been from the (male) spokesman of the Concerned Women of America, Matt Barber, who said of the ad “Scripture says that God is not mocked, yet it doesn’t stop people from trying. As evidenced by this latest stunt, open ridicule of Christianity is unfortunately very common within much of the homosexual community. Gay’ activists disingenuously call Christians ‘haters’ and ‘homophobes’ for honoring the Bible, but then lash out in this hateful manner toward the very people they accuse. In their version of The Last Supper, Christ, Who gave His life for our sins, is despicably replaced by sin itself as the object of worship.” You can read a press-release about it here, but I don’t recommend investigating that site too much.

Now, outrage from the hard-right Christian fundamentalist community is nothing new, and nothing to be surprised at. But what I always find interesting, and depressing, enough to find the term “interpressing” appropriate, is the number of (apparently) gay people who find offense in the ad. Andrew Sullivan doesn’t like it, but Andrew Sullivan is a notorious right-wing crank and hypocrite, so fuck what he thinks, frankly. But if you look at the comments section at popular gay blog sites like Towleroad and Joe.My.God, you’ll see lots of everyday-gays attacking the ad.

The basic complaints all boil down to one thing: ads like this make us look bad to “them.” Ad like this alienate “them” and that hurts gay rights. You see variations of this argument all the time. Drag queens in Pride parades make us look bad to “them.” We should distance ourselves from that married politician who had an affair with another man because it makes us look bad to “them.” Effeminate teenage drama queens on the Internet should be scolded for making us look bad to “them.” I’d like to chalk these arguments up to internalized homophobia, but more often than not they simply seem myopic to me. Because the counter-argument I’d like to propose is that it really doesn’t matter what we, as the gay community, say or do in our efforts not to offend “them.” Because “they” hate us. Not for what we do, but for who we are. It doesn’t matter what we do, “they” are going to be offended. Things like kinky ads, drag queens, closeted politicians and effeminate teens just give “them” a convenient excuse.

Every gay person in the country could be a white, middle-class Republican, living in the suburbs, not ever dreaming of doing anything remotely kinky or “gross”, up to and including actually have sex with a person of the same sex, violently insisting that no, really, we don’t want equal rights, equal protection under the law or to be treated with basic human decency, and “they” would still hate us. What makes me so sure of this? Because there was a time, not so long ago, within the living memory of many gay men certainly, where the idea of a kinky leather festival was unheard of. Not just unheard of, unimaginable. When there were no such things as Pride parades, much less drag queens marching in them. When closeted politician’s careers were over, and quite possibly their freedom. When effeminate teenage queens might as well just kill themselves, because they had nothing to live for. A time when the only homosexuals were “good” homosexuals, living in the closet, in fear and shame, and risking their jobs, homes and livelihoods just to go to a gay bar. Because if the police decided to raid it the night you happen to be there, well, kiss everything you have and know goodbye.
And “they” hated us then. Quite possibly more so than “they” do now.

So no, ads like this don’t hurt gay rights. Gay people sniping at other gay people to “behave, look presentable, and for God’s sake stop acting gay” hurt gay rights. The failure of people in our community to support one another against hateful outside pressures hurts gay rights more than all the kinky leather daddies, drag queens, closeted politicians and teenage queens ever could. So you don’t personally approve of any of those things. So what. Find a gay cause or group you feel you can support, and simply sigh and move on when one of those horrible, evil leather daddies or drag queens comes into view. It’s far past time that gay people stop worrying about making “them” happy.

Two slight codas, one visual allusions to the Last Supper are nothing new. And they haven’t elicited controversy or complaints in significance before. This, I think, really drives home the point that this outrage and controversy is manufactured, and driven more by homophobia than any sincere religious feeling.

Also, one of Matt Barber’s comments bears closer scrutiny: “We further challenge the media to cover this affront to Christianity with the same vigor as recent stories about cartoon depictions of Mohammed and other items offensive to the Muslim community.”
Ah, so Matt, you want the Christian community to be portrayed as a bunch of small-minded, ignorant, backwards fundamentalists, who threaten people with murder if they don’t get their way, all because you’re not culturally sophisticated enough to understand the principles of free speech, artistic expression, and learning to live and let live? Because, I got to say, you guys are doing a bang-up job of that all on your own.

Plus, all those guys in that ad? Hot. Heck, even that woman on the left gives me a funny feeling…

Extra Note: I really hate playing the “Pete card” but in the context of this discussion I thought it worth mentioning. So, Pete, my boyfriend, of nine years? The minister in his church and director of a gospel choir? That Pete?
Cool with the picture. Kind of likes it, actually.
So let’s cool it on both the “Christians are evil” and the “gays are irreligious” talk, shall we?
Actual quote: “I think it’s great they used a black Jesus.”

So, let’s look again at that William Friedkin quote about Cruising:
. A lot of the protests against the film in ‘80 said that it seemed to indicate that the gay lifestyle brought about murder, death, violence… and strangely, you know I find that so off-base. I never got the same criticism from the French government when I made The French Connection and the dope smuggler is a French guy and the guy working for him as his hit man is another French guy. And I never heard from French people that I was accusing all French people of smuggling heroin into America, but that was one of the tacks taken by the protests in 1980. And I think they were reaching – I think there was an enormous reach to find a foundation for the criticism.

The obvious point is this: in 1980, if you wanted to find a film with positive portrayals of French people, you could. But at that same point in time you really couldn’t find many positive portrayals of gay people. And many of the ones you did find were problematic for other reasons: sissies and queens tended to be the dominant image of gay men in film and television. So it’s a laughably absurd false equivalence that Friedkin is building there. Secondly, on the off chance that some person of French ancestry was offended by The French Connection there was an entire French film industry that person could turn to in order to find less offensive portrayals. But in 1980, we were still about ten years away from the “Queer Cinema” days (for good or ill). There were pretty much no mass media portrayals of gay people other than the homophobic or otherwise problematic portrayals in mainstream films. And lastly, Friedkin is apparently the least text-aware director of all time, because both his film and the novel it is based on do rather explicitly make a case that all gay people are deranged predators.

I’m fascinated by this, not because Cruising is a particularly good film or one worthy of commentary (it pretty much deserved all the negative reviews it’s gotten over the years, to set aside the accusation of homophobia in the film), but because it’s recent release on DVD is coincident with the return of an ever-popular media meme about gay men: the sexual predator.

Ironically, it was the disgrace of two conservative politicians, Bob Allen and Larry Craig, that got the media latched onto the gay sexual predator angle, with some help from the increasingly bizarre antics of Fort Lauderdale mayor Jim Naugle. Allen and Craig, for those living under a rock, were both arrested for soliciting undercover officers for sex in men’s room, while Naugle has made keeping gay men out of public restrooms an obsession, much to the embarrassment of his constituents. These three men have kept the media talking about the idea of public sex, cruising, and the role of gay men in both. What’s been over-looked, of course, is that these incidents aren’t really about gay men. Craig and Allen both claim to be straight, and honestly, I believe them. For the most part, gay men don’t resort to cruising for sex in bath rooms. Closeted “straight” men do, however. They do this because societal homophobia either keeps them in denial about their true sexuality, or they’re self-hatred expresses itself in self-destructive ways. But “gay men have sex in public bathrooms; what freaks” is an easier story to sell to the public. More recent news stories, particularly a story about pre-adolescent boys engaging in school bus fellatio, seem to suggest that this kind of salacious and insulting news reporting is going to continue for awhile.

GayGamer.net was offline for most of the weekend after being targeted by denial of service attacks and homophobic postings on their message boards. To the credit of the video-gaming community, most people recognize this as a bias-motivated attack.

There were, of course, other reactions. You can see some of them on display in this thread at Kotaku. For those without the patience to read through, and I don’t blame you for not having it, a certain segment of the on-line video gaming community responded to the attack with some variation of “they had it coming.” Not because it’s a gay site and gays are icky, mind you. But because by specifically setting up the site as being primarily for gay and lesbian gamers, they’re setting themselves up for these kinds of attacks. Because they’re setting themselves apart. Because they think they’re better than you. Because they have to be special. Because it’s only about sex. Because they want special rights. Because they want their issues catered to. Because there’s no “need” for a gay video game site, because sexuality has nothing to do with video games, and it’s not as if all the other video game sites are for straight people.

I don’t have to say it, do I?
The very fact that the site was attacked in a homophobic manner points out the need for a gay video game site. That people are so used to the heteronormativity of video games that they can’t see that, yes, video game sites assume their readership is heterosexual, points to the need for a gay video game site. That the default insult for the teen/post-teen male audience that most video game sites cater to is “gay” or “fag” points to the need for a gay video game site.

Which, in a roundabout way, brings me to comics. Whenever the topic comes up of gay issues in comics, or women’s issues in comics, or race issues in comics, the response, very quickly degenerates into that same kind of “why do you think you’re special, why do you need to be catered to, there’s nothing about comics or the comics industry that’s hostile to women, people of color, or gays.” There is a certain degree of overlap in the comics community and the video game community; they’re both primarily geek-centric activities, after all. And although I’ve noted before the basic conservative inclinations of nerd-dom at large (coupled with an oddly knee-jerk, unexamined libertarianism), I don’t think that’s whats really at issue here. Because I don’t see this willful cluelessness as something confined to geek-culture, but instead it’s something I see in the culture at large. It’s a deliberate unwillingness to understand the issues and concerns of minority groups that quickly turns into open hostility towards the very idea of people that are different from the majority wanting to have either their voices heard in the mainstream or to have their own spaces. But I see this unwillingness and hostility especially prominent in geek circles. My initial reaction is that the geeks who feel so threatened already feel so ostracized and out of touch from the mainstream that any thing that threatens to unseat them from their self-imposed status of persecuted martyr must be shouted down. In other words, it’s the usual fan entitlement rants as applied to identity politics, only in their world nerds are more disenfranchised than any other group in history.

Or, you know, they’re just petty, small-minded jerks. In which case this picture of John Tristram should cause their heads to explode:

Neilalien has a short piece up responding to the “Doctor Strange is teh ghey” meme, which most recently reared it’s head at right-wing news-site National Review Online. An important point he makes is that Doc is actually quite the stud and lady-killer…but the model of virile masculinity he’s based on is very much out of time.

I’m not usually one for picking on the “scans_daily” crowd (it’s a real “fish/barrel/gun” proposition at the best of times), but I felt this thread was noteworthy. I’m honestly baffled by the number of people who seem to seriously think that this:

Is an actual forth-coming cover for the Wonder Woman series. Now, I don’t expect everyone on the internet to immediately recognize that picture as a Glen Hanson piece that’s at least a year old (NWS link, by the way), as I did, but come on! To even think for a moment that DC would ever seriously consider putting an image like that out on a cover shows a painful disconnect from the realities of the comics publishing world.
What’s worse are the responses that seem to think that, okay, because here’s an unabashed piece of super-hero themed beefcake, that excuses all the sexist and misogynist portrayals of women in super-hero comics. Uh, no.
When Newsarama forum posters get the joke you have to have fallen pretty far off the clue train to miss it…

Oh, what the hey, have a Wildcat picture, from Sensation Comics #36:

Yeah, yeah, it’s a cheap-shot, “fagged” just means “tired” in this context…but that’s actually a guy in drag Wildcat’s fighting. Subtext becomes text!

Oh sure, we all know about the time Wonder Woman fought evil lesbians, but did you know that Barry Allen once fought an evil lesbian as well? It all happened in Flash #211.

Barry Allen is characteristically late to a date with his wife Iris, at the look roller derby rink. Iris is working on a story about the star of the roller-derby, Kate Krasher. Clearly, an early human interest piece on the gay rights movement, because we all know what kinds of hard women get involved in roller derby, don’t we? Barry knows for sure, because when he finally finds Iris he’s none too pleased:

“New fish! New fish!” all the girls seemed to be chanting.

When we finally meet Kate Krasher, she’s the largest, manliest woman in the rink. You can almost sort of feel Cary Bates trying to get away with using the term “bull dyke”…

Of course, when Lee Marvin goes toe-to-toe with Mary Tyler Moore, the inevitable happens.

Iris responds to Kate the way you’d expect any uptight, middle-class Republican to react. By imagining her as some sort of alien creature.


Oh, Iris, is it your beourgeosie background that gives you such a talent for othering people who are just trying to live their lives?

In case all that girl-on-girl violence wasn’t enough for you, Central City is then hit with a “scientifically impossible” earthquake.

At the Science Institute, the earthquake’s origin is determined to be…can you guess? That’s right, the roller derby rink? When the Flash heads over to investigate, he finds that all the roller skates glow with an unearthly radiation. He then pulls a Hal Jordan.

Waking up and finding himself trussed up over the rink, Flash, and by now the reader, is not at all surprised to find that Kate Krasher is, in fact, the bad guy, and she plans on destroying the world. Starting with Central City. Using the awesome power of roller derby.
Hey, it was the 70s. Just go with it.

I believe this panel was later reused in Maude’s Handbook to Geology.

Anyway, Flash escapes, he undoes the earth-quake machine by skating around it in the opposite direction of the coil, and he saves the day once again for heteronormativity.

And no, the aliens were never seen again.