Comic Books have always been a little gay. There are few things more fabulous than a man in colorful tights or more butch than a muscular Amazon fighting crime.
Unfortunately, comics had to keep it on the down low for a while. When the
Comics Code was written in 1954, its' forbidding of the depiction of "perversion" in general was clearly understood to include homosexuality & transgender - writers could not openly depict characters as LGBT.
Despite this rejection from the major labels, underground Gay Comix - like the underground "Gay Comix" (1980-98) - DIY'd content by & for the LGBT community - everything from erotica to political commentary to humor, becoming increasingly visible as the LGBT rights movement gained momentum.
The first well-known modern gay comic artist was Touko Laaksonen (aka
Tom of Finland), drawing gay erotica back before it was even strictly legal - luckily for him, "decency" laws loosened in the 60s, allowing him to publish his work.
Feminist & gay newspapers & magazines provided a home for comic artists who wanted to depict gay life in an open & positive light. In the late 80s. Alison Bechdel began publishing
Dykes to Watch Out For, & later the brilliant, haunting autobiographical "Fun Home", that tells the story of Bechdel's youth growing up in a funeral home with a closeted gay dad who died tragically.
Around the same time, the Advocate published Howard Cruse's
Wendel. At the time, according to Cruse, merely depicting the gay community realistically "was a political act". Cruse later went on to co-found Gay Comix & write a graphic novel,
Stuck Rubber Baby, so epicly powerful it was compared to Maus - a semi-autobiographical fiction about a young white gay man who joins the Black Civil Rights movement in the 60s.
During the 80s, gay people were struggling for rights in the maelstrom of a mysterious new plague - so their community became stronger, & tighter. Gay comics talked about the struggles, promoted safer sex, - and provided laughs along the way. Just as gay people needed create their own comics to express their love, they also needed to be able to make fun of themselves (from a friendly perspective) as only they knew how.
All that freedom fighting could sometimes make someone - a bit angry. Thus, Roberta Gregory's "
Bitchy Butch" was born - a masculine lesbian who is angry at the world. In one strip, Bitchy Butch gripes through an entire pro-gay protest that she feels was a waste of time - never knowing that a young lesbian was inspired by her example to accept herself.
By the end of the 80s, societal attitudes towards LGBT folks had changed drastically, & people began to demand that the media, including comic books, acknowledge that gay people exist & are normal humans -so in 1989 the
Comics Code was
revised to explicitly sanction the depiction of homosexual characters. Luckily, it seems the use of an internal censorship system in comics may have prevented the government from creating "decency" laws that would have been harder to change - making the transition to tolerance quicker than it might have been.
Some early depictions of gay characters weren't exactly the most positive. Marvel's 2003 attempt at a gay title character,
The Rawhide Kid, is ridiculed by
Cracked as "
every negative, damaging gay stereotype dressed in a cowboy hat."
The first mainstream openly gay superhero character was
X-Men's
Northstar. Creator Jack Byrne had always intended for the character to be gay, but the character was expressly forbidden from officially coming out until 1992 (in
Alpha Flight #106).
Bisexual characters also began to get more representation in the 80s & 90s.
Hellblazer's John Constantine (originally created by Alan Moore in the 80s) is bisexual. So is X-Men's
Mystique - who reportedly was originally meant to be Nighcrawler's "father", having morphed into a male form (this idea shot down by - you guessed it - the Comics Code).
Neil Gaiman's
The Sandman, which debuted in 1988, depicts lesbian and transgender characters questing together to solve a mystical dream-world puzzle in A Game of You. Transwoman Wanda defies her conservative family & even the goddesses themselves in her fierce defense of her true gender - as do her friends, to whom she is fiercely loyal. Wanda faces a lot of prejudice, but in the end, her strong womanly spirit shines through.
Gaiman also explores gay relationships in
Murder Mysteries, illustrated by P. Craig Russell, in which there is an erotic relationship between two male angels (who notably have the same lack of genitals as the angels in Dogma).
As more adults read edgier comics like DC's Vertigo line, both straight & LGBT characters were freer to explore not only their sexuality, but more complex themes in human drama in general. At the same time, complex graphic novels like Maus started to give comics more respectability, paving the way for deep philosophical, historical, & experimental graphic novel memoirs.
1999's
Bread & Wine beautifully depicts the relationship between a wealthy New Yorker and a homeless man.
In 2011, the indie
Gingerbread Girl depicted a quirky magical realism -style romance with a bisexual woman who may be insane.
The same year the indie Eisner Award-winning sci-fi series
Finder: Voice was picked up by the Dark Horse label; the much-lauded graphic novel includes transgender themes in its story line.
By the 2000s, most Americans were aware of and comfortable with LGBT people, who started to gain more and more equal legal rights.
In 2010, Archie Comics introduced a gay character named Kevin who was just as almost-eerily
wholesome as any other member of the Archie Universe - wed just last year.
Indeed, it seems to be Gay Wedding Season in comics lately - Northstar was also married last season, in
Astonishing X-Men #51. The issue explored the atmosphere surrounding gay marriage realistically, showing the range of views people might hold - with some characters expressing some unease in accepting Northstar for who he is - teammate Warbird declines to attend the ceremony Despite this, Northstar gets plenty of support from the X-community, joyfully kicking off his new married life in Central Park.
DC comics, not to be outdone, launched the "new 52" with the LGBT community in mind, re-inventing one of the most prominent members of the Justice League,
Green Lantern (in his original incarnation, Alan Scott, on alternate universe Earth 2), as a gay man. (Unfortunately, they also -Spoiler! - killed off his boyfriend in the same issue).
The new 52 also launched a re-imagining of
Batwoman as a lesbian expelled from the Marines as a result of Don't Ask Don't Tell who fights supernatural villains in Gotham. Ironically, Batwoman was reportedly originally created as a love interest for Batman to demonstrate that he was not having inappropriate relations with Robin.
The artwork for Batwoman is inspired by the otherwordly themes - it flow across the page in surprising ways, as iconoclast as Batwoman herself.
Around the same time, Batwoman's sister in Bat-Related Gotham Crimefighting,
Batgirl declared her allegiance to the LGBT community in Batgirl #19, written by Gail Simone, when her roommate,
Alysia Yeoh, came out as a transgender woman.
The new 52 also saw the return of the
Shining Knight in
Demon Knights - a mystical transgender time-traveling knight from a mysterious ancient Camelot, originally re-invented from an older character by - - who else? - Grant Morrison as part of his
Seven Soldiers series in 2005. While the other characters sometimes tease him for appearing female, he repeatedly, emphatically, asserts his manhood.
With more queer characters on the scene, the LGBT comic geek community got organized. Anthologies of gay comics started appearing by the 80s, &
Prism Comics was formed in 2003, which publishes an annual guide to LGBT characters & creators in the comic book world.
Last year, the anthology
No Straight Lines collected "four decades of queer comics", including variety of art as diverse as the rainbow - memoir,erotica, political humor, self-portraits, a paper doll "Gertrude & Alice", and more. The volume included nearly 100 authors and artists, such as
Dan Savage, Robert Triptow, Andrea Natalie, Burtin Clarke, Carl Vaughn Frick, Michelle Gruben, & Edie Fake.
 |
| Triptow |
In researching for this article, I found that there were too many LGBT themed comics - not to mention artists & writers - to include them all - & the further into the present I got, the more of them they were, more positive, more popular....
The way things are going, I predict that future editions of LGBT comic anthologies will need to be even larger.
Perhaps someday, being gay or trans or any other variation will be so cool with the world that there won't need to be a distinction made at all.
It's official. Strong Queer Supes (& witches & muggles etc.) have conquered the Comic Book Universe - & made it even more epicly awesome. =)
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