On Coming Out Day yesterday, DC comics made a big announcement: Superman is bisexual.
The DC Universe is a complicated place, and the Superman in question isn’t the original Superman, the Clark Kent one, but Superman’s son Jon Kent. But still, it’s Superman, and thus a big deal, and most who heard the news yesterday thought it was, well, sweet. DC also released a picture of Superman and his new boyfriend kissing, and thousands of people, I’m guessing, saved it to their hard drives.
But not everyone was thrilled by the news.
Some, er, critics reacted with sarcasm. Perpetual media asshole Piers Morgan tweeted:
Meanwhile, over on The Daily Stormer, Andrew Anglin joked that he was “glad that someone is willing to teach our children about anal sex with men.”
Other commenters were roused to full-blown hysteria, with one Republican Senate hopeful declaring flatly that DC Comics is “literally trying to destroy America.”
Meanwhile, Arizona state senator Wendy Rogers was so addled by the news that she made a glorious typo that was a great deal more hilarious than her gay lisp joke.
Fox News responded in its inimitable way:
But what was most striking to me, as I scrolled through the reactions of an assortment of right wing media sites I track, was how many of the critics seemed to take Superman’s bisexuality personally, as if he had just planted a big wet kiss on their own personal lips. (Not that the gentlemanly Superman would do that without their consent.)
On RedState, Mike Miller explained that
a close friend called me this morning to break the cataclysmic news about (the demise of) Superman as we know him. Not only is the “news” emblematic of the Left’s drive to destroy America as we know it, it is insidious. These people never stop, and they never get enough. Like spoiled children.
And they are eating the American elephant one bite at a time.
They’re eating the what now?
Over on Townhall, Tom Tradup reported that
it was with no little sadness I noted media reports this week that DC Comics … is launching a “coming out” for a new, gay Superman. With storyline featuring Jonathan Kent—“son” of the original Superman (don’t ask)—as a woke superhero who fights climate change—ugh—protests deportation of refugees in Metropolis—double ugh—and finally, has a same-sex relationship with another male. Only thing DC is missing is having the new Superman fix the increasingly-ratty hairstyles of MSNBC’s Joy Reid.
What does any of this have to do with Joy Reid?
“At this point, they’re just trolling me,” wrote Rob Dreher of the American Conservative.
Who asked for this? Who asked for superheroes to have sex lives, or gay sex lives? What does it mean that the ideological colonization of the superhero genre, the modern mythology of our times, means that transgressive sexual desire is now a definitive characteristic of our pop culture god figures?
Meanwhile, TheRightScoop declared that
DC is doing everything it can to ruin everything. They’ve done it on their TV shows, making Supergirl’s sister and several other characters gay, and now they are doing the same thing to the original Superman, making his son gay.
This is nothing but LGBT indoctrination and it’s disgusting. I’ve completely abandoned shows that I would have continued watching because of this and you can be sure I won’t be going anywhere near the latest DC comics.
Jonathon Van Maren of Lifesite has been keeping track of all the queer comic heroes.
Back in August, I wrote a column about the queering of DC Comics, with the announcement that Robin, Batman’s sidekick since 1940, was coming out as bi-sexual. I noted that as the LGBT revolution progresses, not a single major entertainment franchise will go untouched. America has a bi-sexual Robin, a gay Archie character, a lesbian Jo March, two moms in Clifford, a homosexual Mr. Ratburn, and an entire panoply of LGBT cartoon characters on TV. It was only a matter of time before America’s most iconic comic book character followed.
Wait, Clifford has two mommies?
On American Thinker, Andrea Widburg started off by assuring her readers that she’s not a homophobe or anything.
I’m libertarian enough to believe that, whether it’s nature or nurture, some people prefer their own sex. What I am not okay with is the left’s relentless efforts to get children to embrace non-normative sexual behaviors. … The most recent example is that DC Comics, which owns the Superman franchise, has made him—or rather, his son and heir—bisexual.
Then she threw in some transphobia, just because she could.
What’s finally crossed the line for [parents] after 13 years of relentless indoctrination [starting in the Obama administration] is transgenderism. It’s one thing to recognize an ancient (although not particularly salubrious) behavior. It’s another thing entirely for schools and popular culture to tell our children that they can magically change their basic biology just by wishing.
Yeah, I’m pretty sure no one is saying this. It does sound like an awesome premise for a superpower, though. I eagerly await the coming of Transman. In part because that would be cool, but mainly so I could see all of these critics’ heads explode at once.
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@Anonymous
See Alan Moore’s Swamp Thing. Batman lecturing people about this while pretending to forget Superman’s name remains priceless.
And yet the romantic lives have always taken a very important part within superhero comics. But I guess if it’s LGBT+ it’s autobad.
Like Lucifer from The Wicked + The Divine by Kieron Gillen. I’d also approve of pansexual Lois Lane. That woman has had a threesome with Bruce and Clark and there is no convincing me otherwise.
@Full Metal Ox
Indeed! And in early Wonder Woman comics, Diana spoke about how Man’s World needed more men practicing loving submission.
I happen to be wearing a Wonder Woman t-shirt today. I’m not a BDSM practitioner, but to deny its influence on one of my favorite DC heroines would be dishonest. Ultimately I love the character because she’s a great example of how love can be a superpower – to paraphrase one of her more recent speeches, she will extend a hand in friendship before she raises her fist or her sword.
(And yes, I used to do the twirl as a kid, just like Lynda Carter.)
@Full Metal Ox
And it fully felt like a cishet american white guy trying to force his fetishes on me.
One of the reasons I have an aversion to Wonder Woman to this day (as I grew up and learned about X-Men this is the reason my relationship with Claremont’s X-Men soured).
Yeaaah… please leave your boner out of other peoples empowerment.
Like any business they have to justify their actions by claiming it will make them more money in the long run. Intentionally stirring controversy is an effective marketing technique and David is giving DC free publicity here. On the other hand the fact that large, established media companies are willing to cater to traditionally marginalized groups. I used to see lots of feminists wonder why corporations catered to straight, white, cis-men (well they didn’t wonder, they knew the answer). Finally the big corporations have realized that everyone else has money too. Consumerism still isn’t good, but at least it is a lot less bigoted now.
@Vic P: Judging by her Twitter, Lynda Carter is pretty cool. And still in great shape.
@Battering Lamb: in re your Clark/Bruce/Lois idea, I am interested in subscribing to your newsletter.
@Elaine the Witch:
That’s a really good question about Connor, and one that Connor himself has spent some time agonizing over, as I recall. Honestly, I’d say ‘son’. While it’s not my only reason, I will note that any other answer has the implications of massive possible splash damage to anybody born from artificial insemination.
And really, does nobody remember poor Maggie Sawyer? Maggie was one of Superman’s contacts with the Metropolitan Police Department, and was pretty blatantly a lesbian back in the early 90s, even if they didn’t use the word at first; Superman musing about the bigotry she received just because she was *boom* oops, got to fly. (Like, literally, that happened in one of the early comics after she was introduced post-Crisis; Superman was musing on what she had to deal with and got distracted by a disaster just before he thought the actual word.) She even made it into the Superman cartoon of about that time, where they had to be even more circumspect, but at a couple of points (a hospital scene and a later funeral scene) we see her partner show up.
Robin… well, which one? At least one of them (was it Tim Drake? It was one of the Red Robins, at least) has already identified as a sort of bi-curious, though more in a sense of ‘I don’t like labels, let’s just see where this goes’.
It’s like, none of this is actually new, people are just able to be more open about it. And that’s what really freaks these people out, the fact that people actually feel free to talk about it openly, that people can see that gay people aren’t horrible perverse demons, and that in turn makes all the doom-sayers look more and more ridiculous and downright evil in comparison.
As for Lex, well, Lex has already cloned himself, transferred his brain into the clone, and pretended to be a cousin of sorts before (the kryptonite ring he had been wearing gave him cancer, which wasn’t caught before it spread). Honestly, him transferring himself into a female body to evade justice wouldn’t be impossible… though personality-wise I suspect he’d utterly chafe at the results.
@opposablethumbs:
The one big difference between clicking on a link the first time, and going up and hitting return on the URL bar, is that the first one is coming from somewhere and most browsers will always send a ‘Referrer’ line to the web host to indicate where you came from. When you just hit return on the URL bar, there’s no ‘Referrer’ line because you’re just going to the URL directly.
This ‘Referrer’ is also the way a number of image servers identify whether you’re looking at the image from the site itself or from somewhere else, so they can throw up an error to anybody trying to embed their image somewhere else. So something like that is probably what’s going on: if the Referrer line is coming from a host that the plugin on the web server doesn’t recognize, it refuses to show the image.
She is indeed a wonderful person, and funny as hell, too. One of my top two favorite star type people – the other is Cassandra Peterson.
@Elaine
In the continuity where he was made from Luthor’s and Kal-El’s DNA, he is the son of both Kal-El and Lex Luthor’s, and calling him a clone is a misnomer: he’s no more a clone of Kal-El than you are of your mother (or indeed father). In his original continuity, he bears no genetic relationship to Kal-El, nor is he a clone of anyone, despite his surrogate* father**’s claims. In the continuity where he is a clone of an alternate timeline version of Jonathan Kent he is Jonathan Kent’s brother, Kal-El and Lois Lane’s son, and the only version who’s actually a clone.
*Probably, he may also have contributed genetic material to Connor’s conception.
**He probably wouldn’t call himself that, but as the person directly responsible for Connor’s birth and upbringing(such as it was) that’s the appropriate word
Poor Andrew Anglin, trying to keep up a brave front with his joke. Won’t someone think of his predicament. He’s a Nazi on the run from the law. It must be hard to find a romantic companion. Or a sex-with-benefits kind of friend. Or a fling. Or even a peaceful moment alone with just himself.
Ugh is right. Who would want to keep this planet safe for everything that lives here. We must fight those who would fight climate change, not turn them into superheroes.
@Battering Lamb
If it hasn’t happened, then Lois still has a secret folder of Bruce/Clark slashfic that she has written. (She deleted the folder of Clark/Superman slash fiction in deep embarrassment after certain revelations.)
I think Bruce, though, has way too many intimacy issues to actually be with someone as close to him as Clark, though he’s probably more in denial about such feelings for Clark compared to how he rejected any chance at a relationship with Diana. It is noteworthy that Bruce has almost always maintained some sort of distance from romantic partners, usually by keeping one side or the other of his life from them. The only people who get to see the real, complete Batman are his family (Alfred and his kids), Clark, and Diana. (The less said about how things worked out with Selina or Talia, the better.)
Can’t comment on the superhero stuff, but here’s probably going to be more wailing and gnashing of teeth among the “SJWs are ruining movies” contingent . The Hellraiser reboot has Pinhead being played by a trans woman (Jamie Clayton).
I can’t comment on the superhero stuff, as what little I know is only via shallow pop-cultural osmosis… But there’s going to be more wailing and gnashing of teeth among the “SJWs are ruining the media” contingent in the near future, at least when it comes to certain long-running horror franchises. The “Hellraiser” reboot stars a trans woman as Pinhead (Jamie Clayton). One of the main characters (and likely, but not confirmed, final girl) in the 5th “Scream” film is a black lesbian (played by Jasmin Savoy-Brown). The “Chucky” TV series based on the Child’s Play films has an openly gay 14-year-old boy (played by Zackary Arthur) as the unfortunate owner of the titular murderdoll.
Or maybe they won’t; it’s always possible anti-SJW types aren’t usually horror fans and will barely notice. We’ll see.
While quite a lot of horror has always had queer undertones, the big-name franchises have (almost) always kept it ambiguous or subtle enough that it usually flew over the heads of cishets. (The best known exception being Nightmare on Elm Street 2, which was borderline blatant, yet some people still didn’t get it…) Regardless, this is another area where they essentially lost the culture war some time ago, and it probably isn’t obvious to them yet – but it will be, and possibly soon, thanks to one or more of the above-mentioned titles.
…Ignore the first message, something screwed up my computer while I was starting to write it. I thought it was erased completely and there shouldn’t have been anything to post (and I definitely didn’t see any indication of anything having been posted, it didn’t refresh the page or anything) so I’m not sure what happened there.
@Jenora Feuer, thank you! So I’m not just imagining that it makes a difference!
Having come across it accidentally, I was doing this on
muchexactly the same basis as those pigeons under experimental observation who associate a purely coincidental action on their part with getting a grain of maize from a food dispenser which is in fact random, thus giving rise to pigeon “superstition” :-sNow I know that I have serendipitously bumped into an actual food lever. All
your maizeembedded gifs are belong to me! 🙂Wait until they hear about Greek mythology and/or the Norse Loki.
@opposiblethumbs:
As I mentioned, I mostly saw this on image hosting sites where they try to prevent linking from outside sites, mostly a combination of ‘protecting our bandwidth’ and ‘protecting our ability to show you our own ads at the same time’.
Different sites do have different default behaviours if there is no Referrer header, though, so sometimes re-loading the page with the basic URL will make things work if they didn’t before, and sometimes it will make things break even when they worked before.
Thank you for the extra info, @Jenora, much appreciated! (variability in results would be very disconcerting, pigeon-superstition-style, were it not for your warning 🙂 )
Understandable. People find patterns even when there aren’t any.
In this case there actually are hidden variables. While programming websites is not my primary job (thank goodness) I’ve had to tweak web servers being used for configuration on embedded systems enough that I’ve become familiar with some of the back-end just from exposure.
Wow, something we agree on!
?resize=580%2C356&ssl=1
This picture is, uh, doing some questionable things to me.
@Mrs. Obed Marsh
Oh, that happened? Hm, at least people on here admit that it’s sexual assault. But wouldn’t it be rape in this case, as Batman was drugged in order for a woman to concieve a child?
@Elaine The Witch
I already had Spiderman and Deadpool, Darth Vader and a Storm Trooper, and more. Even though I don’t like you, you just added a fantasy onto my list, so thank you for that (if it sounds bad I meant it good, sorry sometimes I can’t write too well)
@Victorious Parasol
Very interesting! Comics do serve an interesting point of view.
I don’t believe in the “patriarchy,” but gay/bi men do get it worse than lesbians/bi women.
Sci-Hub | Attitudes toward Bisexual Men and Women among a Nationally Representative Probability Sample of Adults in the United States. PLOS ONE, 11(10), e0164430 | 10.1371/journal.pone.0164430 (archive.org)
Dodge, Brian, et el. (2016). Attitudestoward Bisexual Men and Women among a Nationally Representative Probability Sample of Adultsin the United States. PLoS ONE, 11(10): 18 pages.
(3,033 respondents for bias against bisexual men, 3,046 for bias against bisexual women, all Nationally representative)
A study also found that gay men are seen more negatively than lesbians in every country in a study (forgot which website specifically I got it from but it was a big news website).
Gay men were 6.18 times more likely than lesbians were to become a victim of a violent hate crime in 2019 in the US, according to FBI statistics.
Gay men were more likely than lesbians to become a victim of a violent hate crime every year in the US according to FBI statistics.
In many countries around the world, only gay men (and not lesbians) are criminalized, in a multitude gay men are criminalized more than lesbians, and in some gay men and lesbians are criminalized equally (but it tends to be applied to gay men more, even then). Not a single country only criminalizes lesbians (and not gay men) or even mostly lesbians.
In the US, gay, bisexual, or just men in a relationship with another man cannot donate blood, unless they’ve been celibate for a year. Previously, it was not allowed at all. Lesbian/bisexual/women in a relationship with another woman and men and women in straight relationships are allowed to donate blood freely.
There’s even more examples.
Oh, hi Acid!
You’re actually dropping a pretty decent article, for once. On topic, even!
I’d like to ask you to ask yourself why society might be harsher towards gay/bi men. Because I believe you. Society is terrible towards gay/bi men.
I don’t think feminism is going to ultimately be your answer. I’m pretty sure most of the terrible directed towards the bi/gay men in my life comes from people with a strong, personal investment in maintaining the status quo, who see my friends as traitors to manliness who need to be shaped back into heteronormativity.
A lot of this pressure comes from the underpinnings of toxic masculinity (or insecure masculinity, if you prefer) and misogyny (because sometimes the anger/insecurity is for being perceived as too feminine for a proper man). Men and women BOTH can be responsible for perpetuating this; I’m not going to lie and say only men try to force other men into their man-box-of-hetero-manliness. Abusive and terrible women exist, just like men, because humans are humans.
But just saying a problem exists and is worse for gay/bi men without teasing out why doesn’t really help? It just starts the “who has it worse” olympics of awful, because no matter how awful things are, someone can find a worse case.
Thanks for dropping a decent link, and being on topic with your long post.
Maybe next time try it without the “Oh, hi Elaine, I still don’t like you” post though. I’m pretty sure they remember you, and remember you not liking them, and pro-tip: having to sneak in a “I still don’t like you” into a compliment or thank you is always gonna look SUPER petty. Regardless of intent.
So maybe don’t do that.