GLR July-August 2023
Animated publication
G L R k
July–August 2023
Fantasy Lands
A NDREW W HITE We’re Heroes, We’re Queeroes... H ANNAH M ATTHEWS Fanfiction and the Omegaverse A SHTON C ORSETTI Romancing the Avatar A ISLIN N EUFELDT Grindr Leaves the City Behind
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Time after time, in defiance of our expectations, Eldot surprises us with his imaginative turns and events ... an absorbing, compelling, sentient and comprehensive addition to the story of Julian Forrest, a young man who makes the world better.” — QRSReview
The Gay & Lesbian Review July–August 2023 • VOLUME XXX, NUMBER 4 WORLDWIDE
C O N T E N T S
Editor-in-Chief and Founder R ICHARD S CHNEIDER J R . WORLDWIDE The Gay & Lesbian Review ® PO Box 180300, Boston, MA 02118
Fantasy Lands
F E A T U R E S
Literary Editor M ARTHA E. S TONE Poetry Editor D AVID B ERGMAN Associate Editors S AM D APANAS P AUL F ALLON J EREMY F OX M ICHAEL S CHWARTZ Contributing Writers R OSEMARY B OOTH D ANIEL A. B URR C OLIN C ARMAN A NNE C HARLES A LFRED C ORN A LLEN E LLENZWEIG C HRIS F REEMAN P HILIP G AMBONE M ATTHEW H AYS A NDREW H OLLERAN I RENE J AVORS J OHN R. K ILLACKY C ASSANDRA L ANGER A NDREW L EAR D AVID M ASELLO
We’re Heroes, We’re Queeroes... 10 A NDREW W HITE
Gay Robin, bi Superman, and the rainbow cast of DC Comics
Romancing the Avatar 13 A SHTON C ORSETTI
Video games let you try on new identities in your quest for love
Fanfiction and the Omegaverse 17 H ANNAH M ATTHEWS
Whole new sexualities are permissible, but old patterns persist
Grindr Leaves the City Behind 19 A ISLIN N EUFELDT
Beyond the metropolis, Grindr and Scruff play a more urgent role
A Renaissance Man in Victorian Times 21 A LLEN E LLENZWEIG
John Addington Symonds used the Greeks to broach a taboo topic
From Russia, with Love 24 A NDREW H OLLERAN
A straight line of anti-gay oppression runs from Stalin to Putin
Joseph Hansen’s Pre-Stonewall World 28 N ILS C LAUSSON
For characters in his detective novels, being gay was no big deal
R E V I E W S
Michael Denneny — On Christopher Street 30 D ENNIS A LTMAN Howard Pollack — Samuel Barber: His Life and Legacy 31 R ICHARD M. B ERRONG Colm Tóibín — A Guest at the Feast: Essays 32 J EAN R OBERTA Venus Khoury-Ghata — Marina Tsvetaeva: To Die in Yelabuga 33 A NNE C HARLES João Gilberto Noll — Hugs and Cuddles 34 P HILIP G AMBONE
F ELICE P ICANO J AMES P OLCHIN J EAN R OBERTA V ERNON R OSARIO Contributing Artist C HARLES H EFLING Publisher S TEPHEN H EMRICK Webmaster B OSTON W EB G ROUP WebEditor A LLISON A RMIJO ______________________________ Board of Directors A RT C OHEN ( CHAIR ) E DUARDO F EBLES R OBERT H ARDMAN D AVID L A F ONTAINE J IM J ACOBS A NDREW L EAR R ICHARD S CHNEIDER , J R . ( PRESIDENT ) M ARTHA E. S TONE T HOMAS Y OUNGREN ( TREASURER ) S TEWART C LIFFORD (C HAIREMER .) W ARREN G OLDFARB ( SR . ADVISOR EMER .)
Stevan M. Weine — BestMinds 36 H ILARY H OLLADAY Edmund White — The Humble Lover 37 C ARR H ARKRADER Danny Ramadan — The Foghorn Echoes 38 T HOMAS K EITH Alice Winn — In Memoriam: A Novel 40 C HARLES G REEN Raúl Gómez Jattin — Almost Obscene 41 D AVID B ERGMAN
Aleksandar Hemon — The World and All That It Holds: A Novel 41 E LAINE M ARGOLIN Poetry by Irena Klepfisz, Stéphane Bouquet, Christopher Stephen Soden 42 D ALE B OYER Martin Duberman — Reaching Ninety 43 H.N.H IRSCH B RIEFS 44 Noam Gonick and Michael Walker, directors — Purple City 46 D AVID T ACIUM Laura Poitras, director — All the Beauty and the Bloodshed 50 S TEVEN F. D ANSKY
P O E M S & D E P A R T M E N T S
C ORRESPONDENCE 5 I N M EMORIAM — Michael Denneny, Gay Publishing Pioneer
6 D AVID G ROFF
BTW 8 R ICHARD S CHNEIDER J R . A UTHOR ’ S P ROFILE — Manuel Muñoz’ Stories of Immigrant Survival 16 N EIL E LLIS O RTS A RTIST ’ S P ROFILE — Charles Busch Takes a Selfie 26 M ATTHEW H AYS P OEM — “For October” 35 K AIT A USTIN C ULTURAL C ALENDAR 45 P OEM — “Facts about Assamese Jewelry” 47 M AYOOKH B ARUA A RTIST ’ S P ROFILE — Allen Frame: Toward a Photography of Depth 48 I RENE J AVORS
The Gay & Lesbian Review/ WORLDWIDE ® (formerly The Harvard Gay & Lesbian Review, 1994-1999) is published bimonthly (six times per year) by The Gay & Lesbian Review, Inc., a 501(c)(3) educational corporation located in Boston, Mass. Subscriptions: Call 847-504-8893. Rates : U.S.: $41.70 per year (6 issues). Canada and Mexico: $51.70(US). All other countries: $61.70(US). All non-U.S. copies are sent via air mail. Back issues available for $12 each. All correspondence is sent in a plain envelope marked “G&LR.” © 2023 by The Gay & Lesbian Review, Inc. All rights reserved. W EBSITE : www.GLReview.org • S UBSCRIPTIONS : 847-504-8893 • A DVERTISING : 617-421-0082 • S UBMISSIONS : Editor@GLReview.org
July–August 2023
3
Summer Getaway: ‘Fantasy Lands’ FROM THE EDITOR
T ODAY’S digital technologies have created possibilities for whole new worlds of immersion and experience, and with them a panoply of subcultures organized around these sites. Under the rubric of “Fantasy Lands,” let us visit a few of these milieux with relevance to LGBT life and culture. This is somewhat new territory for this magazine, which is usually concerned with historical themes and the arts, and it’s worth noting that all four theme articles were written by first time contributors. I suspect all four are on the younger side, as things like LGBT comic books and video games and fanfic tion are of relatively recent origin and may or may not be fa miliar to readers of a hard-copy magazine such as TheG&LR (notwithstanding our digital edition). One could argue that all mythological systems are operat ing in the realm of fantasy. What cyber technologies allow is an immersion in these manufactured spaces and the ability to participate in the action. The clearest example of this dynamic can be found in online video games, which allow the user to be come a character in the story with powers and attributes that may bear little resemblance to real life. Ashton Corsetti argues here that romantic video games, which are all about finding true love, allow users to try on alternate genders and sexual orientations and to explore new possibilities that may become a rehearsal for real life. An on-line genre for writers is that of fanfiction, which
starts with a well-known fictional universe, such as that of Harry Potter, and allows writers to adopt a persona and write this character into a storyline in concert with the other users. While the sky’s the limit on sexual and gender possibilities, Hannah Matthews laments that most people have a stubborn habit of settling into stereotypical patterns of gay and lesbian roles and relationships. The popularity of superhero comics obviously predates the Internet, but the arrival of comics online has turned the super heroes into superstars whose antics and orientations are richly discussed. Andrew White offers a brief history of LGBT super heroes in DC Comics and the explosion in their number in recent years. After all, the creators of comics are always looking for novel angles and abilities, and it’s heartening to know that being gay can sometimes be a superpower in its own right. Finally, Grindr and Scruff are apps with which readers of this magazine may be more familiar. While they’re undoubt edly popular with gay men (mostly) of all ages, Aislin Neufeldt reminds us that there’s a decided bias toward youthful users on both apps (especially Grindr). To call them “fantasy lands” may be a stretch, but not much of one. Neufeldt focuses on the rural Midwest, where users talk a lot about “honesty” and “being real,” but that might be the biggest fantasy of all in these highly managed and manicured environments. R ICHARD S CHNEIDER J R .
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TheG & LR
4
Correspondence
Sargent Isn’t So Hard to Figure Out To the Editor: Regarding Andrew Holleran’s essay, “The Inscrutable John Singer Sargent” (March-April 2023), I wonder why he finds the artist’s sexuality to be “inscrutable.” Since when is a smoking gun necessary to come to a logical conclusion? Sargent died almost a hundred years ago and lived at a time when homosexuality was considered a grievous crime. Any indication that a person had same-sex attractions could destroy their reputation, so it’s no wonder Sargent was circumspect. The incident in volving Madame X is proof that he hated negative publicity and was reluctant to share his private life, even with close associates. Still, he couldn’t resist choosing subject matter that could have landed him in big trouble. However respectable his public image, he kept pushing the envelope in his sensual portrayals of male subjects, such as his portrait Dr. Pozzi at Home .His homo erotic interests are also evident in his studies of nude males, which he kept in his posses sion and were only discovered after his death. Even then, it took almost a hundred years for art historians to acknowledge their homoerotic character, something that a few experts are unwilling to accept even today. Jeffrey Paszko, Haverhill, MA
women. So why wasn’t anyone talking about Caillebotte’s fascination with men? Take his Portrait of Paul Hugo —how could anyone fail to see the emotional investment that the painter clearly had in his subject? So, I felt a little prescient when I read the G&LR article and it supported my early suspicions about this amazing artist. Rebecca Jensen, Oakland CA To the Editor: I enjoyed Jim Van Buskirk’s piece on Gustave Caillebotte. I think any gay man looking at The Floor Scrapers would imme diately feel a kinship with the creator of this painting. In contrast, Caillebotte’s Nude ona Couch , showing a female nude covering her face with her arm and her breast with a hand strikes me as the opposite of erotic. I find the treatment of the pattern of the material on the couch more interesting than the nude. The painting is in Minneapolis, where I saw Caillebotte’s most famous painting, Paris Street, Rainy Day , in 1969. At the time, I wondered: “Who is this painter, and why have I never heard of him?” David Brin, Sonoma, CA
A Welcome Reassessment of Caillebotte To the Editor: This is to thank you for Jim Van Buskirk’s essay, “Straightwashing Gustave Caillebotte,” in the March-April 2023 issue. I was privileged at age eleven (in 1965) to see Paris Street, Rainy Day at the Art Insti tute of Chicago. I fell deeply in love. Each time the family went to the A.I.C, I would sit and look at the painting for as long as my parents would allow. I was a budding artist and a budding lesbian. I remember being enthralled with the man in the foreground, the swing of his hips, the details in the clothing. I remember thinking the woman in the dark coat was uninteresting. Years later, I was in San Francisco and went to the Impressionist exhibit that Mr. Van Buskirk discussed, where I saw The Floor Scrapers for the first time—also huge, also incredible. My first thought was that Caillebotte must have been gay. I got Kirk Varnedoe’s book on Caillebotte (1987) and scoured it for information, but of course it wasn’t very forthcoming about the many paintings of men, despite the fact that most of the Impressionists loved painting
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5
IN MEMORIAM
Michael Denneny, Gay Publishing Pioneer D AVID G ROFF
Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic , by Randy Shilts. But Michael’s impact extended beyond the books that he edited with such finesse, intelligence, and care. Through his relentless efforts at St. Martin’s, he created a new publishing model that showed how books targeted to queer readers, espe cially gay men, could a find large, enthusiastic readership and be published profitably. Before him, nobody believed that queer books could make money. He proved they could. Michael worked at a press that made its money through pub lishing myriad books to precise readerships, and queer books thrived in that environment. But this kind of publishing was not easy. Michael was lucky to get a job and keep a job as an out gay man at a time when most gay male editors didn’t publish anything in any shade of lavender. He took risks; he worked the system. It was an often exhausting effort that he excelled at. In our current era, when the issue of sustainability still looms large for all writers, especially our writers, and in an age of corporate consolidations and winner-take-all publishing, his strategies for publishing effectively and profitably are ones we should all look at as we seek a sustainable publishing culture.
The following is adapted from a tribute given at the Publishing Triangle Awards ceremony, April 27, 2023, at the New School in New York City. M ICHAEL DENNENY’S VISION and dedication in form and define how our books get published, find readers, and create culture. He died on April 15th. I’m so glad he got to hold in his hands his own new book On Christopher Street: Life, Sex, and Death after Stonewall [re viewed in this issue]. Life, sex, death, Stonewall, Christopher Street: Michael knew about all of these things. As a person, as an intellectual, and as a participant in the gay life of New York, he knew a lot about the life we’ve been making for ourselves; he helped bring to articulation the life we led then and lead today. And he certainly knew about sex, and love, writing a book of inter views with gay male lovers, living the life of an urban, post Stonewall gay man. He would even go to the baths on his lunch
When I came into publishing, Michael was already a major figure, a formidable but always genial and engaging one. He was my model, and to some degree my competitor, when I was an editor at Crown and he was at St. Martin’s. He and I shared authors, including Paul Monette, and traded notes and notions about pub lishing strategies. When we both became independent editors, Michael was a sup portive colleague. It would be wonderful to lunch with him in his book-lined apart ment on West 83rd Street. He was an amazing man: generous, loquacious, wearing his considerable intellect lightly, engaged with change, uttering wise and sometimes sardonic remarks in his hearty Rhode Island accent, his face spreading
hour, which I as a young editor took careful note of as a workday opportunity. He knew about death, too. Michael came to New York in the 1970s and lived to endure, survive, and chronicle the scourge of AIDS. Like so many gay men and lesbians in New York, he cared deeply for people with AIDS that he loved and lost. His lost authors are their own pantheon. And surely he knew about Stonewall, naming his series of LGBTQ books Stonewall Inn Editions. His career and sensibility essentially spanned the entire fifty-plus years since the Riots launched an enduring, culture-making activism. Michael was a founding editor of the magazine Christopher Street. It hasbeen
Michael Denneny, 1988. Estate of Robert Giard.
into a wide smile, and smoking those incessant Carltons. Sturdy, enduring, a survivor, an executor, a chronicler, it seemed like he would be here for us forever, a mountain, a har bor, a lighthouse. Michael’s impact transcends the specifics of the books he edited, published, and wrote. In the words of writer Jonathan Silin, “through his many projects he helped to make our lives legible to others and, perhaps more importantly, to ourselves.” The great mission of LGBTQ society and culture over the last 55 years has been to bring our identity and community to ar ticulation—to create the words, the legibility, without which we wouldn’t know ourselves. He helped give us those words that shape our selves and our societies. Thank you, Michael, for all you’ve given, for all you’ve helped to make happen. David Groff, a poet and independent book editor in NYC, is the author, most recently, of the poetry collection Live in Suspense .
said that Christopher Street was The New Yorker magazine for queer people, but I prefer to think of The New Yorker as the Christopher Street for straight people. The writers he brought to light remain the luminaries of the post-Stonewall literary movement. During his long tenure at St. Martin’s Press, Michael pub lished such books as For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enu f, by Ntozake Shange, and Ju dith Thurman’s biography of Isak Dinesen, as well as such LGBTQ titles as novels by Christopher Davis, Larry Duplechan, John Fox, Ethan Mordden, Douglas Sadownick, Edmund White, and many more. He also brought out important works of non fiction such as Reports from the Holocaust: The Story of an AIDS Activist , by Larry Kramer, The Soul Beneath the Skin: The Unseen Hearts and Habits of Gay Men by David Nimmons, po etry collections by Paul Monette, Lesbianism Made Easy , by Helen Eisenbach, and the landmark And the Band Played On:
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like a loser all the way, with DeSantis a punchline in his feath erweight match with Mickey Mouse. But the war metaphor isn’t quite right; it’s really about DeSantis seeking ways to take re venge on Disney for its opposition to his “Don’t say gay” bill last year. And he’s been positively Ahab-like in this quest. His attempt to deprive Disney of its special zoning status was thwarted by a simple change in the bylaws by Disney’s board, leaving Ron a laughingstock. His latest gambit is a proposal to build a state prison on public land right next to Disney World. How exactly that harms Disney isn’t entirely clear. They would probably just turn it into an attraction: “See the Great Dungeon from Rapunzel’s Tower after dark!” Hypocrisy Watch This heading could apply to so many of the items that we feature here. And yet, the word “hypocrisy” does n’t quite capture the spectacle of men who promote a form of anti-LGBT hatred while engaging in precisely the behavior that they’re demonizing. Perhaps the word “mendacity” would suf fice, but only as uttered by Big Daddy in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof , with complete disgust. Here are four cases in point: 1. Dateline Texas Take, for example, former Texas state Rep. Bryan Slaton (R), a vocally anti-LGBT politician whose cause célèbre was the plague of adults “grooming” minors for sex. The term is a right-wing dog whistle, though it’s not at all clear why they attribute the practice of “grooming” to liberals. Sla ton is only the latest in a string of conservative politicians to be caught engaging in precisely this form of behavior. His offense was to invite a nineteen-year-old staff member up to his flat
That’s What You Saw? The host of The Michael Knowles Show on the right-wing site DailyWire devoted a show to in forming his audience that there’s a new kind of porn out there that uses hypnosis to turn cis men into trans women. The eerie power of this porn is such that it doesn’t just entertain the pas sive viewer but makes him want to leap into action to change his gender identity. But what force could cast such a spell? Knowles admitted that he’s so afraid of being hypnotized by these apps that he didn’t conduct any firsthand research, and it showed. Luckily, his guest was the very person who had made this discovery, one Genevieve Gluck of Redux magazine, who labeled it “hypnosis porn” and explained that it works through the repetition of insults spoken by a narrator who says things like “You’re a dumb bimbo slut; you want to be a girl,” over and over. Um, we hate to break it to Ms. Gluck, who seriously does n’t grasp men and porn: these are simply sites that cater to that small subset of men who get off on verbal humiliation (and the porn, of course). No one is hypnotizing anyone. Ahab in Florida It looks like the arch-nemesis of LGBT rights, Ron DeSantis, is running for president, but in a way that’s re assuringly klutzy so far. Going to war with Disney World looks
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and ply her with alcohol—the universal grooming tool, one supposes—culminating in a sexual assault. Slaton was forced to resign from the Texas House but did so without contrition, calling the charges against him “outrageous.” Apparently, all the talk about “grooming” was supposed to apply only to same sex liaisons, as his speeches in the legislature make clear. And yet, the crime that will probably land him in the slammer is that of serving alcohol to a minor. 2. Dateline Florida Next up is one Michael Dolce, the founder of a Florida lobby group called “Protect Our Children,” who was recently arrested on charges of—you guessed it—down loading child pornography, including 1,997 images and five videos of kiddie porn. To be fair, Dolce’s cause was a legiti mate one: protecting minors from sexual abuse by adults, to which end he lobbied for an extension of the statute of limita tions for victims to come forward. Nevertheless, the extent to which his virtue and his vice coincided is quite remarkable. No doubt some profound psychological conflict was in play— Dolce was himself sexually abused as a child—though it’s still hard to explain why a “child-sized doll” was found in his bed by the police. Come to think of it, this discovery could make for a climactic ending to a modern take on Hitchcock’s Psycho , with a badly abused doll flashing a deathly grin. 3. Dateline D.C. One of the top organizers of the “Stop the Steal” campaign, Ali Alexander, was accused of searching for nude photos of underage boys, triggering an investigation that turned up evidence of sexual predation going back to 2015. While espousing the usual confection of anti-Semitism, racism, and homophobia, Alexander was the main organizer of the Stop the Steal Rally on January 6, 2021. Right-wing activist Milo Yiannopoulos, who claims to be ex-gay, started to release videos and other evidence revealing that Alexander had sexu ally propositioned adult men as well as two teenage boys. Much evidence turned up about his long-term relationship with Aidan Duncan, who was fifteen in 2017, when Alexander got him to send nude photos of himself on the promise of money and an in troduction to Milo; sexual contact would ensue. In these and other exchanges, one is struck by the brazenness with which Alexander demanded nude photos, and eventually sex, in writ ten communications online. Do people still not get that things in The Cloud are forever, and Big Brother is watching? 4. Dateline Florida The author of Florida’s “Don’t say gay” bill, former Rep. Joseph Harding (R), is in big trouble for scamming the government out of hundreds of thousands dur ing the Covid pandemic. Okay, so this case doesn’t exactly fit the “mendacity” model, and maybe it’s just Schadenfreude to bring it up at all, but it is quite a twist of fate that the guy who gave us Florida’s notorious, and really quite fascistic, law finds himself out of the House, having been forced to resign in dis grace, and facing a 35-year prison sentence. And perhaps the twocrimes are linked in a way—by their sheer sleaziness. The “Don’t say gay” law was a cheap trick to rally right-wing sup port, and Harding’s schemes to use Covid to grab fistfuls of government money were the lowest form of opportunism. In making this connection, keep in mind that Harding was among those who said that anyone who opposed the “Don’t say gay” bill was ipso facto a pedophile. July–August 2023
#// %/)&&"& 1)!" &+." /0$$/" /).' 21+ /+!"& $+ 6+ $+ &%1++/
, ,0//0-6/4 G@#<( ? -E$I%H 3'%II%>(5 H$&'@) @9 :H&%@CHI ;@@" =!H)? /%CHI%(& 50&)**")(0-6 3)($1 !@GHC*( ?%(H>> %& # '!$ &%" 9 ESSAY We’re Heroes, We’re Queeroes... A NDREW W HITE I N THE THIRD DECADE of the 21st century, DC Comics superheroes—the subject of many a queer kid’s incipient desires—have burst free of the Kryptonite closet. Batman’s current Robin, Tim Drake, tends to Bat man’s mental health while guarding Gotham and going on his first date with a boy. Aquaman coaches the gay Black son of his enemy Manta to be the next super-steward of the oceans. And Superman and Lois’ bisexual son Jon bears Dad’s name, cape, and responsibilities while Superman père flies to other galaxies. Rainbow flags ripple over Metropolis, Atlantis, and Gotham City, and in the hearts of gay superhero fans everywhere. Whether your Justice League memories are of comics, cartoons, TV, or movies, the origin story of most superheroes is in comic books, and—like muscles in spandex— comics are where queer representa tion dwells and swells today. This is new for us lads; gay women in DC Comics broke the lavender ceiling before we did. Wonder Woman’s bi sexuality was never really hidden, and Batwoman Kathy Kane has been out since 2006—with arcs in Bat woman: Elegy , Batwoman: Rebirth , and a delightful outing in Bomb shells as a Women’s League baseball player with a girlfriend who looks like Lana Turner. Two decades ago, trans lesbians had a promising start at DC when trans writer Rachel Pol lack created Coagula—whose name referenced the alchemical maxim solve et coagula , or “melt and meld,” reminding us that the human body, like metals, can be disassembled and remade to order. Sadly, Coagula’s run was only two years, though she recently made a cameo in DC’s Pride special, one of June 2022’s top-selling comic books. To trace the odysseys of the new boys in the DC gaybor hood—Jon Kent as Superman, Jackson Hyde as Aquaman, and Tim Drake as Robin—three trade paperbacks tell their tales. (For those of you who aren’t genre geeks, trade paperbacks col lect individual comic issues into full stories to satisfy Aris totelian notions of plot, character, and theme.) Your best Andrew White, based in Philadelphia, works in libraries, museums, and sometimes at the zoo. Now and then he publishes a short story. introductions to bisexual Superman and Robin and gay Aqua man are Superman: Son of Kal-El; Aquaman: The Becoming; and DC Pride: Tim Drake Special . Tom Taylor, Brandon Thomas, and Meghan Fitzmartin are the writers here, and each tells a story far better than, say, the recent crop of DC movies (though Henry Cavill’s adamantine beauty aside, that may be setting the bar a bit low). Jackson Hyde, the Black gay Aqualad-cum-Aquaman in Aquaman: The Becoming, is as fervent, conflicted, and com pelling as James Dean—and handsome beyond the dreams of pornography. Opera fans will find much to like in Aquaman: The Be coming, which would be a perfect li bretto for Verdi in his dynastic melodrama mode ( Il Trovatore , Don Carlos ). As Aquaman-elect, Jackson Hyde struggles to resolve the legacy of being the son of a super-villain (Manta) while attempting to unite the kingdoms of Atlantis and Xebel with out damaging the fragile alliances be tween his own Atlantean and Xebeline families. By comparison, Bonnie Prince Charlie had it easy. In DC Pride: Tim Drake Special, DC assembles the development of Tim Drake’s Robin so that fans can read his arc in one place instead of sifting through back issues of Bat man: Urban Legends , where Robin initially came out. Tim Drake is one of many “Robins” to work alongside Batman and the first to be canonically queer. Drake looks like that sweetly bland boy from your hometown that you only learned was bisexual years after you moved away. His presence in Batman’s life is an object lesson on how out queer men erode the patriar Tim Drake as gay Robin has inhabited numerous DC covers.. chal bonds that constrain our straight male friends. When Bruce Wayne becomes more “broody” than usual, Tim intuits that something has “gotten through the kevlar.” A populist mob con fronts Batman; Tim reminds him that he hasn’t been himself lately and counsels self-care. Instead, Batman shocks him—and the reader—by defusing the mob leader’s anger with a hug. Solve et coagula ; DC’s renovated queer supermen illustrate how the liberation of one group liberates all. But when jingoism and hierarchy are seen as integral to na tional identity, liberation can be threatening. One crack in patri archy’s wall allows all manner of wokeness to scrabble through. TheG & LR 10 In Superman: Son of Kal-El, Jon Kent’s lanky Superman, Jr. is vulnerable and earnest as he struggles to wrestle his father’s legacy of neutral goodness into activism. Friend Damian Wayne, son of Batman, offers our hero perspective: “I get what’s bug ging you,” Wayne says, punching a ninja, “it’s easy to punch a ninja. It’s harder to punch the climate crisis, inequality, the ero sion of a free press, and the rise of demagogues.” After seven nin jas are punched, Batman’s son challenges Superman’s son on what he wants the “S” on his chest to mean. “Truth, justice, and a better world,” Kent answers, substituting “better world” for the been bold or brave.” Cain makes a good point. Twenty years ago, he was in an Antarctic maximum-security prison menaced by a giant boa in the direct-to-VHS movie New Alcatraz . DCwould have been bold and brave indeed to retool their flagship charac ters as this masterpiece dominated the world’s attention. Social media critics of queer Superman whined that making new gay characters is fair, but turning existing characters gay is not. It’s thoughtful of them to allow us new heroes (Homo Man? Superfag?), but Superman’s fetching spit curl and gym-bur nished physique appeared far too often in my adolescent fantasy traditional “American way.” With the intro duction of a slightly edited super-motto, every conservative snowflake in the U.S. melted. As Jon Kent became the most notorious of DC’s new “queeroes,” conservatives stam mered to voice outrage without sounding too life to be wholly accidental. My Superman has always been bi-curious. After hearing the plaintive pleas of conservatives for the cre ation of new queer characters before tarnish ing the hetero heroes of the past, I searched for their approving reaction to Apollo and Midnighter (essentially, alternative Super Like muscles in spandex, comics are where queer representation dwells and swells today. bigoted. “Hypocrisy,” you’ll recall, derives from the Greek word for playacting. The editor of National Review Online summedup right-wing cloaking devices for anti-queer bigotry in two hard working and surely underpaid sentences: “A character being gay doesn’t generate the shock value it did decades ago.” Ergo “woke Superman [is only] a boring and lazy way to generate headlines.” Mainstream crypto-bigots reheated the same luke warm talking points. Former TV Superman and current stunt pundit Dean Cain joined the yawners’ club on Fox and Friends by noting that if DC had premiered gay versions of its most iconic superheroes “twenty years ago, perhaps that would have man and Batman, in love) when they were introduced 25 years ago, in 1998, as two new characters. Alas, but not surprisingly, I found no such positive response. Apollo is a hero in the Kal-El vein—an original queer Su perman two decades before Jon Kent, with wavy platinum locks and a white jumpsuit that Siegfried and Roy would have envied. Apollo’s intermittent boyfriend, now husband, Midnighter— with his black hood and salacious smile—is what Batman would be if his id escaped the stranglehold of his superego. I had not read Apollo and Midnighter over their first twenty years as mainstream super-queeroes but caught up with the pair July–August 2023 11 through trade paperbacks. In 2016’s Midnighter and Apollo , Apollo takes a backseat to his charismatic husband—yet even with the dashing and mercurial Midnighter in the starring role, I confess I found this book dull. Midnighter’s odyssey through hell to rescue Apollo from the demon Neron is a lifeless retread of every infernal cliché of the comics genre. Nevertheless, I am happy to report that Apollo and Midnighter are unmistakably sex-positive. Midnighter, when separated from Apollo, enjoys hookups with other men, and if I’m reading the image right, takes as good as he gives. Who doesn’t love an amoral murder happy Dionysian vers/bottom? Though livelier than Midnighter and Apollo, solo Mid nighter volumes Midnighter: Out and Midnighter: Hard , from 2016, are confusing for readers unfamiliar with Midnighter’s backstory. Nevertheless, I adored the shot of our hero’s Bat symbol briefs in a heap of condom wrappers after an assigna tion, and will keep an eye out for more Midnighter books. No Bat-symbol briefs have been flung by juddering bed frames occupied by Jon Kent, Jackson Hyde, or Tim Drake in their comics as yet, but if the new queer Superman, Aquaman, and Robin have been more demure than Midnighter, each has a charming male love interest. Echoing his dad’s taste in journal istic romance, Jon Kent’s boyfriend is Jay Nakamura, an inves tigative reporter. Nakamura’s sporty magenta hair has been misread as “pink” by most writers, and for traditionalist ones, it’s another reason to be scandalized by the gender-subversive shenanigans at DC Comics. Nakamura was genetically modi fied against his will by the dictator of his island home Gamorra (not Gomorrah), making him impervious to any conceivable physical threat. “I don’t need you,” he tells Kent, “I’m the one person in the world you don’t have to worry about.” This in version of the awed-mortal-meets-superhero trope startles with its ingenuity. From Cervantes to Coltrane, the ability to trans form a familiar genre into something new has been one of art’s greatest delights, and this holds for popular as well as for “high” art. The waistline of the boyfriend of Jackson Hyde—the ap prentice Aquaman whose ink and pen allure I’ve compared to that of an opera tenor, Hollywood pin-up, or stag film stud—is another transformative surprise. Hyde’s sweetheart Ha’wea is a husky Atlantean lad who might fit into our gay zoological tax onomy as a bear cub—or, given his aquatic habitat, a seal pup. Jackson and Ha’wea exchange a look of fervent devotion while twined in each other’s arms on a full page of Aquaman: The Be coming issue #5. Jackson has the Apollonian figure of a comic book hero or coked-up circuit boy, while Ha’wea has the build of a Sears catalog “husky” model. Robin’s Tim Drake is the only new queer superhero who’s had to retread the cliché of rescuing a paramour. In this episode, Robin’s beau Bernard gets in a few punches of his own—even after escaping the sacrificial altar of a sadomasochistic cult. “I’ve been training,” he tells Tim—decked out in Robin gear—as the two face off against a larger numbers of foes. “You don’t have to fight on your own.” As Robin (Tim) and Bernard fight their way out of an ambush, Bernard mentions that one regret he’ll have if they don’t survive is that he wasn’t able to finish his date with Tim (Robin). Wheels turn in Robin’s head. Not only was he on a date with a boy (a date interrupted by the aforementioned cult), it strikes him that he’d like to continue this date. On the next page, Tim—or Robin in civvies—knocks on Bernard’s door, and the two arrange to enjoy the rest of a now unambigu ous date. If this scenario seems far-fetched, consider the hetero patriarchal programming from which each of us has fought to free ourselves, often with the help of friends and lovers. The cover of Tim Drake: Robin #6 (February 2023) gives us Robin and Bernard enjoying an open-mouth kiss, and another fissure snakes up the concrete edifice of American homophobia. LGBT people looking to renew a youthful romance with DC superheroes would be well-served to explore Tom Taylor’s Su perman : Son of Kal-El ; Brandon Thomas’s Aquaman: The Be coming ; and Meghan Fitzmartin’s DC Pride: Tim Drake Special . Each is beautifully written, and each feels like a dif ferent genre—from Technicolor coming-of-age ( Kal-El ) to baroque melodrama ( Aquaman ) to heartfelt noir ( TimDrake ). Comic book art is a collectivist cooperative of inkers, pencil ers, colorists, and cover artists, and while space forbids me to credit every artist involved in the production of these volumes, John Timms draws Kal-El with wit, Belén Ortega pencils Tim Drake with heart, and Aquaman’ s throng of artists somehow creates consistent characters and a unified æsthetic. So, enjoy. The gauzy but seemingly indissoluble membrane separating our adolescent dreams from expression in print is torn forever. The only reasonable criticism of the new queer su perheroes is that Superman’s son doesn’t sport his red undies on the outside but slides into them before donning his blue leo tard. When the ruddy glow of Superman’s well-packed briefs no longer warms the sky over Metropolis, perhaps America’s cultural landscape really has become a woke wasteland. “Cary Grant takes acid. Fiction ensues.” Los Angeles Times Town & Country Pick of the Month Oprah Daily Best Novel Based on a True Story “ The Acrobat matches its graceful, stylish subject in style and grace. Delaney has both captured a man we know and given us a character by whom we are constantly surprised.” Darin Strauss , bestselling author of TheQueen of Tuesday: A Lucille Ball Story Turtle Point Press www.turtlepointpress.com Available everywhere books are sold TheG & LR 12 ESSAY Romancing the Avatar A SHTON C ORSETTI T HE MAIN CATALYST for my switch from playing mostly female characters to living vic ariously through male characters must have been when I was accidentally forwarded a lesbian story arc in Dragon Age II . In the 2011 game, you play as Hawke—a human refugee who is soon caught up in the social, political, and magical struggles of the city where they now live. Most of the storyline is already predetermined for players, except that they can choose Hawke’s first name, gender, appearance, and class at the start, followed by any dialog options that appear throughout the game’s quests. Along the way, players meet non-playable characters who will join Hawke’s party, fight in battles, unlock unique dialog op tions, and weigh in on story beats. Depending on the players’ ac tions, Hawke’s companions will view them either favorably or not, which will impact the storyline and—as I would soon find out—open opportunities for monogamous romance. As a young adolescent who had not yet started to question his sexuality, I was stunned by the experience of romancing my female Hawke with a female party member. The idea of gay and lesbian people existing was no surprise to me, but the fact that I had initiated a same gender romance in a video game—despite knowing that both characters have different gender identities from my own—affected me very differently than did the passive experi ence of, say, witnessing a gay kiss on TV or film. My actions determined the course of this digital romance, a scenario that made me wonder whether those virtual actions had revealed an unknown, inchoate desire. Moments like these reveal how formative video games have been to my queer identity—albeit in ways that the developers, or I, may not have intended. After this first foray, I would still need more time to discover how playing as a male character seeking proxy same-gender relationships would feel more nat ural than playing a female in search of a man. R OMANCE O PTIONS N EEDED IN V IDEO G AMES Today, I pursue games that offer complete role-play freedom within sexually and socially diverse universes, allowing me to get lost in compelling, nonlinear storylines thanks to their strate gic designs. However, even as I play titles that are lauded for their LGBT representation, I can’t help but feel dissatisfied. For a medium that can provide freedom and relief to people on the margins, most mainstream and indie games still create experi Ashton Corsetti, a writer interested in narrative design, technical com munication, and digital rhetoric, works in business-to-business mar keting and public relations for media and IT organizations. ences that do not feel organically queer. I believe that video games, with their capacity for nonlinear and self-directed sto ries, should be the perfect vehicle for representing a commu nity marked by subversion and liminality. This belief leads me to wonder why this inauthenticity persists, and from there, why in-game romance matters, and how video games in this genre operate. Evidence shows that even straight-identifying players some times use video games as a conceptual space in which to “try on” different gender and sexual presentations, albeit for slightly different reasons. In “Gaming on Romance,” an article by social scientist Christine Tomlinson, interviews with straight men in dicate that some will switch their character’s orientation or gen der for the sake of more in-depth gameplay. Tomlinson suggests that because men are expected to be stoic and avoid feminine presentations, they cannot openly enjoy romantic media, lead ing them to use romantic storylines in video games to overcome these restrictions. I can imagine how this ability to break from heteronormative constraints could bring relief to people who are questioning their sexuality or gender identity. found that loneliness—not low self-esteem or poor life satisfac tion per se—is significantly correlated with wanting to play ro mantic games. They also found that those who wanted to play such games hoped to develop their relationship skills. For LGBT people who are closeted or constrained by social, cultural, or po litical circumstances, the psychological pangs of loneliness are even stronger. Having romantic options in video games may pro vide these players with some emotional interaction, even if it’s with a fictional character and only for a short time. To be fair, video games do not guarantee complete self-dis covery, let alone security in coming out. But they can be a cat alyst for people who have just started some form of questioning. Moreover, as these studies have shown, having multiple options for romantic role play—from several gender and sexual per spectives—may help people of all orientations to find empathy while being critical of dominant social systems. H ETERONORMATIVE S TORY S TRUCTURES The gaming community uses the term “playersexual” to de scribe characters of any gender who have no explicit sexual ori entation but are nonetheless romanceable. In essence, all In addition to defying societal norms, peo ple may explore fictionalized romance in video games for deeply psychological rea sons. One of these is the desire to initiate real world relationships. In “What Factors Attract People to Play Romantic Video Games?” Mayu Koike et al. surveyed 281 students at a Japanese university after they watched an ad vertisement for romantic video games. They Video games can be a catalyst for people who have just started some form of questioning, providing multiple options for romantic role play. July–August 2023 13
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