GLR July-August 2023

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

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