The homoerotic subtext has been woven into the DNA of Batman and Robin since the 1940s, though it hasn’t been quite explored…until now.
Over at Slate, author Glen Weldon unpacks the gay-ish portions of his new book The Caped Crusade: Batman and the Rise of Nerd Culture to prove the uber-gayness of the Bat and his Boy Wonder wasn’t just in your mind.
In fact, a publishing blunder made it painfully explicit right from the start:
The opening page of Robin’s debut story in the April 1940 issue of Detective Comics No. 38 featured an introductory scroll jammed with breathless declamatory copy about “THE SENSATIONAL CHARACTER FIND OF 1940 … ROBIN, THE BOY WONDER!”
But the page’s letterer, tasked with squeezing a hell of a lot of text onto said scroll, unwittingly shoved the words “an” and “ally” so closely together as to effectively elide the space between them. Thus, the first thing readers ever learned about THE SENSATIONAL CHARACTER FIND OF 1940 was that he was someone whom Batman “took under his protecting mantle anally …”
After the Boy Wonder’s parents are murdered by the mob, he’s taken in by Bruce Wayne, setting up what seems like an extraordinary amount of mano a mano leisure time:
How about we take this to the next level?
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Thus young Dick became Bruce Wayne’s ward, and many stories in the ’40s and ’50s began by depicting the man and boy engaged together in some leisure-time pursuit. Again and again, however, said tableaux stubbornly bore a romantic, lavender-scented shading.
And this happened:
Take 1942’s Batman No. 13, which saw Bruce and Dick Owl-and-Pussycatting it up in a rowboat on a pond in a Gotham City park. Just the two of them. At night. Or the panel of World’s Finest No. 59 from 1952, in which naked Bruce and Dick lie next to one another, languidly bronzing their brawny physiques under matching sun lamps.
Oh yeah, in one legendary panel, the duo even woke up in bed together:
Batman No. 84 hit newsstands in April 1954, during Wertham’s Senate testimony. Its story “Ten Nights of Fear” begins with one of the most infamous panels in Batman’s 77-year history: Bruce and Dick waking up in bed together. “Morning,” reads the narration. “And it begins like any other routine morning in the lives of millionaire Bruce Wayne and his ward, Dick Grayson …” We are thus explicitly told that this sharing of Bruce’s bed is common Bat-practice.
It’s an enlightening read and we encourage you head on over to Slate and check out the whole thing. Who knew the 40’s and 50’s were so gay?
Antony Nguyen
I knew it lol
bottom250
I remember fantasizing about batman and robin growing up. George Clooney having his way with Chris O’donnell.
Glücklich
Don’t forget SNL’s “Ambiguously Gay Duo”?
trell
As far as Burt Ward’s biography Boy Wonder: My Life in Tights, goes, him and Adam West practically did everybody but eachother in the heyday of the TV series.
I guess there are still a few pages that didn’t make the final edit!
Billy Budd
I knew this already. I love boy(18yo plus)-man couples. My boyfriend is 23 and he makes me feel younger and brings youthful joy to my life. There is nothing like it.
Jeffrey Morgan
Is it kind of creepy that Batman makes all his boyfriends use the same name, just so he never screams out the wrong name in bed?
Jeremy Lyle McClees
JamJewel
There are tons of strips with double entendres; I have collected a couple over the years….
Glücklich
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZZ5LpwO-An4&nohtml5=False
Hermes
I loved batman and robin when I was a kid. In my heart I always thought – even at 7 and 8 – that they were like me. I couldn’t put it in words beyond that, but as I got a little older I realized that they were gay and lovers and it made me feel wonderful. They were the ONLY DC comic I ever liked. All other comics I was fond of were Marvel.
Maude
I love it!
Captain Obvious
Yeah lets dream about obvious pedophilia being gay subtext and act like it’s not disturbing at all. The age difference was large enough for “Dick” to be adopted by Bruce. I mean if you want to look like a pedo by all means fap to this… otherwise let it rest.
Bob LaBlah
I was a comic book fanatic when I was a kid and even in my early teens after coming out I never saw, felt nor expected to see a gay angle between the two. It looked to me like what it was meant to be, an older guy mentoring a kid in the right direction. Why the gay community insisted they were going “south” on each other is beyond me. It had to be the cape and tights that did it. The only character that I was SURE was gay was Prince Namor, the Submariner. He had a big Q in the middle of his forehead that meant Queen. Many people today don’t even know of his existence.
Not to get off topic but Warner Brothers has stopped dead short of calling Batman vs Superman a flop and are rethinking their DC movie lineup. I thought the movie was ok. Not a blockbuster but ok. Ben Affleck looks more of a science teacher no matter what movie he is in. He was the wrong choice for that role and I think they NOW know it. As soon as the production was announced an online petition was started to keep him out of the role but the studio refused to listen. I bet they wish they had listened now.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=garyyBRm6fg
Truth_from_Hudson_NY
Mano a mano does NOT mean man to man…it means hand to hand….close but no cigar.