Gayscape #1 – Super Queers In The Closet: Who is Gay in Superheroes?

Which comic book characters are secretly gay? This has been a favorite topic of gay comic book fans since long before there was an internet to speculate endlessly about such matters. As a young comic book reader, specifically of DC and Marvel books, I looked for any subtle clues as a gay youth that one of my heroes was like me. And by “like me” I didn’t mean 12 years old and Hispanic, I meant “also likes dick”. Speaking of Dick, let’s get started.

BIG MAYBE’S

#1 ROBIN

Robin was my first guess. He’s a lot of people’s first guess (my Robin was Dick Grayson and not Jason todd or Tim Drake – just to get my age out of the way here). He’s got a lot of pretty loud warning signs going on here. The loudest one, though, other than following around a father figure in close to nothing, was his outfit. He had that flamboyantly colored outfit.

Gay Evidence (Gayvidence? Is that too gay/cheesy?…meh…) Gayvidence:

Plus his name was Dick, for fuck’s sake. Dick. DICK.

Soon enough, though, he was butched up to the hetero masses.

So much for Dick.

#2 COLOSSUS

My next suspect was Colossus from X-Men.

Gayvidence:

Anyhoo, eventually Colossus hooked up with several other women, and that was that…but how butch were they?…hmmm….

#3 THE HUMAN TORCH

 

Then of course there is always Johnny Storm, AKA the Human Torch of the Fantastic Four.

Gayvidence:

But as it turns out, Johnny eventually married. So I guess he really was straight after all, just like every overcompensating man that gets married…oh wait…hmmm….

 

Out!

So most of the heroes that I was hoping would turn out to be as queer as a three dollar bill either didn’t work out or the jury is still out on them. That doesn’t mean that beings in the Marvel and DC Universes can’t be secretly gay. In fact, there is actually strong evidence that some long-standing characters might be legitimately among the crowd who like to have some sausage for breakfast. Some almost even came out of the closet. So, since we’re not measuring these heroes’ gayness (cause that is such a straight thing to do), let’s start with the Golden Age of Comics, and work our way towards the present…

 

GAY HEROES THROUGH THE AGES!!!

#1 DOCTOR MID-NITE

You think Marvel’s Daredevil was the world’s first blind super hero? Nope! That particular honor goes to DC’s Golden Age “Mystery Man” Doctor Mid-Nite. First created in 1941, Dr. Charles McNider was a physician who was blinded during an assassination attempt on a mob informant he was treating. Discovering that although he was blind in daylight, he had 20/20 vision in complete darkness. When an owl flew into his window one night, he decided to fight crime and injustice as Dr. Mid-Nite. Yeah, I know, sounds kind of familiar; but, unlike Batman, good ol’ Doc Mid-Nite was never more than a back-up hero in the anthology books of the day.

Gayvidence:

Note: That alone isn’t all that incriminating, but when the other Golden Age characters were revived in later decades, they were all shown to have married, and in many cases, married and had super powered children of their own. Not Dr. Mid-Nite, though. He apparently remained a “confirmed bachelor” throughout his life. Sure, so was Bruce Wayne, but he was a notorious poon-hound even back in the day; with a revolving door of women folk coming through Wayne Manor on the daily. One might start to have questions about the good doctor, though…

 

DC editorial nixed the idea, for reasons unknown. While it was one thing to create new gay characters for the comics medium, something DC was pretty good at doing, maybe they weren’t ready to out one of their original characters just yet – even if it was one that no one really cared about like Doctor Mid-Nite.

 

#2 ELEMENT LAD: A STORY OF CHANGE

 

 

In their fifty year history, no super team has had as vocal a queer following as the Legion of Super Heroes. One can see why; a group of attractive young people from various planets united to spread the concept of unity throughout the universe in the 30th Century. And often in fashionable, brightly-colored, and revealing outfits. With never fewer than twenty members at any given time, the Legion members were pretty evenly spilt between male and female (a pretty forward thinking concept back in the sixties, as teams like the JLA, the Teen Titans and even Marvel’s Avengers and X-men only had one token female at a time). So, “naturally”, most members were paired off romantically with a member of the opposite sex…

…all except one…

Gayvidence:

Today, rampant speculation would start right then and there. However, in 1963 such things certainly were still decades away from being brought up in mainstream comics – or anywhere in any mainstream media, really…

What Happened after this?

In fact, she was taking a form of future over the counter sex change pill called “Pro-Fem,” in an effort to make herself a hot chick so Element Lad would fall madly in love with her. Finally, Element Lad revealed to the newly male officer Erin that anything physical they shared was in spite of her being a woman, not because of it. Finally, after nearly thirty years of speculation, it seemed DC was ready to out Element Lad as gay.

Or not. A year or so later, DC rebooted their 30th Century continuity in their previously mentioned Zero Hour crossover, and in the new continuity Element Lad was made to be clearly straight. I’m going to go out on a limb and say this Pro-Fem drug actually exists, ’cause someone at DC is taking it. Only way to explain how they lost their balls.

The original incarnation of the Legion has returned to the DC Universe recently over in Geoff John’s Action Comics run, and I want to use this opportunity to tell Geoff Johns to make up for past mistakes and officially bring Element Lad out of the damn closet. He doesn’t have to make a big declaration to his teammates or anything like that. Just show a panel of Superman walking in on him fucking one of his fellow male Legionnaires and just get it out of the way. You know, something tasteful and subtle like that.

#3 RICTOR

 

Characters of questionable sexuality are not limited to the DC Universe. Marvel’s X-Men family, long a civil-rights metaphor, went from being metaphorically gay to maybe being just plain ol’ GAY gay with the character of Rictor the seismic mutant. While never graduating to any of the proper X-Men titles, Rictor has been more or less active in the secondary X books for almost twenty years now.

Rictor was introduced first as Julio Esteban Richter, a young Mexican mutant rescued by the original X-Men, then going by the name of X-Factor. Rictor drifted from X-Factor to the X-terminators to the New Mutants to X-Force to the X-Corporation and finally, back to X-Factor.

During his time with X-Force, Rictor forged a very close relationship with Shatterstar, a lame knockoff of the even lamer X-Man Longshot, leading many fans to speculate that the two D List mutants were more than friends. Rictor attempted suicide after losing his powers during the House of M crossover, but I think it was more for never making it actual X-Men status in the nearly two decades he’d been around. I mean, the X-Men even let Dazzler join. I’d jump off a building too.

In an effort to regain his lost powers, he forged a friendship with Magneto’s son Quicksilver who promised to return his lost abilities.

Gayvidence:

No denial followed. He is ours

#4 FIRELORD

 
Another Marvel character who could have been gay, and for all I know might still come out of the closet one day, is Firelord. Is it because nobody knows who he is? Not quite:

Gayvidence:

Even though he is portrayed as mostly an asexual being, he was once asked by the Avenger named Starfox “Doesn’t your fire-y nature ever burn simply for pleasure?” – to which Firelord responded “Not the way you mean it! Not since the day Galactus made me the Firelord! Not since the day I lost my friend Gabriel—!” Mmmhm! You ain’t foolin’ anyone Firelord!

#5 CAPTAIN METROPOLIS AND HOODED JUSTICE

 

Captain Metropolis and Hooded Justice are two minor characters from Watchmen, and only Alan Moore knows for sure if they are gay or not. Let’s just say it’s heavily implied that they are.

 

Gayvidence:

You might be asking, “Eric, are there other suspected homo heroes of any kind out there?” Hell yeah there are! No matter how many times Conner Hawke (the second Green Arrow) denies being gay, there will always be someone to say he’s really in the closet. And, my friends, in the world of comics, all it takes is for a writer to decide otherwise. So who knows? The only thing I can gaurantee is that it won’t be any comic Orson Scott Card is writing.

Next week, we hit Paradise Island and talk about the women folk, so stay tuned for your fair share of Super Queers in the Closet!