pouted. “It is like a wish dream of two homosexuals living together.” Well, yes, now that I think of it, if it weren’t for that pesky Penguin.…
Robin is described as “a handsome ephebic boy, usually shown [with] bare legs […] devoted to nothing on earth […] as much as to Bruce Wayne. He often stands with his legs spread, the genital region discreetly evident.”
Frankly, it would seem to me that a genital region “discreetly evident” would be preferable to one flagrantly evident but what do I know about costumed ephebes? I’ve never had one devoted to me in that way. Certainly not one in tights.
As for the presence of women, there is only “the Catwoman, who is vicious and uses a whip.” I can only thank God the man never visited San Francisco’s late September Folsom Street Fair, high holy days for the leather set. I shudder to think what he would make of some of those ladies and I am sure many of them have never even seen a comic book.
Don’t think it was only this lavender duo who were corrupting innocents, either. Captain America had his young Bucky, the Torch had Toro, and the Green Hornet almost never went out at night without Cato. Practically every superhero had his little boy wonder. Granted, Cato was the Green Hornet’s servant, but we have all heard about backstairs romances. What is certainly apparent is that adoption agencies in those days were quite liberal when it came to pairing up bachelors and young male wards.
Nor did the women come off Scot free. In Wertham’s opinion, Wonder Woman was “a frightening image […] her followers are the gay girls.” To be honest, most of the gay girls I knew got turned on to Sheena, Queen of the Jungle. I think it was the animal skin teddies, which you have to admit are sexier than bulletproof bracelets.
Wertham made no mention of Superman but I think we can agree that those blue tights and the red skimpies were a giveaway. Be honest now, how many genuinely straight men can you picture gadding about town in that get up? The cape alone would raise eyebrows almost anywhere west of Greenwich Village.
Seduction of the Innocent launched a full scale investigation in Congress, headed by Senator Estes Kevauver. Can you see the scene? The busy Senator comes home for the evening and his wife asks, “Estes, darlin”, what matters of world importance did you deal with today?” and he replies, “Little honey, today my fellow Senators and I got into that Rascally Robin’s padded tights. That’s the last time he’ll give Batman a hand.”
Well, all right, what he actually did say, in addressing the opening session of the Senate Subcommittee to investigate Juvenile Delinquency, in 1954, was “The Subcommittee wishes to reiterate its belief that this country cannot afford the calculated risk involved in feeding its children a concentrated diet of crime, horror and violence.”
With that, they were off and running. It’s hard now to think anyone could have taken all this seriously, but Wertham had proved to be good at exploiting the press and arousing librarians, teachers, parents and churches.
Wertham described comic books as a “correspondence course in crime […] a distillation of viciousness […] the world of the strong, the ruthless, the bluffer, the shrewd deceiver, the torturer and the thief.” Frankly, I think that is rather a harsh description of Donald Duck, though those nephews could be pretty feisty.
Yes, true, there was stronger stuff, too, and admittedly the comic book industry didn’t put many limits on their writers and artists. “Don’t chop the limbs off anybody,” DC Comics advised its authors. EC Comics—i.e., William Gaines—had practically no restrictions. In EC Comics, people suffered being devoured by rats, chopped up, skewered, buried alive, and countless other degradations, limited only by the authors’ imagination. Gaines argued before the subcommittee that even children could tell the difference between fiction and reality.
* * * *
In 1952, George Jorgensen, an ex-GI, set aside his Batman comics long enough to travel to Denmark for a sex-change operation, coming home as Christine Jorgensen. This only fueled the anti-gay hysteria sweeping the country. In the 1956 presidential race Walter Winchell would cry that “a vote for Adlai Stevenson is a vote for Christine Jorgensen,” which truly made no sense at all. It’s doubtful if the two even met, and so far as I know Stevenson had no plans to name Jorgensen to his cabinet had he been elected. What post would it have been? Secretary of Lingerie and Make Up? (“My fellow Americans, I want to speak to you frankly about the Menace of Mascara.…”)
The problem had become, who was a real man to trust? Not his Washington bureaucracy apparently, where perverts skulked beneath every desk, like early Monica Lewinskys in long pants. Not the men in military uniform, any one of whom might be a WAAC at heart, nor the comic book superheroes, when the increase in pulse rate they inspired might rouse Walter Winchell’s suspicions. And now not even his women, who might merely be physically altered male sex perverts.
Elvis Presley’s hip shaking caused him to be labeled “morally insane.” In San Francisco, poet Allen Ginsberg was charged with obscenity and put on trial for his Howl. Almost everywhere they looked the crusaders found someone at whom to point a finger. Holy Moley, was everyone a deviate?
Well, yes, probably so, since the media made a habit of lumping together every sort of sexual nonconformity under the general label “sex deviates.” So adulterers, peeping toms, flashers, cross dressers, masturbators, homosexuals, foot fetishists, and users of dirty words were in the same boat as rapists and those who molested and murdered little boys and girls.
And, oh yes, Seduction of the Innocent and the ensuing Congressional hearings all but destroyed the once booming comic book industry. In the forties a comic book might sell as many as six million copies, sometimes even more—and remember, the population was much smaller then. Today a bestseller means 100,000 copies. This was done, you understand, in the name of wiping out juvenile delinquency.
And it worked, didn’t it, at least in part? You can prowl the streets today of almost any major American city and you will be hard pressed to find a single juvenile delinquent wearing a cape.
Shazam! Welcome to the fifties, Beav!
(And I still say Spiderman looks like he’s humping in most of those pictures.)
CHAPTER FOUR
THERE IS A TAVERN…
Things hadn’t gotten much better by the time the sixties rolled around either. Showing or describing the human body was still invariably illegal—murder wasn’t, at least not murdering a gay man. A gay hustler could, and did with grim frequency in those years, murder his john and in order to be acquitted had only to plead that his victim had been homosexual and had tried to molest him—usually after paying the young man for his favors. If you were assaulted, or “bashed,” you didn’t call the cops—they would be more likely to arrest you than your assailant, as my friend Ernestine had so painfully found out.
I was brutally beaten in 1960 in Louisville, Kentucky—by a cop. Nothing sexual. I was in the wrong place and opened my mouth when I should have kept it shut—a lifelong habit, I’m afraid.
In 1961 I spent most of a night with a gun at my head in a gay related robbery. It really is more frightening in retrospect than it was at the time. In all candor, when you have been to some of the gay dinner parties that I have attended, you get over your fear of death. Could it be more painful than another bad impersonation of Prissy?
It was certainly uncomfortable, however. And there were some possible complications that were worrisome. My man with the gun considered the idea of going next door and raping my female neighbor; and I had a roommate who might come home at any time and step into a volatile situation.
