First published June 8, 2005, in the Chicago Free Press.
In the late 1940s and early 1950s critics of so-called "crime comic books" mounted a campaign against the conspicuous violence and brutality in many comics which the critics charged could and did lead impressionable young people to engage in violent and criminal behavior.
The most comprehensive attack was a widely discussed 1954 book called Seduction of the Innocent by Dr. Fredric Wertham, a senior psychiatrist for the New York City Department of Hospitals and director of mental hygiene clinics at Bellevue Hospital.
I once read that Wertham also claimed that some comic books promoted homosexuality so I wondered what Wertham said. Not a lot, it turned out. His 400 page book devoted only six pages to homosexuality, primarily in what he called "the Batman type of story." But what he said was interesting.
Wertham does not claim that Batman and Robin are homosexual, but that "the Batman type of story" - meaning an adult plus youth crime fighting team - could stimulate "children" to have homosexual fantasies without realizing it, and could reinforce homosexual fantasies in adolescents who have already developed homosexual feelings.
Wertham's discussion is not very clearly organized, but drawing on popular stereotypes about homosexuals and then-prevalent theories of sexual psychopathology, he points to four aspects of the Batman comics to support his claim.
First, there is the paederastic structure, if not content, of Batman and Robin's relationship. "The Batman type of story helps to fixate homoerotic tendencies by suggesting the form of an adolescent-with-adult or Ganymede-Zeus type of love-relationship."
Second, Batman and Robin live in a suspiciously elegant, dandified home. "At home they lead an idyllic life. They are Bruce Wayne and 'Dick' Grayson. They live in sumptuous quarters, with beautiful flowers in large vases, and have a butler, Alfred. Batman is sometimes shown in a dressing gown. ... It is like a wish dream of two homosexual living together." So Noel Coward!
It is worth noticing that Wertham has to reverse the usual structure of his argument here. In crime comics, it is the criminals who are fascinating and likely to be imitated. But in the Batman comics it is the heroes who are attractive - far too much so - and likely to be imitated.
Third, Wertham's sharp eye detects ostentatious genital display. Batman is an example of "the muscular male supertype, whose primary sex characteristics are usually well-emphasized." As for Robin, he is "a handsome ephebic boy, . . . usually shown in his uniform with bare legs. He often stands with his legs spread, the genital region discreetly evident."
Fourth, just as homosexuals were thought to hate women, Wertham views Batman as "anti-feminine." There are only "masculine, bad, witchlike or violent women" he says, and "if the girl is good looking she is undoubtedly the villainess. If she is after Bruce Wayne, she will have no chance against Dick." Wertham seems to intend the snickering joke.
Wertham had no trouble finding homosexuals - in therapy, of course - who said they had read Batman comic books and counted them among their favorite reading. And for Wertham that seems to close the case. But Wertham's argument runs into two crippling objections.
Most obviously, millions of children and adolescents read Batman comic books without feeling or developing any homosexual fantasies or desires, yet Wertham offers no theory about why the homosexually "seductive" comics had absolutely no impact on the vast majority of readers.
Then too, although Wertham lays stress on the idea that the comics "seductively" can arouse unconscious homosexual fantasies, the evidence he offers contradicts that. All of the young homosexuals he discusses seem to have been aware at an early age that they were in some way or other attracted to men.
So Wertham has the causation backwards. The simplest explanation is that far from the "Batman type of story" being able to make some young men homosexual, young homosexuals would be attracted to Batman comics and project their early, perhaps inchoate sexual feelings into the comics while young heterosexuals simply do not. End of story.
There was no need to postulate mysterious psychiatric mechanisms such as "unconscious" homosexual fantasies and "fixated" homosexual "patterns" and no evidence that such things even existed.
In response to the widespread criticism and threats of legislative action, the violence and horror comic books were significantly toned down and criticism of those abated. But the suggestion that Batman's household had a homoerotic character continued to shadow the series.
Finally, in 1964, Batman editor Julius Schwartz decided to try to scotch the rumors once and for all by getting rid of the faithful butler Alfred Pennyworth.
According to Mark Cozza Vaz's history of Batman comics, Tales of the Dark Knight, Schwartz recalled: "Many people were questioning why three males were living together. So I said, 'Okay, I'll kill off one of the males and put a woman in there!' And the woman turned out to be Aunt Harriet, the aunt of Dick Grayson. . . . I guess that was pretty drastic, killing off Alfred."
But happily within just a few years the Batman television program decided that it wanted to include Alfred, so Alfred was duly revived from the dead, once again to serve the original ambiguously non-gay duo.