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Looks like DC is really taking some chances and instead of another popular lesbian, a male DC character will reveal he is gay:

“One of the major iconic DC characters will reveal that he is gay in a storyline in June,” Courtney Simmons, DC Entertainment’s senior vice president of publicity, confirmed to ABC News.


As for who, we can’t even guess.

Alan Scott, the original Green Lantern? The Spectre? Ras Al Ghul? Batman Earth Two?

BTW, we tried to think of an image for this post and the best we could do was Batman and Robin again. Sorry.

1 COMMENT

  1. Graphic? Bunker of the Teen Titans. Hugging Red Robin.

    Or perhaps Frostbite and Off-Ramp from “Young Heroes In Love”?

  2. When your sales are falling and you need a boost why not get the speculators back and the curious who want to own the Iconic” Male DC character who turns gay.
    I’m waiting for sales to drop more then DC can make the first transgender iconic character who gets a sex change.
    Why not use Rainbow Raider and make him the symbol for gay pride?

  3. Arrowshaft, I’m assuming you’re saying this for Marvel as well as DC, right? Otherwise, that’d just biased.

  4. “One of the major iconic DC characters will reveal that he is gay…”

    Well, that eliminates Wonder Woman, so realistically, there’s only two iconic characters DC has left. All their other licenses are interchangeable doorknobs at this point, since they’ve been watered down by their Nu52 ‘reimaginings’.

  5. “Arrowshaft, I’m assuming you’re saying this for Marvel as well as DC, right?”

    Isn’t this always a wingnutty attack point to claim false equivalence to one’s more successful competition?

  6. It’ll be Shazam. Then when sales suck it will be because fanboys are homophobes not that Shazam sucks. I don’t know much about Shazam but I don’t think he had a sexual orientation to begin with plus it will differentiate from Supes.

  7. Maybe they can get Kevin Smith to write the story so the character can also get AIDS. AIDS, I tell you! AAAAAAIIIIIDDDDSSS!

  8. Readers will have to see who the icon is, and what the basis for his announcement is. In an article posted today on conversion therapy, Slate’s William Saletan wrote:

    Homosexuality is fundamentally personal, not political. Like heterosexuality, it varies from person to person, and it can evolve over a lifetime. Experience and research suggest it’s extremely unlikely that you can change your sexual orientation, and you’re better off accepting who you are.

    I hope the storyline has some psychological depth.

    SRS

  9. Again, I just don’t understand why the need to change an established characters sexual orientation…why not just create a new, solid, gay character??

    Like I said yesterday, if someone decided that we need a transgendered character – do we set Aquaman up for pre-op so we can now have AquaWoman? If you want a religous character do you suddenly make Superman a Christian or Muslim? How about Green Lantern as a bi-sexual? Changing established characters is not diversity, it’s social pandering. You want a gay Christian struggling with his place in the world you create him and develop the character, you don’t take the Spectre and suddenly make him gay and at a crossroads with the All Mighty. And as far as diversity goes, DC is totally hypocritical about all of this..because thy took arguably their strongest female character, who has spent over the last twenty years in a wheel chair and gave her her mobility back. Why? There where like 42 Batgirls running around at the time this decision was made…why take your strongest and most important female character and change her into something she wasn’t?
    Apparently their need for diversity extends to alternative lifestyles but not the handicapped.

    SRS brought up the point on the other thread that new characters often aren’t accepted by readers. One would assume this goes double for gay characters.

    However, that doesn’t seem to be a problem for KEVIN KELLER over at Archie. Archie comics are, generally speaking, far more wholesome and conservative than super hero comics, and they had very little problem introducing a new, fresh from the creator’s mind gay character that seems to be widely accepted.

    Apperantly DC and Marvel couldn’t do this and get the sales bump they want or need.

    Imagine if Archie had been outed, he and Jughead are a couple or Betty and Veronica as a couple or so on…it’s unecessary and out of character. Fan’s would have been outraged. The character’s have been established for decades, so why change for the sake of change, shock value and/or social pandoring? Archie Comics did it right. If a character is good it will work without the drastic changes.

    This falls into the same vein as the Miles Morales character at Marvel – They chose to make him Spiderman as opposed to giving him his own super hero identity. Why? Is the character not strong enough for his own identity? If he’s not, why bother creating him. The only reason is to shock readers into a sales spike, becaue if the writers really believed in social change or minority characters you don’t create the same character over again and simply give him a different skin color.

    I think Marvel and DC should look at how Archie and his buddies at Riverdale are handling things. A new (gay) character that stands on his own without strip mining the past or another characters creative history for the sake of appearing socially diverse.

    And that’s the key here, DC and Marvel don’t really care if they are socially diverse, the just want to appear that way – otherwise Mr. Terrific and Static Shock would not have been cancelled after 8 issues and Barbara would still be in her wheel chair.
    I get more pissed everytime I think about that last one – Barbara Gordon as Oracle is ten times the character that her Batgirl is.

  10. @KET so pandering is only bad when you’re not #1. So Marvel is not doing this to boost the sales of Astonishing X-Men?

  11. @ Synsidar, you hope the story has psychological depth? That would really be impressive from DC. Psychological depth would be more of a revelation than a character being gay. Unfortunately, whoever this poor bastard ends up being he is going to have to carry being an “icon,” a gay icon on his shoulders. He will end up being written by committee or at least “Didiotorial” oversight and become the world most boring gay character.

  12. That would really be impressive from DC. Psychological depth would be more of a revelation than a character being gay.

    I think that making Bruce Wayne gay could work, but how would people react? Doing an Elseworlds story about that would be a nice example of using a character concept as a starting point, not as the whole person, and writing him well to develop ideas.

    SRS

  13. @ BiffordMichael —-> AMEN bROTHER! i was one of those not to pleased by Barry Allen’s return…..bring back Wally West in any form!

    For it to be an icon??? No WW, forget supes or Batman…nor Green Lanthern. You have the Flash family left, one of its numerous speedsters no doubt.

  14. The big 2 are SO behind on this. I’m sorry but does NBC or someone have major sitcoms based on gay couples? Now we get gay icons and weddings in comics? Sorry superhero comics that was a broad stroke. It’s a little self absorbed. It’s like Switzerland coming out against anti-Semitism in 1960. Good to know but where were you 20 years ago?

  15. @Thomas Wayne:

    If someone you knew in real life, someone you’d known for a while, for years, and had long thought of as heterosexual (and had acted as heterosexual in all your interactions with him or her) came out to you as gay, would that be so very different from some of the scenarios you’re sketching out as problematic? Or came out as transgendered, to go with your Aquaman example?

    I don’t see how having an established and apparently heterosexual character coming out as gay would be such a bad thing. Some people spend a good portion of their lives in the closet before coming out. Or are out only in some parts of their lives and not in others. Or take a while to figure this stuff out for themselves. I’d think you could use an already established and apparently heterosexual character to tell good stories about that experience. It worked just fine for Renee Montoya.

    Changing established characters isn’t necessarily pandering because characters change, just like people change.

    This is all somewhat moot, because it seems that the character is one that hasn’t yet been re-introduced in the new DCU. So his orientation is going to be a retcon, a change to past continuity in its way no different than any of the other changes to past continuity that we’ve already seen for other characters the new DCU. I’d guess that whoever it is, within the new continuity, he’ll be gay from the get-go, which means it will be closer to the scenario you’re looking for, actually.

    And I think you can tell good stories with those sorts of characters as well – like Karolina Dean and Xavin over in Runaways, or Hulking and Wiccan over in Young Avengers. I agree, there should be more new characters that are LGBT from their inception.

    But it seems to me that having an established character come out could be a good thing. I could see where that might be good for a closeted teen or twentysomething to read. Or for the friend of someone who just came out. That kind of thing just as much a part of life and it would be nice to see it reflected in comics.

    Either way, this is all just speculation, and will continue to be so even once the character is revealed. Whether it works will depend on how well-written and drawn the stories involving the character are.

  16. I am still sticking with my predictions of VIBE or THE ATOM… VIBE isn’t iconic, so maybe not but Johns has said a “new take” on him… and if they are talking about an EARTH 2 character then it really won’t have the impact they want (ala Bunker, all over again)… While Ray Palmer is part of the Frankenstein book, a new ATOM has yet to be revealed… And they do keep teasing yet another Justice League title (see the latest issue; first member: Green Arrow)…

  17. SF,
    My problem with taking an established character and changing them is that they are not doing it to improve or expand on the character. They are doing it for social pandering or shock value.

    If all of a sudden DC went ultra Christian on everyone, all characters went to church, read the good book,Batman prays for the Joker instead of laying the smack down. GL decides to turn the other cheek when it comes to Sinestro and leave his evil in Gods hands,etc, etc, people would lose their minds, and rightfully so.

    In the real world, like your scenario of someone who was always thought of as heterosexual suddenly comes out and admits their gay, people become fiercely religious all the time. I have a friend who changed his entire perspective on life when he met the girl of his dreams and she was Christian and he was not. After 9-11 millions of people turned back to their God and prayed and hoped for the best.
    Do you honestly believe DC would take a mainstream character and suddenly have them become a die hard Christian? Or Muslim? Hell no. It would never happen.

    I don’t care if people are gay, I don’t care if characters are gay, I care about quality storytelling about characters I have followed and invested my time in, in a medium I have been a part of for 30 plus years.

    I’m all for an gay alien with limitless power from a dead planet who comes to earth to protect us – if he is a character worth knowing and reading and following based on solid creators.

    However, I am not in favor of the aforementioned alien if he is Superman.

  18. You’re all missing the story here. Ten years ago, it would have controversial for either company to admit that gay people exist by introducing an openly gay character and then never mentioning him or her again or “turning them straight” to quiet things down. Now both of them are sending out press releases bragging that they have storylines about gay people. One is going on national TV to promote it!

    Is it hamfisted? Is it behind the times? Is it ludicrous and in no way resembling anything a human being would actually experience in their lives? Is it a Marvel or DC superhero story? Yes, yes, yes, and naturally.

    Next up, Batman reveals that he’s actually Chinese!

  19. @ThomasWayne,

    I partly agree with you. This is primarily a pathetic publicity stunt on the part of DC (which has long been my favorite company) and it is rather disappointing. One doesn’t have to go far to just look at how well Batwoman has been received to see how introducing a new-ish character who happens to be gay can be a major success (I consider Batwoman “new” because the character she had basically been in mothballs for nearly two decades before she Kate Kane was introduced in 52).

    That said, I disagree with you on Miles Morales as Ultimate Spider-Man. This is Marvel’s “alternate” web-slinger — from a line created specifically so the company could experiment with its “iconic” characters. Peter Parker is “still” Spider-Man in the historic Marvel Universe. There’s as little a problem with Morales becoming an Ultimate Spider-Man as there would have been with Barry Allen becoming the Flash years after Jay Garrick (followed by Wally West).

    But, yes, it would be far better if the companies either created brand new “diverse” characters or at least allowed introductions of new individuals to take over old identities. But “turning” an established character gay is just lazy.

  20. RaggedT,

    Fair enough on the Mile Morales point of contention. I’ve softened on that one over the last few months, my initial problem was why not make him an original character….instead of the half black, half hispanic Spider-man.

    But I agree with you…its lazy and laziness is what happens when you won’t, can’t or don’t write strong characters anymore….let’s just make an old character “new” again..or in this case gay.

    Like Allen Rubinstein said – next up…Chinese Batman…gay Chinese Democratic Batman in a wheel chair who wants a sex change …

    To be continued

  21. @ThomasWayne
    Re: Why not just create an original character rather than alter an existing name?

    Compare the amount of coverage between Bunker (Teen Titans) and Morales Ultimate Spider-Man. The bigger the story, and controversy, the more attention a company gets and presumably that translates into more sales and money.

  22. I can’t help but notice a fan-fiction mentality creeping into the management at Marvel and DC. Turning an established character gay, or Bendis writing characters out of character (i wish fanboys were exaggerating but it’s true)…throwing loners on team books…you know, just ideas that twenty years ago would be considered amateur.

    I don’t read the sales numbers posts . Are sales plunging so fast that they have to resist to fan-fiction ideas to stay afloat? If the stakes have risen, why is the quality bar being lowered?

  23. @ Allen Rubinstein brilliant and well said. I think the only way to be original here is to go transgender. It would bold, interesting, forward thinking and everything we will not get.

  24. Sales stunt, of course. If I were gay I’d be pissed that these companies are using issues surrounding my sexual orientation to bump up sales and get media coverage. Oh, the nice little bump they’ll get when Fox jumps on this story!!

    @TW
    >>>And that’s the key here, DC and Marvel don’t really care if they are socially diverse, the just want to appear that way – otherwise Mr. Terrific and Static Shock would not have been cancelled after 8 issues ….>>>

    OH MY GOD… REALLY??? SERIOUSLY? If they cared, they WOULDN’T CANCEL BOOKS THAT SELL LIKE CRAP!??? What do you expect them to do, continually publish books that feature minorities if THEY’RE LOSING MONEY? I agree with you that “they want to appear that way”… why do you think they brought back Blue Beetle when it didn’t sell the LAST TIME? But do really expect them to publish something that doesn’t sell?

  25. I don’t think having someone simply “come out” is inherently interesting or dramatic.

    I really liked the (brief) scene in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy where we learn that the heroic character played by Benedict Cumberbatch is gay, as the scene completely served the story (moving it forward) and yet caused me to reexamine what had gone before- making me more aware of the great pressure Cumberbatch’s character had to endure.

  26. Someday, comicdom will create good characters that just happen to be gay — as opposed to being “that gay superhero.”

  27. @TW
    >>>And that’s the key here, DC and Marvel don’t really care if they are socially diverse, the just want to appear that way – otherwise Mr. Terrific and Static Shock would not have been cancelled after 8 issues ….>>>

    OH MY GOD… REALLY??? SERIOUSLY? If they cared, they WOULDN’T CANCEL BOOKS THAT SELL LIKE CRAP!??? What do you expect them to do, continually publish books that feature minorities if THEY’RE LOSING MONEY? I agree with you that “they want to appear that way”… why do you think they brought back Blue Beetle when it didn’t sell the LAST TIME? But do really expect them to publish something that doesn’t sell?

    OtisT Firefly,
    I understand that hey canceled the books because of low sales, but if you want to be diverse you keep the low selling books with diverse characters out there to sell to that crowd no matter what. If you want African American characters in their own books you don’t cancel them after 8 months for any reason…you fight for them to find an audience. If after a year or two they can’t find an audience then you send them packing. That’s how you be diverse, you stay the tide and see what happens. I agree with you…and have no problem with the fact DC and Marvel are in business to turn a profit. I consider myself a (do I dare utter that dirty little word…I dare) Capitalist and have no problem when someone makes money. But if you want to claim diversity than money has to take a back seat for a little while to see if what you are producing can reach an audience.

  28. I failed to mention my main point.

    Diversity is not a “one shot…oops…we missed….time to move on” kind of thing.

    Give John Stewart his own book. Give Vixen her own book. Give a minority character a chance. The write creative team can make all the difference. Great storytelling makes all the difference.

    You can’t claim diversity as your own and give up on those diverse characters inside of a year and expect folks to take your claims seriously.

  29. @Thomas Wayne:
    “They are doing it for social pandering or shock value.”

    Even if they are, does that preclude a well-written character?

    “If all of a sudden DC went ultra Christian on everyone, all characters went to church, read the good book … people would lose their minds, and rightfully so.”

    Do you think that DC’s going to suddenly make all their characters gay? If not, this really isn’t a good example to use. From what we’ve heard, it’s one character. Just one.

    “Do you honestly believe DC would take a mainstream character and suddenly have them become a die hard Christian?”

    Didn’t Marvel effectively do this with Nightcrawler at one point? Didn’t he become a priest? Haven’t read those issues, so I don’t know how that went. But it doesn’t seem out of the realm of possibility to me, if that was something a writer wanted to explore.

    And haven’t DC writers occasionally worked their characters religions into their stories? Maybe I’m misremembering, but wasn’t there a scene of Crispus Allen and his family praying during whatever Crisis it was at the time, near the end of Rucka’s run on Gotham Central? And pre-reboot, there was a scene in Infinite Crisis, I think it was (maybe it was a different one), where a lot of the characters went to church, and Mr. Terrific (atheist) and Ragman (jewish) hung out outside and discussed belief.

    “I don’t care if people are gay, I don’t care if characters are gay, I care about quality storytelling about characters I have followed and invested my time in, in a medium I have been a part of for 30 plus years.”

    Again, from what little we know, is there anything we’ve heard about this that actually precludes quality storytelling? I’m not talking about the likelihood of quality storytelling from DC in general, or from quality storytelling in the new DCU. I’m talking about DC deciding that one of their characters will be gay and then publishing a story that shows that. Does that in any way necessarily preclude quality storytelling?

    Or would it be better to wait and see what they do with it before deciding what the quality of the storytelling is?

    “Diversity is not a “one shot…oops…we missed….time to move on” kind of thing.”

    From my perspective, neither is it a “Well, we’re trying to go for some diversity over here with this character, so until we get that working, we can’t try for it over there with that character.”

  30. i don’t really understand the complaints about changing established characters. this is the new 52. they have been making changes left and right. reimagining a character as gay is perfectly fine in a reboot.

  31. If it has to happen I would bet on Superboy.

    I would prefer if DC came out and announced that this was just a rumor to show how stupid it is to use the sexual orientation of a fictional character as a selling point for a comic book.

    It’s not like ANY of these characters are getting a lot of action so what difference does it make if the sex thay’re not having is with a man or woman?

  32. SF,
    In my humble opinion DC is doing this in-replace of quality storytelling. The entire NEW 52 was designed to bump sales, not improve stories. That is what this is designed to do.
    Someone pointed out earlier that Marvel and DC have taken a kind of fan fiction mentality in the way they have run things the last few years. Most fan fiction, good or otherwise, can be labled as amatuer. These are supposed to be professional storytellers. When you scrap the bottom of the creative barrel for shock or social change you are left with a product little better than professional wrestling storylines – the let’s take a good guy and make him a bad guy trick. It’s tired and old.
    I will agree with you on one thing, I over generalized on my religious counterpoint. DC is not changing the sexual orientation of all of their characters so my concept was off. But let’s try it from this standpoint. DC is claiming a major iconic character will now be gay (again, most likely for the sake of shock or social pandering). I ask you this – what if DC decided that the same character who would be outed as gay should be die hard Christian? And all of their descision in life were based on the bible and what it tells them. It appears the most Christians are at the very least not pleased with homosexual people on some level or another, ranging from not liking a lifestyle to downright hatred, because the Bible tells them to, or at least they think it does. DC would never create this character out of an established iconic character. This would never be whomever is going to be gay. My point is – they are willing to go to one extreme (politically correct pandering) but not the other (viewed as hatred and wrong) yet both characters exist in real life. If we are assuming DC is trying to be diverse – as in what America really looks like, many people with many views and many viewpoints, beliefs, etc. it should be willing to do both. But it would never make a hero a homophobe or at the very least non appreciative of someone else’s lifestyle. This is where the poor storytelling begins. If you are willing to go to one extreme but not the other it’s a stunt, plan and simple. And stunts don’t work, they never have. Stunts are “we’re out of ideas…I know…lets have the JLA take on Darkseid for the 620th time. A story is “let’s have the JLA take on Darkseid because he has kidnapped Superman – only to find out that he has done this because even a greater and more powerful and more evil character than Darkseid (and they can make that character gay if they want because they aren’t changing things for the sake of change) has kidnapped a daughter(she can be gay too) Darkseid didn’t even know he had and his fatherly ego steps in.Regardless of no love for this child at all how dare someone attempt to hurt Darkseid or his family. He needs Supes help to get her back back and Supes won’t turn him down because and innocent life is in danger and he would never not help and innocent even if it is the spawn of Darkseid. In the end we find out the daughter was never kidnapped and she was in on the deal with the other new bad guy all along. Hawkman and Adam Strange join the fray and so on and so and so on.
    I came up with that off of the top of my head while writing this and I didn’t need to change any major character histories to come up with a story worth telling and if told very well would be most likely enjoyed by the vast majority of comic fans everywhere. I just gave you new characters with deep secrets, a team up between Superman and Darkseid, made Darkseid a sympathetic character (at least for a moment) and implied that all the other ingredients of a cool outer space super hero conflict story (battles, betrayls, Thangarians and Rannians)and I didn’t have to make Darkseid a gay Christian in order to pull it off.
    Maybe its my age…Ive been reading comics for 30 years (I turned 40 in March). I always read comics for great stories – great super hero stories. I have never once read any character because they were black, white, chinese, hispanic, gay, parapalegic, quadrapalegic, straight, bi-sexual, transgendered, christian, muslim, etc, etc. So why does DC and Marvel think I and people like me (the average aged comic book fan) want that now?
    I’ve never once thought “wow, Jimmy Olson would be so much cooler or in the now if he was gay”. I never once thought “wow, I wish they would kill off Ted Kord and replace him with a hispanic character so they can have more hispanic characters to be more diverse”.
    Want more hispanic characters…GREAT…I’m all for it…just don’t be lazy and change Frank Castle to Fransico Castle. Creat Hector Gonzalez, a quiet shy father of two whose wife left him and his twin girls, both only 5 years old. Hector is working his butt off at three jobs to support his little ones and his mother watches the children most of the time. One day, at one of Hector’s jobs a gun man comes in and starts shooting up the place. People are killed including a really old black man. As the killer moves in on Hector he here’s a voice – “Your girls need you” it says. The bad guy shoots, the bullets bouce off Hector and he stops the bad guy. Later the voice comes back, this time with the ghost of the old black man. He tells Hector ” that his daughters are the future…they will grow up to be the greatest super heroes the world has ever known. You must protect them so they can fulfill their destiny. – so I will protect you”The voice never says why or how or who, allowing the story to unfold over however long it is told. I just created a new set of diverse characters – all with compelling stories yet to be told – and I didn’t have to kill Ted Kord to do it. And for those who think that my idea would not sell as well as the hispanic Blue Beetle would – check the sales numbers…it just might. Blue Beetle is hanging around the 15,000 per month sales mark and teetering on cancellation.

  33. @Thomas Wayne:
    Okay, we’ll agree to disagree on this.

    One last point:
    “It appears the most Christians are at the very least not pleased with homosexual people on some level or another, ranging from not liking a lifestyle to downright hatred, because the Bible tells them to, or at least they think it does. ”

    That is not the case for most of the Christians I know. It’s not the case for pretty much all the Christians I know, and I know quite a few. But maybe I’m just lucky and know a lot of cool Christians (without being one myself).

  34. SF,
    I’m glad all your Christian friends are cool if not a little liberal, at least as Christians go, but for the most part, it is Christians and the Bible that stand in the way of anything gay. Who else is it? Its folks who defend their biblical beliefs…if they didn’t have the bible telling them that homosexuality is bad their would not be an issue, its that simple. Its not like their is a large contingency of non-christians sittin around and just randomly deciding to keep gays from marriage and other supposed rights. I’ve always felt that marriage is not a right, even though I believe that this is America, and if we are to be truly free you can’t tell one group of people what they can or can not do especially when it does not infringe upon anyone else’s rights. But again, marriage is not a right. There are plenty of men and women who want to be married and are not – so what about their rights? We can’t just force someone to marry them because they have a right to be married. Marriage is a privelage, not a right, but its a privelage that should be extended to all free Americans.