And the article is actually completely gay-positive, very well-informed and a lot of fun. (But would you expect less from the good folks at CA?) Here’s a sample:
It has become an exhausted joke, of course; the hero/sidekick relationship has inspired decades of snickering insinuation. The implication is not merely that Batman is gay, but that he is a pederast and a predator - concepts that have too often been conflated by prejudice. The Batman/Robin relationship was the basis for Frederic Wertham’s allegation that Batman stories were “psychologically homosexual.” Where [Batman writer Grant] Morrison says there’s “just no denying it,” Wertham says, “Only someone ignorant of the fundamentals of psychiatry and of the psychopathology of sex can fail to realize a subtle atmosphere of homoerotism.”
…We reject or deride the sexualization of Batman’s relationship with Robin precisely because of the worrying implications of eroticizing Robin, but that reading takes the roots of Batman’s gayness in the wrong direction. For gay readers in the 1940s, the introduction of Robin to Detective Comics did not sexualize Robin; it sexualized Batman. It created what Wertham called “a wish dream of two homosexuals living together,” a visible idealization of a same-sex relationship in an era when homosexuality had no mainstream recognition. The gayness of Batman was not just a joke about sidekicks, it was a scrap of identification for a starved gay audience. Robin established Batman as an early totem for a nascent and repressed gay subculture.
