Here’s a last little excerpt; as always, please keep in mind that it’s very rough, first-draft work:

Jay spun around and lunged forward, aiming low and holding his forearms braced over his head.

He rammed into the hips and groin of the man who’d opened the door, driving him backward and into the hallway.  Somebody swore and Jay threw himself to one side, kicking out. His heel hit something and he used it to push himself farther away, rolling over the floor and up to his feet.

Two men there, one he recognized from the autocarriage, one — the one on the ground — whom he’d never seen before.

He spun and ran off in the opposite direction.

A window, a window — he needed a window without bars, but all that lined the hallway were closed doors. The stairs he’d climbed up were behind him. He hoped this corridor wasn’t going to dead end; what kind of building would that be? There had to be another stairwell down at the other end of the wing.

He spun around a corner. Two men — he angled himself toward the wall and sprang up onto it, crouching low and running as fast as he can. Startled, both men jerked away in surprise as he ran across the wall and past them before kicking himself off and back to the floor again.

“Jay Whitsun!” one of them shouted. Jay faltered a second before catching himself.

It wasn’t Bishop’s voice or a member of his family’s, and he didn’t give a damn about anyone else.

“Stop!”

Not a chance. He careened left and spotted stairs. Perfect; the architect hadn’t let him down.

“Somebody — stop him!”

Up or down? Usually he preferred up — few men were willing to chase him onto the rooftops — but in a building with barred windows, he had no guarantee of finding easy access outside. On the other hand, down likely meant more guards and that damned glass-shard-covered wall again. But down meant doors, too.

He made up his mind and dashed down, only two see two large men running up with leather-wrapped clubs in their hands.  He jumped up onto the wooden handrailing and leaped foward over their heads, tucking his knees to his chest and allowing himself to spin once in midair before opening his eyes. Off — he braced — and landed, hard, dropping to one knee that slammed against the floor. He winced and stood. Pain in his hand, pain in his knee, pain in his ribs.

Then somebody tackled him from behind, arms wrapping around his midsection and throwing him forward. His injured knee gave out and he landed badly, hissing as he reached out to break his fall with his wounded hand and it slapped against the floor, leaving a smear of crimson from his blood-soaked bandages.  He started to squirm, but an expert arm wrapped around his neck and began applying pressure.  He struggled as his vision began to darken.

As always, my thanks to the good folks who put on National Novel Writing Month each year; it’s always inspiring to participate!

The Skin Tight party — in which the costumes range from the familiar (like Spider-Man) to ones that only a comics geek would recognize (like the 1993 version of Superboy) — is one way that gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender comic book fans are expressing themselves today. They are coming out, loud and proud, in blogs, peer groups, Web comics and more, simultaneously pronouncing their sexual identity and their devotion to comic books. But it wasn’t that long ago that the environment was less than welcoming for those who wanted to make the two seemingly disparate worlds one.

Those who didn’t grow up as superhero fans and/or students of the queer in popular culture may not realize that there has been a longtime gay/lesbian subculture of interest in those men and women in tights. Recognition of this interest occurred as early as 1954, when Fredric Wertham published Seduction of the Innocent, a diatribe against comic books that led to a Congressional inquiry and the establishment of the Comics Code Authority.

“Comic books stimulate children sexually. That is an elementary fact of my research,” he argued on p. 175.  Then, later, “The muscular male supertype, whose primary sex characteristics are usually well emphasized, is in the setting of certain stories the object of homoerotic sexual curiosity and stimulation.” (p. 188).

Batman and Robin were called out, specifically, as a problematic case of pederasty in comics.

At home they lead an idyllic life. They are Bruce Wayne and “Dick” Grayson. Bruce Wayne is described as a “socialite” and the official relationship is that Dick is Bruce’s ward. They live in sumptuous quarters, with beautiful flowers in large vases, and have a butler, Alfred. Batman is sometimes shown in a dressing gown. As they sit by the fireplace, the young boy sometimes worries about his partner: “Something’s wrong with Bruce. He hasn’t been himself these past few days.” It is like a wish dream of two homosexuals living together. Sometimes they are shown on a couch, Bruce reclining and Dick sitting next to him, jacket off, collar open, and his hand on his friend’s arm. [...]

Robin is a handsome ephebic boy, usually shown in his uniform with bare legs. He is buoyant with energy and devoted to nothing on earth or in interplanetary space as much as to Bruce Wayne. He often stands with his legs spread, the genital region discreetly evident. (p. 191)

Needless to say, reading Seduction of the Innocent is an exercise in campy fun nowadays — “good heavens, beautiful flowers in large vases! Your honor, I rest my case.”  Go ahead and read Seduction yourself, especially Chapter 7.  Some parts are pretty amusing; other parts will make you glad that some of comics’ worst offenses (especially violence against women) were reined in.

Of course, Wertham was absolutely right in his suspicions. Only the most naive of readers could possibly miss the Batman and Robin subtext. (Their relationship, as a side note, was inspired by Sherlock Holmes and Watson, another couple often given a queer reading — a Holmes/Watson comic with canonical text can be found here). And the rest of those early male superheroes were much the same. Although they hadn’t settled down into Bruce and Dick’s comfortable companionship, they nevertheless ran around in skin-tight suits doing manly things with other men and hiding their true selves from the women in their lives — none of whom they married, at least no longer than a hallucinatory or alternate-world sequence.

Wonder Woman, Wertham helpfully pointed out, served as a role model for lesbians.

Where Batman is anti-feminine, the attractive Wonder Woman and her counterparts are definitely anti-masculine. Wonder Woman has her own female following. They are all continuously being threatened, captured, almost put to death. There is a great deal of mutual rescuing, the same type of rescue fantasies as in Batman. Her followers are the “Holliday girls,” i.e. the holiday girls, the gay party girls, the gay girls. Wonder Woman refers to them as “my girls.” (p. 193)

Wertham could be dismissed as reactionary, but in fact we know from anecdotes both published and spoken that some members of the GLBT community were inspired and aroused by superheroes as children. For example,

Novelist and art critic David Galloway (1987) testifies that, contemplating Warhol’s painting, he was transported back to adolescent erotic fantasies inspired by Superman comics — fantasies in which he recognized the emergence of his own homosexuality. He recalls “lying in the grass imag[ing] Superman’s pulsing thighs hovering over me. The forbidden world of comics thus acquired a fresh, engrossing dimension of Taboo. Batman and Robin suggested nimble variations on the theme, but Superman remained my own tender, indigo-haired ravager” (quoted in Collins & Cowart, p. 115)

Edward H. Sewell Jr.’s chapter “Queer Characters in Comic Strips” provides a history of the comic-strip recognition of homosexuality. He notes that a (coded) gay male character was introduced in 1936, and a lesbian in 1939, in Milt Caniff’s Terry and the Pirates, but it wasn’t until 1976 that an openly gay male character appeared in a comic strip — Andy Lippincott in Gary Trudeau’s Doonesbury.

But those are hardly comic-book superheroes. What about those daring young men and women in tights? When did they come out of the closet as well as out of of the phone booth?

The 1960s included some parodic gay and lesbian heroes, but the mainstream comic industry in America waited until the late 1980s and 1990s to feature openly gay or lesbian characters, starting with extras and walk-ons and moving into supporting characters. Marvel’s Northstar was one of the first major superheroes to come out as gay, in 1992, the same year the British comic 2000 AD introduced muscular gay exorcist-priest Devilin Waugh, who was consciously created as a foil for Judge Dredd.

Since then, a number of other openly gay superheroes have been created, several of them appearing in X-Men, a series that has always been read as a metaphor for various oppressed or repressed subcultural groups. (Of interest, in the backstory for Colossus, who is gay in the Ultimate X-Men spinoff, we see him keeping a much-creased Captain America poster under his bed — perhaps he hid it because he grew up in Russia, but….). And an established, living-together gay superhero couple, Apollo and Midnighter, is featured in The Authority.

By contrast, relatively few superheroes have come out as lesbian. However, the 2006 lesbian incarnation of Batwoman makes her as the most mainstream, well-known LBGT superhero — Batwoman, after all, has been around in one persona or another since 1956. There’s still no comparably vintage, openly gay male superhero yet.

At least, not outside the Stonewall Inn.

References:

Collins, Bradford R. & Coward, David (1996). Through the Looking Glass: Reading Warhol’s Superman. American Imago 53.2, 107-137. Quote originally from Galloway, David. 1987. “Pop Goes the Hero.” In Superman at Fifty: The Persistence of a Legend. Edited by Dennis Dooley and Gary D. Engle. Cleveland: Octavia. 116-22.

Sewell Jr., Edward H. (2001) Queer Characters in Comic Strips. In Matthew P. McAllister, Edward H. Sewell, Jr., and Ian Gordon (Eds.), Comics & Ideology. New York: Peter Lang, pp. 251-274.

Wertham, Frederic. (1972 [originally printed 1954]). Seduction of the Innocent. Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat Press.

More Reading:

A useful list of “Lesbian, Gay, and Bi Super-Heroes” can be found online courtesy of Beek’s Book; it includes both mainstream and indie comics.

Comic-book panels shamelessly ripped off of Superdickery, a site guaranteed to keep you hooked for hours.

The article does a good job of delving into the subject. However, although it does, around page four, discuss the history of slash (fan-created m/m homoerotica drawing upon copyrighted or real-life characters), it doesn’t mention the historically analogous rise of boys’ love in Japan.  So I will.

Since its inception in the ’70s, slash fiction has had to remain more or less underground due to its use of copyrighted characters. Boys’ love, on the other hand, did not have the same problem in Japan because it used original, rather than copyright-protected, characters. Setting aside the male/male love affair mentioned in Lady Murasaki’s Tale of Genji, written in the 11th century, the rise of boys’ love fiction in Japan is typically dated to the publication of Hagio Moto’s shōjo manga Heart of Thomas in 1974, a homoerotic story about young men in a German boarding school. Heart of Thomas kicked off a genre that seemed to enjoy immediate popularity. Yaoi, the fanfic of boys’ love manga, may have started in Japan after original BL manga; it’s impossible to say with any certainty, but we do know that the term “yaoi” wasn’t publicized until 1979.

Either way, while in English-speaking countries, female-authored m/m homoerotica started as fan fiction and remained an underground publishing phenomenon, in Japan at about the same time it started as an original fiction genre and became wildly popular, spreading from Japan out to other Asian and, eventually, European countries.

I’m strongly tempted, in fact, to say the incursion of boys’ love manga into the U.S. has been a major influence on the rise of female-authored male/male romance novels here.

I wouldn’t say that it is the only reason, of course.

For one thing, the new popularity of the male/male romance genre in the U.S. certainly wouldn’t be possible if it weren’t for the groundbreaking efforts of gay male romances, by which I mean m/m romances written by and primarily for gay men. Gay male romances have become increasingly mainstream over the last few decades, the result of a long struggle for public acceptance and visibility that should in no way be overlooked or diminished.  The authors who fought to get these works published, and the publishers who took a chance on them, were all pioneers, and it’s because of them and the work of the GLBTIQ community in general that same-sex romances appear in all sorts of genres, quite often without any fanfare whatsoever.

In addition, the attention being paid in the U.S. to contemporary male/male romance novels, by which I mean m/m romances written by and primarily for women, tends to ignore the fact that women have been writing such works for a long time, and not only in the form of fan fiction. For example, Anne Rice’s Interview with a Vampire (1976), Marion Zimmer Bradley’s The Catch Trap (1979), Ellen Kushner’s Swordspoint (1987), Storm Constantine’s The Enchantments of Flesh and Spirit (1987 — technically hermaphrodites), and Mercedes Lackey’s Magic’s Pawn (1989) leap to mind as a few early mainstream examples, even though most are not, technically, romances. I wouldn’t be surprised at all if many of the women now writing original male/male romance novels, especially paranormal m/m romances, cited one or more of these authors as inspirations.

And, of course, we can’t forget fan fiction itself. Slash began as an underground genre in the ’70s, disseminated in the form of newsletters and zines. It wasn’t until the advent of the internet that it began to come into its own, linking different fandoms that had hitherto relatively little interaction with each other and becoming more visible to mainstream readers who might stumble across slash fiction while hunting down information about the TV series or novels they enjoyed. Although “discovered” by academia in 1992 with the publication of Henry Jenkin’s Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture, slash is still more or less an underground phenomenon, re-”discovered” by the media every few years with another gee-whiz article about those funny women who write porn about the men of whichever TV, novel, or movie series is popular at the time. But despite the wide-eyed surprise these articles affect, fans, especially female and gay male fans, are already quite aware of slash’s existence, and I think it’s very likely that the women currently writing original male/male romance novels have read or written slash at some point or another.

Nevertheless, the reason I want to argue that the incursion of boys’ love manga into the U.S. has been a major influence on the rise of female-authored male/male romance novels here is because of BL manga’s influence on publishers.  Sure, women have been writing this stuff in the U.S. for years — but up until now, relatively little of it has been picked up by publishers. So what’s changed?

My opinion is that publishers couldn’t help but have noticed the immense popularity of BL manga in the U.S.  BL manga went mainstream here starting with TokyoPOP’s translation of Gravitation 1 in 2003 (see my timeline), and it enjoyed immediate popularity with the fans who’d encouraged its publication in the first place. In fact,  BL was, at one point, the fastest-growing niche within manga publication in the U.S., and although its sales have slowed down since that intial boom, it remains a strong element within the manga market.

How could other publishers ignore that? I suspect that many saw the largely untapped market of women interested in m/m homoerotica and decided to pursue it.  Novels, after all, are cheaper to publish than manga, and they’ll reach a wider audience.  I think that many publishers began to take a second look at the male/male romances they were being sent, or even to actively solicit them, and I predict that this is going to continue and spread to larger, more mainstream romance publishers, probably in the form of specialized imprints, much as was the case for manga publishers.

Other essays I’ve written related to this topic:

A Note on Boys’ Love and “Straight” Readership: In which I explain why I don’t argue that male/male romance is written by and primarily for straight women.

Boys’ Love vs. Yaoi: An Essay on Terminology: My preliminary attempt to broaden the category of “boys’ love”; I’m now calling this category male/male romance, instead.

Another article:

Zipper Rippers: Women Write Gay Male Romances for Women (Baltimore City Paper)