Back in August, I wrote a column about the queering of DC Comics, with the announcement that Robin, Batman’s sidekick since 1940, was coming out as bi-sexual. I noted that as the LGBT revolution progresses, not a single major entertainment franchise will go untouched. America has a bi-sexual Robin, a gay Archie character, a lesbian Jo March, two moms in Clifford, a homosexual Mr. Ratburn, and an entire panoply of LGBT cartoon characters on TV. It was only a matter of time before America’s most iconic comic book character followed.
The Man of Steel has come out as bisexual.
DC Comics has just released the fifth issue of their series “Superman: Son of Kal-El,” which has Jon Kent — the child of original Superman Clark Kent and Lois Lane — in a queer relationship. Over the past 80 years, every version of Superman has been in love with Lois Lane, but the times are a changin’ and America needs a new version of the hero, eventually. This new issue, according to CNN, “will confirm that the new Superman … is bisexual after following for Jay Nakamura, a male reporter.”
Superman’s new love interest will provide “a shoulder for Kent to lean on when the business of being Superman gets too rough,” and images that DC Comics has provided to stoke enthusiasm for their new series shows “Kent and Nakamura sharing a kiss and sitting together atop a building, their legs dangling off the edge.” According to Tom Taylor, one of the writers working on the series, the new queer Superman is necessary for our modern times.
“Superman’s symbol has always stood for hope, for truth and for justice,” he stated. “Today, that symbol represents something more. Today, more people can see themselves in the most powerful superhero in comics.”
I’ll state up front that I’m not personally invested in any of the American comic book franchises — my European background means that Tintin and Asterix were my preferences growing up. But it is impossible to ignore the fact that major comic book characters like Superman are quintessentially American and that artwork of the Man of Steel making out with a pink-haired male journalist are iconic for very specific reasons: Even a key American superhero has fallen to the sexual revolution.
As Rod Dreher put it at The American Conservative: “Who asked for this? Who asked for superheroes to have sex lives, or gay sex lives? What does it mean that the ideological colonization of the superhero genre, the modern mythology of our times, means that transgressive sexual desire is now a definitive characteristic of our pop culture god figures? Like it or not, Superman’s identity has been bound up with America’s for coming up on century.”
“In American popular culture, Superman is the ultimate bearer of heroic virtue. Now that virtue includes sexual desire for a man. For better or for worse, that’s what America is in 2021.”
The American entertainment industry has been producing poison for decades, but the next decade is going to make that impossible to ignore for those who have preferred to shut their eyes or ignore particularly egregious attacks on Christian faith and morality in film, TV, and pop culture. The LGBT movement is not satisfied with sidekicks like Robin — they want Superman, and Captain America, and Batman. They want the major film franchises, too — and I suspect they’ll get them. After all, why not?
Some of this is the LGBT movement’s desire to use entertainment to proselytize for their worldview. And part of this is their desire to rub their cultural victory in the faces of all those who still disagree with them. The Sexual Revolution is the reason we can’t have nice things.
