431: Jules Feiffer 2: Hostileman 2

“Playboy”, June 1969

The point of interest in this two page excerpt from this late instalment of “Hostileman” is Jules Feiffer’s take on the gay folk myth that has historically accumulated around Batman.

In Feiffer’s case this piece doesn’t just grow out the obvious dig about a grown man and his close relationship with his younger ward. Only a couple of years earlier Feiffer had written his study, “The Great Comic Book Heroes” (Dial Press, 1965).

In his book, Feiffer quoted Frederic Wertham's 1954 condemnation of comic books “Seduction of the Innocent”, in which the homosexual appeal of Batman and Robin is revealed:

"At home they live an idyllic life…They live in sumptuous quarters with beautiful flowers in large vases…It is like a wish dream of two homosexuals living together. . . The atmosphere is homosexual and anti-feminine. If the girl is good-looking she is undoubtedly the villainess. If she is after Bruce Wayne, she will have no chance against Dick. For instance, Bruce and Dick go out one evening in dinner clothes, dressed exactly alike. The attractive girl makes up to Bruce while in successive pictures young Dick looks on smiling, sure of Bruce".

You’ll note this is a fairly good description of what Feiffer himself does in the relevant panels of “Hostileman”.

Feiffer however doesn't agree about any putative homosexulity, despite the fact that the young Feiffer had no real love for Robin (“I couldn’t stand boy companions….God, how I hated (Robin). You can imagine how pleased I was when, years later, I heard he was a fag…”). Wrote Feiffer: “Batman and Robin were no more or less queer than were their youngish readers, many of whom palled around together, didn’t trust girls, played games that had lots of bodily contact, and from similar surface evidence were more or less queer. But this sort of case-building is much too restrictive. In our society it is not only homosexuals who don’t like women. Almost no one does. "

Bruce Maim is an obvious ref to Bruce Wayne as Batman, however within the context of a cartoon with gay content in “Playboy”, there’s also the fact of Bruce as the stereotypically gay name.

Tangier, meanwhile, was long a famed bolthole for gay tourists.

344: The Ambiguously Gay Duo

The Ambiguously Gay Duo @ Yahoo! Video

by Robert Smigel, J. J. Sedelmaier and Stephen Colbert
Voices of Stephen Colbert and Steve Carell
Narrated by Don Pardo
1. September 28, 1996 "It Takes Two To Tango"
2. November 2, 1996 "Queen of Terror"
3. December 14, 1996 "Don We Now... Or Never"
4. April 19, 1997 "Safety Tips"
5. November 15, 1997 "Blow Hot, Blow Cold"
6. May 9, 1998 "A Hard One To Swallow"
7. November 21, 1998 "Ace and Gary’s Fan Club"
8. May 6, 1999 "AmbiguoBoys"
9. May 13, 2000 "Trouble Comes Twice"
10. October 19, 2002 "The Third Leg Of Justice"





“Playboy”, December 1999

The Ambiguously Gay Duo is a parody of the stereotypical comic book superhero duo. It’s also a parody of the cheapness and formulae of 1970s superhero animation. Which is lucky, since it lets the writers and performers keep repeating in good faith the same jokes and set-ups, just like a cartoon of the period. It puts the joke in a repetitive frame which pardons what would otherwise just be the normal pandering to an audience’s tastes for more of the same from familiar characters.

The typical episode usually begins with the duo's arch-nemesis Bighead briefing his henchmen on a plot for some grandiose plan for world domination, interrupted by a debate as to whether or not Ace and Gary are gay – often with some speculation as to how he knows so much about The Gayness (which is all gym locker stuff to be honest). Once the crime is in process, the police commissioner calls on the superheroes to save the day, often engaging in similar debates with the chief of police. Ace and Gary set out to foil the evil plan, but not before calling attention to themselves with outrageous antics and innuendo, and behaving in ways perceived by other characters as profligately homosexual. And

Ace [patting Gary on the buttocks] : Good job, friend-of-friends!
Villains/Bystanders [gasps, and ghastly stares]
Ace: What's everybody looking at?
Villains/Bystanders [in unison]: Nothing!

is the pay-off in every instalment.

The shorts were intended to satirize suggestions that early Batmancomics implied a homosexual relationship between the title character and his sidekick Robin, a charge most infamously leveled by Fredric Wertham in his 1954 book, “Seduction of the Innocent”. But where that was merely a possible subtext in the originals, the “Ambiguously gay Duo” makes that explicit and therefore the sole point of discussion for everyone except the unwitting heroes, Ace and Gary. It’s not merely that there is the close relationship but that everything they do has a sexual aspect, which is not all that bloody ambiguous. The gags presuppose that the audience now know everything about gay lifestyles. It’s the same dubious pleasure of gossiping and the cheap fun of speculation. It’s assumed that the homosexual’s tastes and mannerisms unwittingly give him away and leaves everyone else nudging each other in the ribs. Of course this is all merely conceptual set- up for the plethora of sodomy puns and innuendo. If the sitcoms and sketch programmes of the ‘70s and ‘80s were quite happy to have gay gags set up by speculation about mincing poofs, by the late 90s humorists on TV can get away with a penis-shaped car and visual gags which ape a cock stuffed into two round arse cheeks, masturbation, oral sex or the Ambiguously Gay Duo fighting in ways which resemble having sex with each other. What in the ‘70s in “National Lampoon” and the likes was the height of deliberate bad taste are now merely a little risqué.

343: Superman

by Ken Pyne
in “Punch” 13 October 1980

There are sizeable chunks of the internet devoted to teasing gay meanings out of old Superman and Batman comics, and of course there was all Fredric Wertham’s obsessing in the 1950s, but actual gay cartoons or gags about superheroes don’t seem to have really cropped up with much regularity until the Ambiguously Gay Duo in the mid-1990s.

Since this is by Ken Pyne, it’s inevitable that the mood of this is disillusionemnt rather than jokes about lycra-clad muscled fetishism.