The Gay and the Rad

Dear Batman and Superman,

In New York last summer, as I rode the escalator down from the movie theater on Forty-Second Street after seeing your home movie, Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice (Zack Snyder, 2016), I exited with two young and presumptively straight men (my Gaydar is at a disadvantage with this hoodie-wearing cohort). Both lamented the film's characterization of you, Batman. As you both know and I'm sorry to say, the movie is crap, save for Gal Gadot as Wonder Woman and Jeremy Irons as Batman's loyal Alfred. "They took everything about Batman that was cool and made him do things he wouldn't do," my theater companions complained. Said one, "He used to be gay and rad."

In honor of Richard Dyer, I want to speak to this intoxicating cocktail of the gay and the rad, imbibed over the many years since Richard first celebrated that combination by proposing the divine figure of a clenched fist on a limp wrist. You, Batman, know exactly what I mean, even if you won't admit it. And although Richard might be my own superhero, what I have to contribute to this dossier has precisely to do with scale: with particular and intimate experience and the grander scheme of things, with the capacity to disperse judgment across discriminating aesthetic and formal observations as well as big-picture statements about ideas and culture. I don't want to make him do or say things he wouldn't; I want to keep what's gay and rad. And so, what I want to bring into focus, while celebrating the monumentality of Richard's work, is his countertendency against "field defining" or diagnostic pronouncements. Instead, in his writings across the years, we find welcoming perspectives, revisions, and correctives, whether from historical hindsight or competing experiences and points of view.

Batman, Superman, let me tell you two about my own point of entry. As an undergraduate student in the early 1980s, I encountered Richard's work in Gays and Film as the foundation of a new field I had inherited through literary study. At that moment, it was in literature that it seemed possible to pose feminist questions about authorship, genre, mass and popular culture, reception, signification, and consciousness—even feminist questions about superheroes. In my traditional liberal arts curriculum, where things like American literature or the novel itself were heinous departures from the core of lyric poetry, I thrilled to the prospect of studying women writers and, quickly thereafter, lesbian writers and writing, propelled by the energy of feminist and gay movements (Catwoman is in that cast). Two other currents fed the stream: one was a vestigial cultural feminism, that realm of solidarity, activism, and aspiration caricatured yet captured by earnest guitar-strumming womyn, an image that appeared as a performance of the Indigo Girls song "Closer to Fine" (1989) in the recent Transparent (Amazon Studios, 2014–) episode "Man on the Land." The other current involved my acute sense, in the early 1980s, that the most vibrant area of humanistic study—from questions of authorship and genre to the high stakes of feminist, postcolonial, Marxist, and critical race thinking—was shifting away from literature toward cinema and media, in the wake of the work of Richard, Laura Mulvey, and Stuart Hall, among many other authors. Closer to home, it entered through the teaching, writing, and mentoring of Marcia Landy, Gayatri Spivak, and Jackie Byars. That heady, sometimes gay, sometimes rad field has been revised in the past forty years by gays and lesbians and queers and trans folk with different political and aesthetic investments and genealogies.

It is thanks to the wisdom and energies of these foremothers, forefathers, and multiply gendered ancestors that we stand here today; but let me pinpoint which debt I think we owe most palpably to Richard. His work has always made it clear that there is a great deal at stake in what we do. Not because a panel at the SCMS conference or a dossier of letters in Cinema Journal changes the world, but because they are of a piece with...