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237 Batman, Deviance and Camp andy medhurST Reprinted by permission from Roberta E. Pearson and William Uricchio, eds. The Many Lives of the Batman: Critical Approaches to a Superhero and His Media (Routledge, 1991), 149–163. Only someone ignorant of the fundamentals of psychiatry and of the psychopathology of sex can fail to realize a subtle atmosphere of homoerotism which pervades the adventure of the mature “Batman” and his young friend “Robin.” Fredric Wertham It’s embarrassing to be solemn and treatise-like about Camp. One runs the risk of having, oneself, produced a very inferior piece of Camp. susaN soNtaG i’m not sure hoW qualified i am to Write this essay. batman hasn’t been particularly important in my life since I was seven years old. Back then he was crucial, paramount, unmissable as I sat twice weekly to watch the latest episode on TV. Pure pleasure, except for the annoying fact that my parents didn’t seem to appreciate the thrills on offer. Worse than that, they actually laughed. How could anyone laugh when the Dynamic Duo were about to be turned into Frostie Freezies (pineapple for the Caped Crusader, lime for his chum) by the evil Mr. Freeze? Batman and I drifted apart after those early days. Every now and then I’d see a repeated episode and I soon began to understand and share that once infuriating parental hilarity, but this aside I hardly thought about the man in the cape at all. I knew about the subculture of comic freaks, and the new and alarmingly pretentious phrase “graphic novel” made itself known to me, but I still regarded (with the confidence of distant ignorance) such texts as violent, macho, adolescent, and, well, silly. That’s when the warning bells rang. The word “silly” reeks of the complacent condescension that has at various times been bestowed on all the cultural forms that matter most to me (Hollywood musicals, British melodramas, pop 238 andy medhurST music, soap operas) so what right had I to apply it to someone else’s part of the popular cultural playground? I had to rethink my disdain, and 1989 has been a very good year in which to do so, because in terms of popular culture 1989 has been the Year of the Bat. This essay, then, is not written by a devotee of Batman, someone steeped in every last twist of the mythology. I come to these texts as an interested outsider , armed with a particular perspective. That perspective is homosexuality, and what I want to try and do here is to offer a gay reading of the whole Batbusiness . It has no pretension to definitiveness; I don’t presume to speak for all gay people everywhere. I’m male, white, British, thirty years old (at the time of writing) and all of those factors need to be taken into account. Nonetheless, I’d argue that Batman is especially interesting to gay audiences for three reasons. Firstly, he was one of the first fictional characters to be attacked on the grounds of presumed homosexuality, by Fredric Wertham in his book Seduction of the Innocent. Secondly, the 1960s TV series was and remains a touchstone of camp (a banal attempt to define the meaning of camp might well start with “like the sixties Batman series”). Thirdly, as a recurring hero figure for the last fifty years, Batman merits analysis as a notably successful construction of masculinity. nIghTmare on pSyChIaTry STreeT Seduction of the Innocent is an extraordinary book. It is a gripping, flamboyant melodrama masquerading as social psychology. Fredric Wertham is, like Senator McCarthy, like Batman, a crusader, a man with a mission, an evangelist . He wants to save the youth of america from its own worst impulses, from its id, from comic books. His attack on comic books is founded on an astonishingly crude stimulus-and-response model of reading, in which the child (the child, for Wertham, seems an unusually innocent, blank slate waiting to be written on) reads, absorbs, and feels compelled to copy, if only in fantasy terms, the content of the comics. It is a model, in other words, which takes for granted extreme audience passivity. This is not the place to go into a detailed refutation of Wertham’s work, besides which such a refutation has already been done in Martin Barker’s excellent A Haunt of Fears.1 The central point of audience passivity needs stressing, however, because it is crucial to the celebrated...

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