Gay Superheroes

Well, it's official: Alan Scott, the original Green Lantern, is coming out of the closet.

Here's a bit more of a preview.

Needless to say, the clueless right is up in arms. The notorious OneMillion(minus 960,000)Moms posted a warning on their Facebook page -- which they promptly took down when the comments were flooded with congratulations to DC. David Badash has a screen-cap here. Given their success with the boycott of Toys R Us and Archie Comics after Kevin Keller's wedding, I suppose it's no surprise that the OMM decided to duck and run.

What strikes me is that they seem to have no clue that gay superheroes have been around since at least the early 1990s. That would be Northstar, originally with Alpha Flight and now in the Astonishing X-Men series, where he is scheduled to marry his boyfriend next month. (And to add to the insult to the guardians of all that is decent, it's another interracial same-sex marriage.) And don't forget Wiccan and Hulkling from Young Avengers (who I discussed here), and Rictor and Shatterstar in X-Factor. (I reviewed the first collection of that series here.) They got together in X-Factor #45, say 2008?

And gods help us if OMM ever figure out that there's a manga genre (very popular among teenage girls -- and I'm sure a certain number of teenage boys) devoted to male-male romances, some examples of which are much steamier than anything you're going to find in American superhero comics.

I just find it highly amusing that these arbiters of what's proper in our culture have no clue as to what's actually going on.