DC COMICS SAYS: BATMAN is GAY ?!?!?

BATMAN may be supergay. We're going to have to review this current article and this older well-sourced article with citations from actual comic panels to find out. Maybe he's like my friend Al who is straight but does gay stuff.

Batman a Confirmed Bisexual? DC Outs Bruce Wayne in New Comic this Week
https://bleedingfool.com/comics/batman-confirmed-bisexual-dc-outs-bruce-wayne-in-this-weeks-batman-the-knight/

A Brief History of Dick
https://slate.com/culture/2016/04/the-history-of-the-gay-subtext-of-batman-and-robin.html

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Are Batman editor Ben Abernathy and writer Chip Zdarsky outing Batman next week? This possibility was first teased 16 months ago, but in Batman the Night #8, out this week, Bruce Wayne is apparently confirmed to be gay, bisexual, or at least bi-curious as a youth. Reader suspicions began in Batman: The Knight #5 which saw Bruce share a moment with his teammate Anton. The two looked into each other’s eyes, hinting at a potential kiss between the two before they were interrupted.

Although LGBTQ+ activists squealed over the possibilities, so far DC Comics hasn’t yet confirmed the sexuality of the Dark Knight. Social media blew up at the time, with many expressing their opinions on what the moment meant.

DC Comics has been no stranger to making their biggest characters gay or bisexual. Last year, they debuted comics outing Superman as bisexual, Tim Drake’s Robin is a bisexual, and there’s even a comic featuring a bisexual Supergirl. And the creator of Ghost-Maker, the bisexual character that Bruce has been so focused on in this story, is James Tynion IV, who coincidentally is the same writer that retconned Golden Age comics era Green Lantern as a homosexual – also last year. It’s been speculated that 55% of the new characters at DC in the last three years identify as LGBTQ, so the odds are pretty good Bruce is next.

The synopsis for this week’s issue is as follows: Bruce Wayne’s journey to become the Dark Knight has taken him around the globe several times, but his training is nearly complete. His trials, however, haven’t gone unnoticed: someone has been watching him…hunting him! The final test of the Batman begins!

Previews have been showing up on line, and they include the following panel where a young Bruce’s teacher reveals that Bruce Wayne and Anton Knight (aka Ghost-Maker), apparently had a previous romance.

Ghost-Maker, created by James Tynion, had his own backup story playing out in the main title last year where he was revealed to be bisexual in Batman #107. He was quite the mystery at the time, and what little readers knew of his past was that he trained in martial arts with Bruce Wayne during the formative years of his Batman training. And the two have a deep bond – which had become a bitter rivalry. Now this issue of Batman the Knight apparently reveals even more of Ghost-Maker’s past, seemingly confirming that he and Bruce had a romantic tryst that ended with Bruce getting his heart broken.

Wes Daugherity of Thinking Critical found this preview panel first, and admits as a DC Comics fan, he’s starting to suffer from “gay fatigue” with all these LGBTQ+ retcons to established characters in the DC Comics universe:

The Shadow of Wertham

Wertham’s crusade rallied church groups, schools and local legislatures against comics. Crime and horror comics folded by the dozen. Even Superman struggled to hang on. And as for Batman and Robin, they went from comics’ premiere double act to ensemble players, welcoming a bevy of masked hangers-on into the Bat-ranks.

Alfred the butler had joined them in 1943, serving as a 24/7 chaperone. Now, between a Bat-Hound, a Batwoman, a Batgirl, a Bat-5th-Dimensional-Magical-Imp, and—all too briefly—a Bat-Ape, Batman and Robin could hardly find any time alone together. This was no coincidence. The shadow of Wertham lingered long into the ’60s, and Batman editors resolved to do what they could to dispel it, even if doing so came with a body count: When asked why Alfred the butler was killed off—briefly—in 1964 to be replaced by the dithering Aunt Harriet, editor Julius Schwartz averred, “There was a lot of discussion in those days about three males living in Wayne Manor.”

But gay subtext, like information, longs to be free, and the universe doggedly conspired to keep dropping inadvertently hilarious panels like this one, from a 1966 Justice League of America comic, into Bat-canon: