A couple of weeks ago I posted a series of discussions about the way in which super-hero comics tend to be structured around homosocial desire and the closet. You can read the whole series here.

Just to resummarize quickly: the basic argument is that a character like Superman is a male power fantasy. That fits in with Freud and the Oedipal conflict. Clark Kent can be seen as the “child” who imagines himself supplanting the Father/lawgiver/god. You can also take this one step away from Freud and argue (via the theories of Eve Sedgwick) that what we’re talking about here is not, or not solely, an internal psychological desire, but rather a cultural/social formulation. Men turn away from femininity in order to identify with patriarchal power; or, to see it another way, to be patriarchal requires the denigration or hiding of weakness. That’s the closet; Clark Kent is living a lie, pretending to be powerful in order to be powerful, when his truth is actually a weak, wimpy child. And, again, the closet is powered by male-male desires and fantasies, making it homoerotic (though, as I argue at some length, it’s actually a straight person’s homoerotic fantasy — we’re talking about how straight men bond or interact with the patriarchy in particular, and arguing that that interaction is structured by ideas about, and within, gayness.)

Okay, so that’s basically where we left things. In the last few posts, I was mostly interested in pointing out similarities in the way this basic blueprint was used across different kinds of comics, from Superman and Batman through Spider-Man and Hulk and on to the work of folks like Chris Ware and Dave Sim. But, of course, there are differences too from case to case, and it’s interesting to look at some of those, and how they work.

So first, I’ve been thinking a little about the differences between some of the early heroes of the 30s and 40s and the later iconic Marvel heroes. Generally, I think, the argument is that Marvel heroes were different because they were more realistic; they faced everyday problems, made mistakes and so forth.

I wonder how true that is exactly, though. The fact is, none of the Marvel characters are all that realistic. Peter has girl troubles, sure, and he gets bullied — but Clark Kent had girl troubles, and he got bullied too. And Peter’s a genius inventor. And he’s drawn to look like he’s 40 even though he’s only like — what? 16?

Anyway, the point is, I don’t think the change had all that much to do with verisimilitude. We’re still in the world of preposterous fantasy, after all, with cosmic rays and gamma rays and super strength and defeating your enemies by punching them in the face. The difference, it seems to me, has more to do with anxiety. The Oedipal split is always somewhat agonized and anxious; the superfather for Freud is also the super-castrating ogre. And in those early Superman stories, Clark is despised and castrated; there’s a definite feeling of loathing.

However, the loathing is in these directed mostly towards the castrated, not the castrator. The problem, the thing to be ridiculed, is powerlessness, not power.

Over time, though, the faith in that image of absolute power started to waver. In the 50s and 60s there was a lot of more-or-less playful experimentation with the idea of superman as evil father. Thus, the aptly (and Freudianly) named Superman is a Dick website.

Here’s a particularly apropos picture:

I don’t know that I can really add anything to that.

Of course, the stories here always resolved by showing that Superman was acting for everyone’s good; he may have looked like the evil father, but he’s still really the good father; patriarchy is still to be trusted, power is still great, and all the boys still want that super dick.

Marvel’s innovation was not that it gave us stories that were different in kind from Superman’s kid, Jimmy Olsen. Rather, the difference was that it was able to take exactly this story and treat it as tragedy rather than farce. The problems most Marvel super-heroes face is precisely that of the superdick. That is, they aren’t beset by normal, everyday problems — they’re beset by the Thing — the monster phallus itself. Peter Parker’s mega-problems (the death of his uncle in particular) stem from being Spider-Man; which is why, when he loses his powers, he’s acutely relieved. The early Marvel comics loved to portray super-powers as a crippling curse, a disaster. The Hulk is maybe the purest example; the uber-masculine ogre who hates and wants to destroy his weaker self. You couldn’t really come up with a more lurid Oedipal castration fantasy.

The Marvel stories, then, are about mistrust of patriarchal authority; they insistently question whether the great gay bargain — exchanging individual weakness for patriarchal strength at the cost of always hiding your weakness — is really worth it. In this, they’re not unlike exploitation films, which are from roughly the same time period and which were also obsessed, in various ways, with authority and changing ideas about masculinity and femininity.

But where exploitation films could, and did, revel in the perverse pleasures of fucking with authority, Marvel comics never (for various reasons) went there. As with Superman as Superdick, the stories always ultimately ended up affirming the worth of power as power. Peter Parker is relieved to lose his powers…but then his Aunt and girlfriend are captured, and he realizes how much he Needs to Be a Man and grasp the superdick in order to save them. And even though he’s an ogre, The Hulk, somehow, always ends up being a force for good (and eventually became childlike himself, neatly undercutting the evil-ogre-father aspect of the character, which was much more prominent in the first issues.) Moreover, Stan was hardly above indulging in some Superman style superdickery himself; Professor X and other father figures are always running the X-Men through this or that idiotic test for their own good. “Yes, my X-Men, I gutted Ice Man and used his bloody remains to lubricate the gears of my Cerebro computer, then let you think he was dead for weeks. But! The experience has made you stronger as a team! And Cerebro is working really well now! And besides, before I brutally murdered him, I created a perfect robot duplicate, whose powers work better and who doesn’t engage in annoying pranks. Say hello to you new teammate: Ice-Bot!”

Having just written that super-hero parody, I have to say…it’s interesting how much super-hero parody revolves around superdickery. Chris Ware’s Superman, for example, is essentially a brutal sadist destroying everyone who contradicts him; Johnny Ryan has a superman/god character who works in a similar way. And then there’s Kate Beaton’s bad-ass Wonder Woman. And a lot of the humor in Mini-Marvels is based on the kid heroes behaving like megaomaniacal uber-fathers (Reed Richards cheerfully sending the Hulk off into space for example.) And, of course, that’s the whole point of Marvel Zombies too, with the heroes turned into evil ogres and at last wholeheartedly embracing their inner superdickery.

In fact, the genius of the early Marvel comics is not that they undercut (as it were) the superdick, but rather that they reconsecrate it by more fully acknowledging its dickishness. Males (and especially adolescent males, the ones reading these comics) are always ambivalent about sadism and patriarchal power, both because the sadism and patriarchal power is likely as not to be directed against them (“go to your room!” go off to war!”) and because, you know, who wants to be always about to become the ogre raping and murdering their own loved ones? That very guilt and fear, however, function as a lever and a spur. Peter Parker kills his father….and his life is thereafter defined by the guilt that demands he himself become a monster/father to take Uncle Ben’s place. The Hulk, in his later incarnations, is not just the destructive phallus, but the wounded child as destructive phallus; the fantasy, both terrifying and fascinating, is to become the ogre-father while still an infant, eternally both torturing oneself and satisfyingly wreaking instant vengeance, on oneself and others, for the torture. Marvel figured out that you don’t need to deny the anxiety and guilt attendant upon the power fantasy; rather, you can harness them to make the green monster grow.

So a couple more comments about this.

— I think that, as others have pointed out, power fantasies (or superdickery) is really central to the super-hero genre. And I think that what that means in part is that the super-hero genre is — not always, or everywhere, but quite centrally nonetheless — sadistic. It’s about identifying with power — either for good, or for ill. It’s about being the beneficent god or the evil ogre father, or both at once. To the extent that you do identify with weakness, it’s generally as a prelude to releasing your inner hulk, or going out to websling, or whatever.

—This is a big part of why superheroics and horror (as opposed to goth) don’t mix especially well. You can certainly have gore in something like Blackest Night, because gore and violence fit perfectly well with sadism; you can be the ravening ogre father chomping on bones, hooray! And, yes, sadism does have a place in horror too — thus torture-porn — and to that extent it does make some sense to think of Blackest Night or Marvel Zombies as some kind of horror crossover. But the central mode of horror really is not sadism; it’s masochism. It’s about being the devoured child, not the devouring father — in horror, while you may cheer for the ogre at various points, you never actually are the ogre; you’re the victim, which is where the fear comes from. The whole point of Shivers or the Thing or the Living Dead movies is that the characters are consumed; they are destroyed, and then eaten up or filled up by the Other (which is pretty explicitly the phallus, in Shivers and the Thing, especially.)

But super-hero comics never do that; even when the super-heroes are evil, they have a recognizable personality, and are the stars with which you (more or less) identify. The two genres, super-heroes and horror, are simply diametrically opposed; they are committed to opposite goals. Super-hero comics are fun because they empower; horror is fun because it disempowers. You can’t do both at once. (Alan Moore’s Swamp Thing is an exception that tests the rule, perhaps…I found the Swamp Thing vampire story at least fairly scary. But Moore accomplished that by keeping Swamp Thing himself off screen for most of the story while various civilians are terrorized and slaughtered. When Swamp Thing did show up to do battle with a giant frog/lizard/vampire thing, the horror quickly dissipated.)

—Masochism is central to the way that exploitation films, such as horror, express their distrust of the status quo. Not that horror films are actually revolutionary, per se, or that I Spit on Your Grave is going to overthrow the patriarchy or anything. But, effectual or not, a film like Last House on the Left really expresses a visceral distaste for patriarchal authority. It sneers at good dads and bad dads alike, and at the war they perpetrated, and at the whole concept of justice and truth. And again, it does this through masochism — through identifying with victims and getting pleasure/excitement/terror through fantasies of disempowerment rather than through fantasies of empowerment.

Super-hero comics on the other hand, have a lot of trouble making that kind of perverse identification with the disempowered. This is the case even with parodies like Marvel Zombies or Ted Rall’s Fantabulaman or even Chris Ware’s Superman/Jimmy Corrigan strips, where there’s generally a kind of contempt for Jimmy’s weakness which echoes the distaste for Clark Kent or Peter Parker. In all these parodies, the focus is largely on the evil father doing the ogrish evil; the victims are much less personified or even visualized. Even if you have your tongue in your cheek while admiring the superdick, you’re still kind of admiring the superdick.

Grant Morrison’s mainstream work provides an even clearer example. In his Justice League and X-Men runs, he often has his villains launch fairly damning critiques of the heroes as egotistical, self-satisfied, godlike assholes. But then he always kind of takes it back; the heroes waltz on and show that they’re noble and good and they save the world and you’re supposed to be all enthusiastic, I guess. Obviously, Morrison identifies with the critique to some extent, but there isn’t any way in a super-hero comic to let it have the last word, or to have it be the point (as it is, to some extent at least, in the Invisibles.)

Another example is Greg Rucka’s Hiketeia. Rucka puts a certain amount of effort into making the story masochistic. The cover features Wonder Woman stepping on Batman’s head, and the plot is a rape-revenge, in which a young girl slaughters her sister’s killers, taking the knife to patriarchal notions of justice and fairness. Men get beat down by storng women. However…in the first place, this is a Wonder Woman comic, and a lot of the emotional oomph comes from watching her beat the tar out of Batman — you identify with her, which is sadistic rather than masochistic. Secondly, the story ends up being not about the girl and her revenge at all, but instead about the tragic rift that the girl’s rape-revenge creates between Wonder Woman and Batman; a rift the girl, rather inexplicably, sacrifices herself to heal. It’s like she hears all the genre rules yelling at her that she’s supposed to be the one getting castrated, not doing the castrating, and she finally acquiesces — perhaps just because she can’t stand being written by Greg Rucka any longer.

Again, Watchmen is perhaps an exception of sorts here, where the role of all-powerful father is both questioned and in various ways deflated. But it took Moore a number of false starts before he got there (Miracleman and V for Vendetta try to mount an anti-establishment critique via super-hero, but ultimately, I’d argue, end up defeated by the genre conventions.)

The point here isn’t that stories supporting status quo are necessarily bad. Dark Knight is pretty unabashed in its worship of the superdick, and it’s great. And, as the Dark Knight kind of suggests, the status quo has numerous benefits (stable currency and revolutionaries not stringing up me and mine from flagpoles = good.) It is interesting, though, the extent to which the superhero genre’s bias towards and fascination with the superdick makes it difficult for authors to tell certain kinds of stories (horror, anti-status-quo) even when they’re clearly trying to do so.
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Well, that was about twice as long as I thought it would be. I still want to discuss the question of whether Wonder Woman can be the superdick…but I think we’ll have to leave that for another day.

Last week I posted a lecture I gave on the importance of, and suppression of, male-male bonding and obsessions in comics. (Part One, Part Two.)

Some interesting comments and criticisms were brought up in the comments to those posts, particularly questions about Freud and why on earth I thought writing about this sort of thing was a good idea. I’m going to try to address some of those questions here. The result is going to be a bit rambling, but hopefully not completely uninteresting. So with that endorsement — off we go.

To do a quick recap of the argument: my basic point was that Western comics are obsessed with male-male relationships and heterosexual identity. That obsession is structured by homosexuality and the closet; maleness is always furtively in danger of splitting into a hypermasculinized overman (and hypermasculinity equates with gay) and into a feminized underman (which again, can be equated with gayness.) The fraught, agonized tension of of male-male desire becomes both the emotive force and the excuse for self-pity, and ultimately for violence, directed at women (who are despicably feminine and constantly interfering in all the male-male bonding) and towards other men (as objects of desire who can only be furtively embraced through physical chastisement.) Homophobia, misogyny, and violence, in other words, are motivated by a crisis in heterosexual male identity — a fear of an inescapable homosexuality, which becomes more inescapable the more (or less) male one becomes. I argued that this dynamic was present in classic super-hero comics like Superman, Batman, and Spider-man, and that it also existed in more well-respected indie comics like Cerebus and Jimmy Corrigan. Finally, I suggested that shojo manga dealt with gayness and emotional bonds in rather different ways. (Many of these ideas are adapted from Eve Sedgwick, who I’ll discuss some in this post as well.)

So that basically bring us up to date. The essay provoked a certain amount of skepticism, most notably from Pallas, a frequent commenter. He eventually asked a series of perceptive questions, among which were these:

What “erotic” means?

Is there such a thing as platonic friendship, or only “erotic” friendship?

Is the appreciation of a parent towards a child inherently “erotic”? (Hey, you brought up the Batman surrogate father examples, not me!)

Is it possible to appreciate aesthetic qualities without that appreciation being “erotic”?

I think, as Pallas suggests, these questions are central to my argument. They’re also, though, rather more broadly important; they’re essentially questions about how human beings interact with each other, whether as lovers or family or political actors.

I do have a couple answers for Pallas, I think. To start at the beginning:

“[Explain] What erotic means.}

I think “erotic” in this context means touched by, or having to do with, desire. So, for example, Clark Kent’s relationship with Superman can be seen as erotic, in that Superman can be seen fairly easily as a power fantasy; Clark desires to be Superman. That’s erotic — and since they’re both men, it can be read as homoerotic (and when I say “can be read” I mean it can be read that way not just by me but by Clark and to some extent by his creators.) Similarly, Lois desires to humiliate Clark — that’s erotic. Superman desires to humiliate Lois — again, that’s erotic — and, obviously, sado-masochistic. Or, as another for instance, Joker desires to destroy Batman; Jimmy Corrigan desires to become powerful like Superman; Cerebus desires to remain continent. Desires are erotic — and desire, in one form or another, exists in all human relationships. Thus, to answer Pallas’ second question, there is no clean “platonic” friendship, because all friendship is involved with desire.

This isn’t an original insight; most obviously, it’s associated with Freud, who argued that all human relationships, even the most sacrosanct (as, for example, those between mother and son) were charged with erotism and desire. He was roundly hooted for being a dirty old quack — and the scientific certainty he brings to his more outlandish theories is, I have to admit, kind of hard to take. When Freud insists “all human beings are bisexual…Psychoanalysis has established this fact as firmly as chemistry has established the presence of oxygen, hydrogen, carbon and other elements in all organic bodies,” it’s hard not to respond with a heartfelt, “You wish psychology was chemistry, Ziggy.”

I think the scientific foderol can obscure the fact, though, that when he argued that desire was central to human existence, Freud wasn’t just making shit up; he was restating a very old truth. Desire is, I think, a fairly good shorthand, secular definition of sin — a fairly important concept before the Enlightenment declared we were all clean, rational, democratic automatons. Freud was a benighted heir of the Enlightenment too, in his own way — thus his insistence that he was doing science instead of theology. But I think there’s a fairly strong argument to be made that he was a theologian in spite of himself; that, in focusing on desire and eroticism, he was simply (or not so simply) reintroducing sin as a motivating force in the affairs (variously defined) of human beings. Freud says this himself, when, for example, he points out that “prohibited impulses are present alike in the criminal and in the avenging community. In this, psycho-analysis is no more than confirming the habitual pronouncements of the pious; we are all miserable sinners.”

In short, the statement “all people are bisexual” is not a scientific truth. But that doesn’t make it false — and, in fact, since desire is part of all human relationships, I, at least, think that the statement “all people are bisexual” is, in fact, true.

So on to Pallas’ next question:

“Is the appreciation of a parent towards a child inherently “erotic”?”

…which lands us neatly in the Oedipal complex. Both Freud and Christianity, I believe, would answer Pallas’ question with an affirmative; the love of parent and child is erotic; it is charged with (selfish) desire, just like every other human relationship since the Fall.

Freud would illustrate this with the Oedipus drama. But comics fans don’t need to go so far afield. Consider, for example, Spider-Man. Peter Parker is, like all super-heroes, surely a power fantasy; he’s a nerdy, nebbishy, feminized nothing who, though the miraculous oral intervention of an insect, is transformed into a paragon of masculinity, able to beat up professional wrestlers and earn money with a single upgraded chromosome. He changes, in short, from pitiful son to masterful father. In doing so, he also, inevitably, kills his own father (“Uncle” Ben)— and all the guilty emoting can’t quite erase the fact that the death of the father is not the end of the fantasy, but a continuation of it. To be a man is not just to have great power, but great responibility (for protecting the womenfolk, among other things); Peter can’t take his father’s place as protector of the weak (i.e., the women) if his father is still there.

(I googled Spider-Man and Oedipal conflict, incidentally,and was kind of startled not to immediately discover, like, 50 people making the same points above. Despite my failed googling, though, I am sure as sure can be that I am Not The First Person to Think of This — it’s pretty blatant after all. I’d imagine it at least occurred to Lee and Ditko themselves, for that matter.)

Or, to put it in less psychoanalytic and more Christian terms — children and parents envy and compete with each other; their love for each other is stained with desire. Even Peter’s noblest impulses (his desire to take responsibility and do good) are in part a selfish desire to be perceived as being as powerful as and as good as his father; to set himself up as an idol and take the place of God. (Probably the basic sin of the super-hero genre in general.)

Another way to look at this dynamic is through the work of Eve Sedgwick. I talked about Sedgwick a good bit in my original posts; she was a feminist and queer theorist, who (like a lot of feminist theorists) took Freud’s scientific/psychological ideas and recast them in a social/cultural context. In comments, Eric B (also known as “my brother”) provided a good summary:

Sedgwick’s point (derived partially from Claude Levi-Strauss’ account of kinship systems) is that we live in a patriarchal culture, where men have the power and are interested in maintaining that power. One of the ways in which this done is in the “trading” of women. Marriage serves a central function in cementing bonds between two families, consolidating patriarchal power, by joining two or more men in “homosocial” bonds. Women traditionally had no power in marriage (obviously this changes post 19th century) and so become “objects of exchange.” So…marriage itself is a weird structure–less about sex than about power and perpetuating bonds between families “ruled” by men. So…women become mediators of “relationships” between men. This reverses some old second-wave feminist accounts of “feminism is the theory, lesbianism is the practice.” Instead, its “patriarchy is the theory, homo- bonds is the practice.” This is how she links homophobia with misogyny. Women are treated as object in this model…but necessary objects. Without marriage (and therefore love and heterosexuality), you have no consolidation of power. Because of this “necessity” (just a structure–no “natural” reason why its necessary other than reproduction, which doesn’t require marriage, just sex)–homophobia develops as a part of patriarchal culture. Once marriage becomes important to power/economic structures, it must be maintained by powers-that-be and one of the ways that happens is a discouragement of same-sex relationships. So…misogyny and homophobia are linked…but they are also linked to homoeroticism (which isn’t always erotic, but often is), since the system requires (yes) the repression of homosexual sex, but also requires close bonds “between men.” It’s convincing to me more because of the links to Levi-Strauss account of kinship…an anthropological theory that is fairly widely accepted as helping to explain various “taboos” against certain kinds of marriage in a variety of different cultures/societies. I think there is some reliance on Freud, but the “repression” is less internal/psychological and more “socially necessary” to perpetuate a certain kind of culture. We don’t repress homosexual desires because of an overactive superego–but because we know society frowns on it and we can be gay-bashed for it, etc.

From Sedgwick’s perspective, then, the Oedipus story, and the Spider-Man origin, can be read (without too much of a shift from Freud’s version) as a fantasy, not about the infant’s love/hatred of his father, but about a man’s love/hatred for patriarchal power. Aunt May ends up as a chit in the power exchange between Uncle Ben and Peter. Peter’s feelings for his father — the patriarchal bonds of affection — are dangerous and inexpressible. Thus, Ben gets put out of the way, so that Peter can express his power fantasies (taking his father’s place in the patriarchy) through the safer medium of loving Aunt May on his dead father’s behalf. (Obviously, Peter isn’t marrying May — though it’s interesting that MJ is introduced to Peter by May. And it’s also interesting how important evil fathers are in those early stories; Norman Osborne, obviously, but also Doc Ock, who engages in an odd courtship with May.)

In any case, the Spider-Man story also shows pretty clearly how the Oedipal conflict, especially as interpreted by Sedgwick, ends up being structured by closeted homosexuality. Peter’s desire, his libido in Freud’s terms, is directed towards male power — the story is a power fantasy. As such, Peter is split in two; on the one hand, he’s the uber-father, with hyper-masculine powers, taking on the patriarchal father. On the other hand, he’s still a weak, helpless kid. This is what Sedgwick means, I think, when she talks about bifurcated identities — masculinity is always split like this, between absolute patriarchal power (which can perhaps be embodied momentarily, but is never absolutely attainable) and the individual self, (which always falls short of patriarchal ideals/responsibility/power.) It’s Spider-Man who takes the place of Uncle Ben…Spider-Man’s who signals that Peter has taken on the power and responsibility of the patriarch, or the father. But though he’s a man, Peter’s still also a frightened child.

So Peter is split. Oedipally, one part of him identifies with the powerless child, one part with the all-powerful (all-responsible) father. That split is charged with homoerotic desire; Peter desires the power of Spider-Man, which is also the power of his father, or of the patriarchy. I think too, contradictorily, Spider-Man desires the powerlessness of (ahem) Peter — the lack of responsibility. The Peter Parker/Spider-Man relationship is homoerotic — it’s about men’s desire for certain kinds of maleness.

At the same time, this relationship (and not coincidentally) is structured around the closet. The closet is about repressing male-male desires; presenting a united patriarchal front of power and responsibility to the world while concealing potentially dangerous emotions. The Spider-Man/Peter relationship is gay, and that gayness — or that feminization — has to be concealed. Spider-Man wears a mask because masculinity has no face; it’s an anonymous power. Beneath that mask is the face of someone who is not a man — a child — but the mask erases the child’s face. To become the patriarch is the desire and also the fear — the strength of the patriarch is also the strength of a monster: Thing, Hulk, Spider. The mingled desire and fear is why these relationships are agonized — to take on great power and great responsibility, you must be split. I discussed this in the context of the Friday the 13th films here.

All of which is to say, you can’t undermine masculinity by cutting it apart, or by pointing out that this or that person doesn’t measure up. Jason isn’t less of a man because he’s actually a child — or rather, he is less of a man, which is what masculinity is all about. Masculinity is always already bifurcated. On the one hand you have the Law — pitiless, perfect, unattainable. On the other hand, you have the implementer of the Law, the person the Law inhabits. That person is inevitably stunted, powerless, pitiful — feminized. The Law uses imperfect bodies, but that doesn’t make it less perfect. On the contrary, it merely emphasizes its disembodied perfection.

Again, you can see this in a Christian context as well — where too, obviously, father-son dynamics are fairly important. In some ways, Christianity is an effort to get out from under the Law; to replace the law with platonic love. Humans aren’t capable of platonic love, though. Instead, such love as humans are capable of (like Peter’s love for his father-figure) leads, via desire, back to a wish for power and thus to the law. That’s why Jesus has some harsh things to say about treating family bonds as more important than salvation, and why, ultimately, you need grace. (It’s interesting in this context that Spider-Man, Superman, et. al. were created by Jewish creators — “with great power comes great responsibility” is not exactly a Christian sentiment.)

Anyway, on to Pallas’ next:

“Is it possible to appreciate aesthetic qualities without that appreciation being “erotic”?”

If “erotic” is seen as meaning “desire”, I think the answer is no. Art is tied up in desire — the desire of the creators and the desire of the audience. This isn’t surpsing, since art is a human product meant to communicate with human beings,

The irony, of course, is that a lot of aesthetic criticism is tied to determining whether a given piece of art is free of desire, or pure, in particular ways. Art that seems clearly intended to make money, for example, is often denigrated as being inauthentic or impure. Similarly, art that caters to observers’ prurient interests (which is clearly erotic, in other words) is often downgraded.

Nonetheless, I don’t see how you separate aesthetics and desire. You identify with a character because you like something about him or her, and affections are (for humans) tied to desire. Even if you’re talking about abstractions, you’re talking about beauty, which is certainly linked to desire. There’s almost always, too, something compulsive about art — collecting, viewing, knowing, discussing — which seems inextricable from the mechanics of desire.

I think to me this is a big part of why art is worthwhile, or interesting. Desire — according to Christianity, according to Buddhism, according to Freud, according to innumerable pop songs — is at the heart of the human experience. If art isn’t erotic — if Spider-Man doesn’t satisfy and address desires — what would be the point, exactly?

Gene Philips correctly points out that there are types of desire other than homosexual or homosocial which can be dealt with through art, and, sure, I don’t have any problem with that (I talk at great length about bondage on this site for instance.) But relationships between men — tinged as all relationships are with desire — seem to me to be especially important, inasmuch as men, even now, play a disproportionate role in running the world.

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Update: More on this topic here.

I thought I’d reproduce here a talk I gave at Florida Atlantic University about a year ago. A shortened version ran in the Comics Journal, but this is the whole thing, pretty much as I presented it. It’s over 5000 words, so I’ve split it into two parts. I’ll run the second bit tomorrow. (Be warned; there are some explicit images below.)
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Comics in the Closet

I thought I’d start by reading a short, short story I wrote. This is called “Alpha Male in…Don’t Be Gay!”

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Alpha-Male was bitten by a radioactive penis and gained the proportional speed, strength, and emotional maturity of a penis. He lived happily out of touch with his feelings until suddenly his dick-sense tingles and, wham! The Gay Utopia arrives. A bunny offers him a flower from its anus; a burlesque troop of Hello Kitty dolls sings about bodies and pleasures; he is almost buried in pastel-colored anti-America flyers. Luckily, even the most playful subversion can’t daunt Alpha-Male! Fueled by his Alpha-testosterone, he tears several butterflies asunder and rapes a bunch of queer video projects. But for how long can our hero keep it up in a world without big box retail? Plus he can’t buy any meat so his farts don’t smell right. That’s why it’s time for the ultimate Alpha-power: mind-over-ejaculate! Desperately, courageously, he thinks of Hugh Hefner and achieves one final orgasm . Then he makes his cum take the shape of a direct-market comic store. Inside are a bunch of dudes like Frank Miller and R. Crumb making manly comics with boring layouts about fighting evil and getting laid. He decides to live there the rest of his life. Fuck the Gay Utopia! The End.
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And here’s a couple of illustrations done for the story by Johnny Ryan, a very talented indie cartoonist who kindly collaborated with me on this:

There’s alpha male being bitten by a radioactive penis;

1and there’s alpha male using his power of mind over ejaculate to create a direct-market comic book store in which he can live out the rest of his life.

So what we’ve got in this story is a pretty clear binary, right? On the one hand, you have the gay utopia, which is feminine, frilly, and touchy feely. Then, on the other hand, you have Alpha Male, who is masculine, not frilly, and emotionally inaccessible. Most importantly, the gay utopia is gay, and Alpha Male is not.

Except that, as you can see, like all super-heroes, Alpha Male is dressed in flamboyant tights. And he’s escaping from the gay utopia into an all-male environment that is extremely sexualized. What are he and Frank Miller and R. Crumb going to do for the rest of their lives in that direct comic book store? Are they really just going to be making comics about getting laid?

So is Alpha-Male straight? Is he gay? In Epistemology of the Closet, Eve Sedgwick argues

…that many of the major nodes of thought and knowledge in twentieth century Western culture as a whole are structured — indeed fractured — by a chronic, now endemic crisis of homo/heterosexual definition, indicatively male, dating from the end of the nineteenth century.

In other words, male heterosexual identity is incoherent, built upon a binary definition of homosexual identity which is essentially untenable. Though it’s taking a few liberties with Sedgwick’s formulation, I tend to think of it like this: Heterosexual men are men who like women. But if you like women too much, then you’re feminine, and so gay. But if you don’t like women, you like men and then you’re gay. Does not compute…does not compute…boom, you blow up like one of those robots out-witted by the very manly Captain Kirk and his close, close buddy, Mr. Spock.

American comics have long been written by, aimed at, and consumed primarily by, guys. They’re basically male genre literature, like Westerns or spy thrillers, devoted to visions of mysteriously manly men performing manly deeds —flexing, fighting, rescuing damsels in distress, and so forth. Super-hero comics provide a vision of fairly stereotypical masculinity — a man is a man when he has big muscles and fights for what is right.

As a for instance, here’s a picture of Batman behaving in a typical manly fashion.

So masculinity in super-hero comics is almost laughably straightforward. And yet, at the same time, it isn’t straight at all. Instead, it’s bifurcated, incoherent and, in a lot of ways, really gay. To begin with, super-heroes generally have a secret life, a “secret identity”, that they can’t talk about even to their closest friends and relations. In other words, they are all closeted. And what’s in that closet?. A hypermasculine, muscle-bound body, swathed in day-glo tights; an uber-manly man whose physical tussles with the bad guys preclude any meaningful relationship with the leading lady. Out of costume, on the other hand, the hero is a feminized sissy-boy, whose painful secret prevents him from having any meaningful relationship with the leading lady. Either way, what looked like iconic maleness starts to look, from up close, rather queer. And that’s not even getting into the whole boy sidekick thing.

Several pictures to illustrate what we’re talking about here:

First, here’s Superman in an ambiguously compromising tussle with a bad guy.

Second here’s the Joker goosing Batman. Incidentally, this is by Grant Morrison, who is quite aware of the homosexuality of super-heroes. Alan Moore also touches on it at several points in Watchmen. I’m far from the first person to discuss this sort of thing, in other words.

Anyway, to move on: here’s Peter Parker, aka Spider-Man, canceling a date with Liz Armstrong so he can go have a secret rendezvous with the Sandman. Notice that studly Flash Thompson takes the opportunity to point out that Peter is effeminate, or as he says “Lucky for you, Liz! Now you can go out with a real man — namely me!”

I also wanted to point out here, just as an aside, that the nebbishy alter-egos like Peter Parker and Clark Kent are sometimes associated with Jewishness; most of the creators were Jewish, and you can see it as a metaphor for assimilation. This interpretation doesn’t clash with the one I’m using, I don’t think — Jewish maleness and gayness are often associated with one another, both being grouped together as unmanly. Sedgwick I think would argue that the heterosexual/homosexual binary shapes the way we deal with issues like ethnicity and assimilation, which is why we have the stereotype of the Jewish nebbish in the first place.

Anyway, on to boy sidekicks: here’s Bruce Wayne (Batman) in bed with his youthful ward, Dick Grayson. Apparently when the unhealthy sexuality of comics was being condemned in the 50s, this panel served as an important case in point.

And here’s a multiple boy sidekick panel; Bucky, who’s Captain America’s partner, is grinning lasciviously and saying “Did you see the way Robin kept looking at me, Cap? I guess he knows who’s got the better partner…and the more exciting life!”

And one more boy sidekick image, because I couldn’t help myself.

Sedgwick incidentally points out that one of the main uses of the closet, perhaps for those inside, but definitely for those outside, is the way it allows one to feel smart and knowledgeable. You look at these images in this context and you say, hey, I know something here that most people, maybe even the creators, don’t. In this case, though, knowledge isn’t so much power as it is participation in mechanisms of pleasure. Enjoying your knowledge is one of the ways that the closet has power over you, not the other way around.

So, besides a desire to feel that I’m especially clever, why point this stuff out? Well, one reason is that the fractured masculinity we’re talking about here has some important effects on the way men are presented in these comics. In her books, Sedgwick argues that anxiety about homosexuality, or homosexual panic, is a trait *not* of gay men, but of *straight* men. If you’re gay and all the way out, you don’t need to worry about the closet, because you don’t have to worry whether people think you’re masculine enough. Straight men, on the other hand, have to always keep one hand on their masculinity (so to speak.) This can be expressed very dramatically, thorough, for example, homophobia or gay bashing. But it can work in more subtle ways as well.

One of the things Sedgwick talks about in this context is the idea of sentimentality. She points out that the sentimental is typically defined in terms of insincerity and femininity. It tends to be connected to genre fiction for women (romance novels, Hollywood romantic comedies) or else to a camp aesthetic associated with gayness (musicals, Joan Crawford melodramas.)

However, the fact is that sentimentality is just as much a male mode as a female one. It’s just that, where sentimentality in romance tends to be focused on tragic relationships, in male genres the sentimentality is tied up with the crisis of masculine identity which we’ve been talking about. Specifically, men are figured as stoic, and anti-sentimental. The male sentimental mode is all about men’s lack of sentimentality —the tragedy of the man who would cry, but will not, or cannot.

Sedgwick links this cultural fact to “an extraordinarily high level of self-pity in non-gay men” in the U.S., and argues that such “straight male self-pity is…associated with, or appealed to in justification of acts of violence, especially against women.” This is one typical justification for domestic abuse, for example — the idea that the woman emasculated, or made the man feel bad about himself, and therefore he is tragically driven to beat her up. You also see this in murder ballads, where the protagonist, as Hendrix puts it, is always “going to shoot my old lady/caught her messin’ round with another man.”

This link between maleness, self-pity, and violence, is readily apparent in American comics. Though on the surface super-hero stories seem to deal with very masculine subjects like law-and-order and fist fights, when you look a little deeper its clear that comic-books are sodden with masculine self-pity and sentimentality. This soppy maleness is, in fact, the main tool of identification, of plot, and of character development. Superman, Batman, and Spider-Man, the three most iconic examples of the genre, are orphans, and it is their status as such which impels, justifies, and lubricates their masculine physiques, skin-tight attire, and repetitive fisticuffs.

As a particularly clear example, of what I’m talking about, here’s a page from an early 80s Daredevil story, in which they’re retelling his origin. Daredevil’s Dad, Jack Murdock, is a prizefighter, and he’s being threatened if he doesn’t throw the fight. But inspired by his love for his son, and, one suspects, by his investment in his own masculinity, he refuses to lie down, and in an orgasmic surge of violence and sentiment, defeats his opponent.

For not throwing the fight, Jack is killed, which, naturally, inspires his son Matt Murdock, not to cry, but to don yellow tights and unleash an orgy of violence of his own.

And here’s Daredevil, not crying, but threatening.

As you can see, love between men is expressed not through tears or affection, but through bellowing and bashing.

Other characters of the Marvel stable have their bifurcated difference as the cause of their sentimental histrionics; their status as closeted or outed other is their tragedy, and, again, their excuse. This is the case for the Hulk, a semi-nude, muscle-bound id who gets to express his emotions by bashing everything in sight — but it’s all morally okay because when he turns back into snivelling, skinny Bruce Banner, he whines about it. The Thing works in a similar way. My son is currently obsessed with this one old cartoon where the Thing changes into human form and decides to go get married; before he can, though, he’s changed back into his orange rocky self by Dr. Doom — and this provides the occasion, not for tears, but for him to go on a murderous rampage in which he almost kills the bad guy. And then there’s the storyline in which the Thing and the Hulk switch bodies. Here’s a picture of the Thing trussed up and willing, as the shirtless and oddly ripped Bruce Banner explains the pseudo-science whereby their intimate attachment is going to save both of them from their hyper-masculine selves.

I don’t know if you can read the text here, but The Thing tells Banner, “Ya ain’t got any idea how long I’ve been waitin’ for somebody ta say that. If I didn’t think ya’d get the wrong idea, I could kiss ya!”

Of course, they don’t actually kiss each other; instead the experiment goes wrong, the two switch minds, and then they spend the rest of the comic working off the repressed sentiment by assiduously whacking at each other.
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Part 2 tomorrow, where we extend the argument to Cerebus, Jimmy Corrigan, and shojo.

Update: Part 2 is here.