How to Bring Your Wonder Boy up Gay

The name ‘Wonder Boy’ is one suspiciously absent from the current comic book world. Wonder Woman has never had a young male sidekick, and in light of the families of her respective DC trinity associates, that fact is curious in its conspicuousness. For both Batman and Superman, there is a recognisably distinct family of characters, from both sides of the gender spectrum, sharing panel time, and often their own titles, with their patrons.

Wonder Woman’s family, by contrast, has primarily been a female-only space. Along with the two Wonder Girls, fellow Wonder Women Hippolyta and Artemis, as well as Nubia, have been touted at times as members of the Wonder Family. Attempts to incorporate men into the adventuring cast of the Wonder Woman title are often hampered by their status as love interests. So, why no Wonder Boy?

Is it because of gender discomfort? By this I am referring to the gender connotations that having a young male hero inspired by a female icon like Wonder Woman might generate. In the current masculinist culture of comics in general, it is easy to see how a Wonder Boy character would be picked on for being the male sidekick of a female superhero. Yet all around the DCU, young women have and are taking up arms in the name of their male icons. Supergirl, Batgirl, Miss Martian, Speedy, Aquagirl…all of them have been at times accepted as legitimate heroines without questions to their femininity. Clearly we are comfortable with female interpretations of what were started as male traditions (though not in all cases, as Stephanie as Robin stands to prove), yet I am not sure the same would be the case for a Wonder Boy.

The recent introduction of a Power Boy is one of the only examples I can think of where a Heroine’s title has been taken and applied to a male, yet even there the urgency with which he has been disassociated from Power Girl as a namesake, and also turned into an obsessive and abusive ‘himbo’ is a worrying example for how seriously male interpretations of female traditions might be taken in the DCU. And the fact that Karen is herself a take on the Supergirl character as derived from Superman would pretty much undermine Power Boy as an example anyway. Which leaves us with…not very much.

The problem here isn’t that a Wonder Boy would be necessarily effeminate because he had a female namesake, but because it’s imaginable people would joke about it anyway, both within the text and outside it. I can just see the whispering during his first outing with the Teen Titans, or the questions about whether he’d wear a tiara too…And moreover, I wouldn’t place the line at being a questioning of his masculinity, but also his sexuality. I daresay a Wonder Boy wouldn’t just be the focus for joke about femininity, but for homosexuality as well. The way in which we live in a culture that still predominantly views gender and sexuality as collapsible categories makes it inevitable that expectations about femininity will become linked to the desire for men as a love-object, and vice versa. If Wonder Boy were questioned about his masculinity, questions about his sexuality would go hand in hand. It’s infuriating, but I daresay an annoying truth. Moreover, Wonder Woman’s status as something of a ‘gay icon’, while seemingly free from affecting her female co-stars, is something that I would hazard a guess would come to affect the attitudes towards a Wonder Boy.

Here’s the rub for me: what would be the problem if Wonder Boy were effeminate? And moreover, what if he was gay as well as effeminate. Would that be a big problem?

In an article I was reading the other day to which this post owes its title, Eve Sedgwick looks at how the image of the young effeminate male has become the spectre of the adult gay rights movement. Consistently in gay and pro-gay literature, there is a cultural emphasis and value placed on the gay male who isn’t feminine, who is masculine and takes part in a typically ‘masculine’ ontology. This move is important because it seeks to debunk the supposed link between sexuality and gender by maintaining that it is possible to be masculine and still desire men. The downside in that move, and the placing of value on this breaking of stereotypes is that the effeminate gay man becomes marginal within an already marginalized group. In psychological literature, where homosexuality has been removed from the DSM as an example of mental disorder, Sedgwick notes how there is still an apparent need to identify young male femininity as ‘Gender Disorder’. While various aspects of society have been able to move forward with regards to an open view of sexualities, the transgression of gender lines still seems to evoke discomfort, and returns to speak about what is ‘natural’.

Taking it back to Wonder Boy, if we were to introduce a Wonder Boy who is masculine and heterosexual, we would do a good job of debunking the presumed link between gender and sexuality, but we would also perpetuate the value judgement that relegates femininity in males to being an example of disorder. Because it is such a predictable outcome that a Wonder Boy would be a prime subject for questions about his sexuality and his masculinity, any attempts to contradict a stereotype would have the adverse affect of reinforcing the stereotype as something we fear.

Generally, whether or not a Wonder Boy is a big manly man or not, and whether or not he desires men, women, both or none, isn’t something that would usually concern me. However, since Jimenez introduced the character of Bobby Barnes into the Wonder Woman mythos, a character who was then not only ignored from any future issues but also met a great deal of fan scorn, I’ve been left mulling over the concept of a ‘Wonder Boy’ for some time.

For those who weren’t around for issue 188 of Jimenez’ run on Wonder Woman, Bobby Barnes was introduced as the nephew of Diana’s then love-interest Trevor, and was a young African American boy who idolised Wonder Woman and was blown away to finally meet her, receive an honorary ‘Wonder Boy’ t-shirt, and be invited to Themyscira where he could be seen sharing his panel position with Cassie as Wonder Girl. The potential for taking this optimistic young boy further in the Wonder Woman mythos and actually making him a real Wonder Boy was hampered by the fact that his uncle was killed off in the very next story-arc after Jimenez’ departure. Yet the potential for conflict between Bobby and Diana over Trevor’s death seems like a curious dropping of the ball as far as creating an interesting Wonder Boy character. Bobby could easily have returned as a newly empowered Wonder Boy to take issue with his uncle’s death, or perhaps to honour it by fighting by Diana’s side.

In any case, Bobby was forgotten from his one-issue appearance, though not without some conflict on the DC message boards. The issue of Bobby’s debut was also Jimenez’ final issue, and was a tribute to Lynda Carter. Jimenez has always been open about being a young gay man inspired by Carter’s on-screen superheroics, and how important watching the show had been for him. As a result, the strong reactions against his work, and this issue in particular, were often hard to distinguish from the general homophobia he could often receive on the message boards. Fans picked on the issue for being action-lite, and for Diana’s radical amount of costume changes throughout. It was pretty, optimistic, and some might say a little thin on content, but in the spirit of the show it honoured, it was a fun issue. Nevertheless, the readers came out in force to chastise Jimenez for fulfilling his childhood fantasies on the page at best, and promoting some kind of ‘gay aesthetic’ at worst. Attacks on the content of the issue were a thin veil for some of the homophobic abuse levelled at Bobby as a projection of Jimenez within the text, and gave a good indication for the kinds of controversy I feel writing a potentially gay Wonder Boy could arouse. The example of Jimenez’ introduction of Bobby provides another problem with the investments of a Wonder Boy; the idea that the character might become a vehicle for the politics of his creator, or will be accused as such.

As with the issues discussed earlier concerning Wonder Boy’s masculinity and sexuality, there is an almost inevitably political component to introducing a young man into the Wonder Woman mythos, one that would be difficult to avoid for any writer at the helm. If Wonder Woman is till to be considered a feminist symbol or icon, does that apply to her protégé’s, and would that include a Wonder Boy? If the double-w has become a symbol of Amazonian heritage and courage, can a man wear it and what are the connotations if so? Does DC have the current creativity and subtlety to explore those issues without resorting to stereotype; to introduce a male character with a female mentor and primary companions, without resorting to stereotypical tropes? Would the avoidance of stereotype simple reinforce them anyway? The questions I have raised above, along with the rest of this discussion, are just examples of the kind that could take place. Yet despite the hotbed of connotation, I am even more inspired that a Wonder Boy is something the Wonder Woman mythos needs, possibly because of the symbolic implications his absence currently represents.

Any thoughts?

The Sandman: A Game Of You; transitions, permanence and identity

Prompted by a discussion on this blog, I decided to take a second look the other night at The Sandman: A Game Of You, Neil Gaiman’s Sandman instalment dealing with issues of gender and identity.

Towards the end of the tale a drag queen** called Wanda is killed as her apartment building falls during a storm while she is looking after the sleeping form of her friend Barbie. Barbie attends her funeral, where a family friend is keen to impress the idea that Wanda is to be remembered as ‘Alvin’, not Wanda; ‘his’ ‘true’* identity. ‘His’ family never approved of ‘his’ transgendered behaviour, and as a result honours the memory they see fit.

They do so by carving the name ‘Alvin’ into her/his headstone, an act of defiance against the Wanda identity. In retaliation, and once the ceremony is over, Barbie writes the name ‘Wanda’ in lipstick over the headstone, though we know the likelihood of it remaining there is small.

In the discussion that inspired this post, Alabaster insightfully points out how this opposition between Alvin and Wanda fits into the ‘private vs public pain’ idea I discuss earlier in this blog(not sure how to link to the discussion, scroll down to my 'public vs private pain' post and call up the comments). Alvin is the public persona, the male, the socially acceptable character, whose loss is something the family mourn. The woman ‘he’ had become, Wanda, is seen as a contravention of that image. Wanda is the woman Alvin’s family did not lose, because they never accepted her in the first place. The suffering of Wanda is not something to be grieved for, it is the private pain that will never be known to those in attendance at the funeral, they will only remember the Alvin that was publicly known before.

At the same time however, there are other dichotomies set up by the Alvin in stone/Wanda in lipstick idea that bear some commentary.

By inscribing the name ‘Alvin’ on the headstone, it appears concrete, natural, certain, while the transience of ‘Wanda’, written in lipstick, suggests fragility, instability, uncertainty, and also its status as a construction. But the metaphor runs perhaps more deeply than that. Gaiman seems to make a fine choice by using a headstone. Though it suggests its permanence, it undermines it as well. For what is a headstone before it is a headstone? Veritably, it is a blank tablet, tabula rasa, upon which we inscribe the messages of how we want to be remembered. The inscription on the stone is an act of defiance and also illusion. It is an attempt to make ‘Alvin’ a certainty, to create the illusion of his naturalness. But its still just an attempt, it’s a construction, it is an attempt to carve some kind of truth into a form that was, initially, a blank canvas. While the family want Alvin to be true, they do so with an act that inherently undermines their endeavour, by highlighting the way we attempt to inscribe permanence onto identity that is inherently fluid and undefined.

The choice of the lipstick, inevitably transient (we all understand how often it can need to be reapplied, Barbie does so to her lips in the space of just a few pages), used to write the name 'Wanda', is also a sort of social commentary on identity. Simply understood, as I saw it, it might seem to be a message saying that our attempts to change ourselves, our identities, despite their symbolic importance, is futile, that it must take place against a ‘natural’ form, such as the headstone suggests. But again the metaphor might run more deeply. Perhaps it is a commentary on the way that we suggest some forms of knowledge as legitimate, and others as unreliable. ‘Alvin’ as set in stone appears natural because it is a majority thought, it is the normative state of affairs, it is our reverence for the scientific and the biological. ‘Wanda’ in lipstick is the way that we often make bold statements against science, against notions of the ‘natural’, but how ultimately we live in a society that allows for a framework which undermines those statements, where the questioning of biology with the way we feel, or the questioning of science with a personal narrative, is seen as a poor way of phrasing the question, is an illegitimate claim. Gaiman is, quite possibly, passing comment on how we allow certain discourses the status of privilege while we let others seem questionable, when all of them are in fact as contingent as each other. Science and biology have been constructed to seem impenetrable, but they too share contingent foundations, they too are constructed discourses. While the lipstick could indeed wash away in the rain, a powerful enough sanding device would erase that ‘Alvin’ inscription from the headstone, and with the right tools carving another wouldn’t be too difficult. Whether we should be endeavouring for new inscriptions however, new ways of trying to enforce the legitimacy of our claims, I’m not sure.

Finally, and quite beautifully, we have an image of Wanda after death, now appearing as a ‘complete’ female, the image of femininity as Wanda had sought out, ‘like Glinda in the Oz movie’. Her perfection, the fact that she doesn’t look ‘artificial’ is commented on by Barbie, who dreams of her. Initially to me, that image seemed bleak, the suggestion being that only in death could we achieve the realisation of identity as we want it to be. The idea that the self-defining of gender was impossible in this life; that only in death would we ever be able to transcend biological gender (i.e. never). But I think that’s not the idea that Gaiman’s text should evoke, nor is it the one i think Gaiman actually cues us for. As has been mentioned, I think, throughout the Sandman run, Death is not a state of permanence, oblivion or end, but a metaphor for a change of state, from one thing to another. Perhaps, with his final image of Wanda, Gaiman is suggesting that change is in the making of it, that in order to have the identities we want, we must work towards a change of the state of affairs we have now. We must move to a point where personal narratives are just as important as the scientific biological ones; where we do not seek to make certain forms of knowledge as the legitimate ones, but render them all equal to one another. If we push for real changes of state (or State?) we enable the changes in ourselves.

I think that image is a far more optimistic one than I initially gave the text credit for presenting, and one I would much rather allow Gaiman the privilege of being responsible for, and Alabaster for prompting me to look for.

alex x




*I put these terms in quotations to problematise their supposed certainty. Wanda is described as Alvin, and as a ‘he’ even though it contravenes Wanda’s self-description, which is the one I would personally want to lend more credence to out of respect. I problematise the term ‘true’ to undermine its objectivity.

** Initially, my description of Wanda was as a transvestite. I was then promptly reminded by someone, Kate (to whom I'm grateful) how important it is to get terminology right when describing transgendered characters, and was informed (with second opinion also) that transvestite might not be the best term. I went back to the text, and on a second look, found that the official blurb on the back of my edition describes Wanda as a drag queen, while the introduction describes her as a 'would-be transsexual'. I am going with drag queen, if only to be true to the text, and because the 'would-be' prefix to transsexual just doesn't sit too well with me.