GMU Pop Culture Journalism

Feature Response- “Out of the Closet and Up, Up and Away”

Back in April The New York Times printed “Out of the Closet and Up, Up and Away,” a feature story about gay night clubs where the patrons dress up as superheroes. The story then goes on to the history of gay creators in comics and gay characters in comics.

The reporter George Gustines started out his story by describing a scene at Skin Tight, USA party at the Stonewall Inn in New York. In addition to interviewing the co-founders of the party for the first part of his article, Gustine also interviewed various gay comic book fans, creators and reporters.

Other than the interviews, he seems to have plenty of research into gay comic book characters, citing many of the current homosexual characters in the mainstream comics of Marvel and DC. Gustines even foundout that there is a charity, Prism Comics, that helps LGBT comic book creators.

The feature is organized in an odd way. It kind of jumps around from topic to topic, always focusing on homosexuals and comic books somehow, but in a different way each time. Gustines begins his article talking about the Skin Tight, USA party, but clearly that is just the lead for the story, and does form the focus of it.

Using that as his set-up, Gustines then writes about how in the mid-80s comic books were beginning to become aware that there were homosexuals in the stories themselves, and that some creators had begun to come out of the closet.

Gustines then transitions this into describing how comic books were read by gay fans and they felt that they could find acceptance within those stories and could identify with other misunderstood characters like the mutants of the X-Men.

Gustines then lists several recent gay and lesbian characters to have come out from Marvel and DC Comics in recent years. He then tells of Prism Comics which helps LGBT comic book creators.

Gustines ends his story thinking about what the future holds for gay characters in comics and cites that Showtime almost picked up a show based on a comic book about a gay teen with super powers. They passed, and its producers are still looking for someone to make it.

This article does a great job of tying together the various aspects that comic books and homosexuality have influenced and helped each other. I don’t believe there was not a question asked that I wanted answered, but I thought it would have been interesting to see if there were any groups or people out there that specifically opposed gay characters in comic books.

Gustine has a great article here. I’m glad I found it while browsing NY Times archives for a feature story about comics (there aren’t many). It also helps illustrate that comic books are a window into our society and are something to be taken seriously.