Supervictim

Superman is gay now. Well, not entirely. And he’s not the original Superman. Other than that, yes, Superman is gay now. Says the New York Times:

“The new Superman, Jonathan Kent — who is the son of Clark Kent and Lois Lane — will soon begin a romantic relationship with a male friend, DC Comics announced.”

You’re surprised it took this long to get around to that. The Superman comics — read by no one except pear-shaped obsessives who keep their comics in plastic sleeves and turn the pages with tongs lest they crease the paper and lower the value of “collectible” Superman No. 8,332 — always played with Superman’s nature, in the form of one-off speculative what-if stories.

What if Superman embarked on a life of crime? Picture of Superman holding a bank bag with a dollar sign, wearing one of those clichéd Beagle Boys black masks but otherwise attired in Superman mufti. As if people would say, “I have no idea who robbed the bank. I couldn’t see the area around his eyeballs. He was wearing a blue and red outfit with ‘S’ on the chest, and a cape, and he flew off after holding us up. Sorry, boys, I wish I had something you could go on.”

What if Superman got old? Picture of Superman all wrinkly, his suit hanging off his withered frame, walking with a cane. Imagine an elderly Supe using his remaining super-strength to pry open the doors at the Denny’s at 5 a.m. because he’s wide awake and wants his senior special, goldang it.

There are hundreds of them. What if Superman married Lois Lane and he was also a gorilla and Jimmy Olsen shrunk to the size of an ant? I don’t know. I’m not eleven. I don’t care.

The difference, I suppose, is that this isn’t What If Superman Were Noticeably Unmoved by Lana Lang’s Wild Tousled Red Hair and the Licentiousness It Suggests. It’s canon, as they say. Superman is bi, at the very least. Fine. But it’s ridiculous to think that Gay Superman is somehow a breakthrough moment. Making Superman gay is the easiest, least controversial thing they can do. You want angry letters and furious Twitter threats? Have Supe turn down a date with the Green Lantern.

“Sorry, Hal, I’ve no interest in men whatsoever.”

“Oh, come on. You wear skintight clothes, and you have a cape, for heaven’s sake.”

“Those are the conventions of my profession, Hal. I’m sorry if you misread them.”

Somehow the rote assertion of Superman’s canonical heterosexuality would invalidate and marginalize, because an opportunity for inclusion had been intentionally thwarted. It would seem like an affront.

Not that affronts are bad, depending on who’s affronted. DC editors are no doubt praying for MAGA types to get all gosh-durn mad about it. In case the gay thing isn’t enough, DC changed his motto: He’s no longer defending “Truth, Justice, and the American Way.” Now he defends “Truth, Justice, and a Better Tomorrow.”

Hmm. You know, the American Way used to be regarded as a means by which all could have a better tomorrow — you know, a house with a white picket fence, a family, a good job. You know, the unsustainable, Eurocentric, patriarchal, heteronormative machine for soul murder. The phrase was used without irony for about 45 minutes in the 1950s and then became a term of smirking derision. But never mind. The new formulation is still problematic.

Whose truth, for example? We hear this phrase all the time: “This is my truth.” To which you want to respond, “Truth is truth, regardless of who claims possession.” “My truth” is the equivalent of a toddler with a red-smeared face insisting he did not get into the strawberry jelly. As for “justice,” well, that’s a bit vague. What kind? Social? Climate? Economic? There’s probably someone out there protesting Waffle House on behalf of Breakfast Justice. The word must be modified so we know it’s more important than plain old vanilla justice.

“A better tomorrow” is nice, but better for whom? Jeff Bezos and his fellow space billionaires? At least “a better tomorrow” sets Superman apart from all the Joe Manchins and Kyrsten Sinemas, who thwart plans to save the planet because they want everyone to turn into burnt husks bobbing in a rising ocean.

In short, until Superman cries out “Individual stories that reflect marginalized experiences and trump empirical conclusions, Redistributive Justice that accounts for the embedded legacy of colonialism, and a Tomorrow in which systemically generated inequities are rooted out by the destruction of exploitative modes of profit-based economic models!” he’ll still be a problem.

Of course, if he did try to say that, well, even Superman can get winded.

Again, it’s nothing new. A few years ago Superman went to the U.N. and declared himself a citizen of the world. Perhaps that was a what-if story: “What if Superman was 20 and got into weed in college?” It’s all familiar and boring, the recasting of an American archetype into a new mold to shame and instruct, because they can’t come up with archetypes of their own. I know, never mind Batman and Robin — how about Ben and Jerry?

In the 1960s, Superman appeared in public-service announcements in DC Comics, arguing against prejudice of all sorts. It wasn’t the American Way, he chided. He’s always been a good guy, but some can’t see that unless they paint his cape in their colors. They look at an American archetype who not only stood for simple truths that anyone could accept but could take an atom bomb to the sternum, and they think: white fragility.