The Dictionary of Homophobia (35 page)

The situation that developed in American comics was quite the opposite. During the revolution of the “silver age” of superheroes in the 1960s, ushered in by the hegemony of Marvel Comics (e.g.,
Spider-Man
and the
Fantastic Four
), a wholesale change in the demographics of comic book readership took place. The superheroes were now appealing less to younger readers and more to adolescents and young adults, specifically the fifteen-to-thirty-year-old market. From this began a trend in the 1970s and 80s toward greater realism in comics, wherein the principal approach was to have the superheroes encounter characters and situations which echoed current American social issues. Thanks to this trend, the Comics Code Authority (CCA), little by little, fell by the wayside. The first salvo was fired by Marvel Comics at the end of the 1960s, when an issue of
Spider-Man
was published without CCA approval because it depicted the use of drugs. By the end of the 70s, the issue of homosexuality began to be addressed. However, in an industry where characters were largely owned by the publisher (and mostly by the two principal companies, Marvel and DC) yet produced by a steady stream of different writers and artists, the conditions were such that the stance on homosexuality became a defining point between those writers and artists who were gay-positive (some of whom had come out themselves during the 1980s and 90s) and those who were not. The opportunity was also ripe for homophobic subtext—indeed, one of the first clear allusions to homosexuality can be found in
Hulk Magazine
at the end of the 70s, a black-and-white comic targeted at an “adult” audience. A secondary male character, upon discovering Dr Robert Bruce Banner half naked and dressed in rags, states very clearly his intention to take advantage of the doctor, with or without his consent.

Nonetheless, the relative liberalism that existed in the world of comic book creators led to a trend that started with the introduction of secondary gay and lesbian characters, such as Arnold Roth in
Captain America
, and Maggie Sawyer in
Superman
, leading further to the creation of gay and lesbian superheroes within existing groups (e.g., Extraño in
The New Guardians
, Hector of the Pantheon in
The Incredible Hulk
), and finally the coming out of already-existing superheroes (e.g., Northstar in
Alpha Flight
, and Shrinking Violet, Lightning Lass, and Element Lad in the
Legion of Super-Heroes
). On the other hand, efforts to create an original gay superhero were practically nonexistent. The one rare attempt was
Enigma
, which, confined to a limited edition miniseries of a DC Comics collection aimed at a mature audience, had more in common with the Franco-Belgian art-house comics than with traditional comic books.

However, this tentative embrace of homosexual themes was fragile and limited. Extraño is a good example of this. First appearing in
Millennium
at the end of the 1980s, the character became caught up in a controversy between several gay-positive comic book artists making accusations of homophobia given Extraño’s flamboyantly gay South American characteristics. The debate over the legitimacy of this effeminate representation of homosexuality was quickly cut short by the new editor who was tasked with launching The New Guardians team (including Extraño) into its own series, and who declared that there was no question about Extraño’s sexuality, but upon joining the ranks of The New Guardians he was “cured.” Likewise, the lesbian couple of Shrinking Violet and Lightning Lass, along with their male counterpart Element Lad, in the
Legion of Super-Heroes
(who had become veritable icons for gay and lesbian comic book fans in the US), were heterosexualized by DC Comics in the mid-1990s in a revisionist scheme to rewrite the world of superheroes and remodel main characters with an updated image. Even though this kind of ploy is common in the world of comics, it nonetheless enabled DC to erase the progressions of the previous decade.

Today, the new direction in comic books comes from Japan, where manga has been around for several decades but is only now starting to flood the Western market. In manga, homosexuality is comfortably accepted, and even has its own special genre:
sh
nen-ai
, where masculine love is expressed through tender romance. The more sexually-explicit version of this genre is known as
yaoi
. As difficult as it might be for a Westerner to believe, this genre is usually written by women, with an audience of young girls who appreciate this new expression of a complex masculinity that is both familiar and strange, romantic yet strong. In this sense, these works could potentially contribute to the valorization of male homosexuality and help fight homophobia in Japan. However, the real social and cultural impact, if any, remains to be seen. At the same time, the production of
hentai
enjoys a similar popularity, in which romantic and sexual relationships between women take center stage. However, this genre of comic book, produced by men for men, presents an objectified, reified, and stereotypical image of lesbians that surely cannot go far to improve the social acceptance of female homosexuality in Japan.
—Pierre-Olivier de Busscher

Busscher, Pierre-Olivier de. “Paroles et silence. Les representations du sida et des sexualités dans un media grand public: l’example de la bande dessinée américaine,”
Sociétés
.
Revue des sciences humaines et socials
, no. 39 (1993).

Leyland, Winston, and Jerry Mills, eds.
Meatmen: An Anthology of Gay Male Comics
. San Francisco: GS Press, 1986.

HentaiSeeker.com
:
http://www.hentaiseeker.com
(accessed January 5, 2008).

MAG: Mouvement d’affirmation des jeunes gais et lesbiennes:
http://www.mag-paris.org/magazette/33/mangas.php
(site now discontinued).

Mangels, Andy. “Out of the Closet and into the Comics.”
Amazing Heroes
, no. 143–44 (1988).

Suvilay, Bounthavy. “Le Héros était une femme: le travestissement dans le manga.”
ProChoix
, no. 23 (2002).

—Art; Caricature; Cinema; Literature; Media; Publicity.

COMING OUT.
See
Closet, the; Exhibitionism; Outing; Shame

COMMUNISM

On the whole, the history of international communism is one of the saddest chapters in the history of homophobia during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It was bad from the start, given that Friedrich Engels, the cofounder of Marxism, was fiercely homophobic. In a letter to Karl Marx in 1869, in which he violently attacked the German sexologist Karl Ulrichs, Engels wrote: “Henceforth the slogan shall be ‘
Guerre aux cons, paix aux trous-du-cul’
[‘War for the cunts, peace for the assholes’]. It is fortunate that we, personally, shall be too old to have to fear that, when the party wins, we shall be required to pay physical tribute to the victors.” And in his work
The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State
(1884), he denounced “the repugnant practice of Greek pederasty,” which he saw as the result of the decline of morals. Of course, this position was not unique to Marxists; for many nineteenth-century progressives, homosexuality was a vice of the elite, the result of a moral breakdown unavoidably brought on by aristocratic luxury and the capitalist system, having abandoned all that is healthy and natural. This theme appears in the work of French historian Jules Michelet, who contrasted the homosexuality of the gloomy seventeenth century with the heterosexuality of the glorious eighteenth century. It can also be found in the work of socialist philosopher Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, who was furious that fellow philosopher Charles Fourier, in his defense of homosexuals, had “sanctified unisexual unions”; and in the literature of Emile Zola, most notably at the end of his 1871–72 novel
La Curée
(
The Kill
). That said, certain social democratic leaders of the German Empire (i.e. Karl Kautsky and August Bebel) were in favor of abrogating Paragraph 175, and the famous socialist theoretician Eduard Bernstein, in defending Oscar
Wilde
in 1895, refuted the idea that homosexuality was an
unnatural
act and a sign of
decadence
.

While Russia’s Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 began by emancipating homosexuals and abolishing the criminal code of 1832 (then excluding sodomy as a crime in the codes of 1922 and 1926), the Bolsheviks themselves had little patience for homosexuals—in fact, the great leaders had no appetite for sexuality in general (“the disorder of one’s sexual life is bourgeois, and a manifestation of decadence,” Lenin declared in 1922). They did not consider homosexuality to be a crime, but rather it had all the signs of a sickness. Above all, it was considered a
vice
of aristocrats (i.e. Tchaikovsky and Sergei Diaghilev)—not a good thing in a country seeking to break with its Tsarist past. Starting in 1924, there were massive arrests of homosexuals who were “of poor origin,” as attested to in the correspondence of writer Mikhail Kuzmin. However, it was Joseph Stalin who instigated the most radical homophobic acts in Russia to date: on December 17, 1933, male homosexuality (
muzhelozhstvo
) was recriminalized according to Russia’s criminal code, and Article 154 (which later became Article 121), introduced in April 1934, made all homosexual acts punishable by three to five years’ incarceration. Soon thereafter, numerous arrests of homosexuals took place in Moscow, Leningrad, Kharkiv, and Odessa, notably in the realms of theater,
music
, and the
arts
. After Kuzmin’s death in 1936, his lover, Yury Yurkun, and most of his friends were arrested and shot. The same year, Commissar of Justice Nikolai Krylenko declared homosexuality to be a crime against the Soviet state and the proletariat.

To Stalinists, homosexuality was not simply a deplorable legacy of the old regime; it was also intrinsically linked to
fascism
, as author Maxim Gorky implored in the May 23, 1934 issue of
Pravda
(not long before the infamous Night of the Long Knives purge in Nazi Germany): “Remove homosexuality, and fascism will disappear.” (There is an unverified rumor that the recriminalization of homosexuality was in fact the result of a personal request to Stalin made by Gorky, whose adopted son had been seduced by a homosexual.) This theory of fascist
perversion
(the “habits of the Nazi SA”) gave the Soviet public a reason to oppose homosexuality (socialism was aligned with nature, health, and virtue, and Nazism with all that was unnatural,
degenerate
, and unvirtuous), all the while ignoring the reality of Nazi homophobic violence. This theory also had the advantage of combining popular Russian prejudices with orthodox ones (the end of the 1930s in the Soviet Union was marked by the triumph of a pro-Russian reactionary populism): it is thus that homosexuality’s recriminalization in 1933–34 took place in the context of what an American historian once called “the great Stalinist regression.” Abortion was recriminalized, divorce became more difficult to obtain, and the contributions of women were no longer acknowledged—in short, the revolutionary advances that had begun to take hold between the 1900s and 1920s were stopped cold. In this way, the regime renewed the homophobic image of a sort of mystical heterodoxy from the turn of the century, typified by Vasily Rozanov, author of “The Family Problem in Russia” (1903) [not published in English], who saw in the questioning of sexual roles and in Russian patriarchal holism (
sobornost
) a victory for the “sodomites” and the “third sex.” On closer inspection, it is easy to see how Stalinist society allowed no room for homosexuality: after all, to Stalin, people were nothing more than nuts and bolts in service to the socialist state, and sexual pleasure not aimed at reproduction was considered a waste of energy not permissible by socialist society. As stated during the same era by proponents of Lysenkoism (the repressive political and social campaigns undertaken in science and agriculture, spearheaded by Trofim Denisovich Lysenko, Stalinist director of the Soviet Institute of Genetics), the external environment will always modify behavioral characteristics; it followed, then, that banning homosexuality would make it disappear completely.

The fallout from this discourse would be felt for more than fifty years: film director Sergei Eisenstein was the victim of extortion from 1938 until his death in 1948; filmmaker Sergei Parajanov was jailed twice for homosexuality, once in 1952, and again in 1974; and dancer Rudolf Nureyev, unable to tolerate the blackmail to which he was subjected, defected in 1961. Certainly the reforms undertaken by Nikita Khrushchev did nothing for homosexuals: Khrushchev, leader of the Soviet Union from 1953 to 1964, was very homophobic, and frequently made connections (no doubt thanks to his rural origins) between homosexuality and the intelligentsia. In December 1962 while visiting an art exhibit, he used the word “queers” to describe the painters of pieces too modern for his tastes. The years under the leadership of Leonid Brezhnev (1964–82) did not improve matters either: during the 1970s and 80s, the arm of the militia responsible for dealing with homosexuals frequently blackmailed those identified as such (some were even forced to perform sexual acts) and the KGB arrested an average of over 1,000 homosexuals a year. The accusation of homosexuality, reinforced by the claim of mental illness, was often used against political dissidents, such as mathematician Leonid Plyushch or archeologist Lev Klein; and a clandestine gay organization known as the “Gay Laboratory” set up in Leningrad in 1984 was quickly dismantled by the KGB shortly after it made contact with homosexuals in Finland. Lesbians were always at risk of psychiatric confinement, with effects felt for years afterwards. And homosexuals were the lowest ranking prisoners in the
gulags
, and were subjected to rape (sometimes even gang rape) and sexual servitude.