Too Short for a Blog Post, Too Long for a Tweet 407

 

Here are a few excerpts from a book I recently read, "Better Living Through Birding: Notes from a Black Man in the Natural World," by Christian Cooper.

 

Near as I can tell, I was born that way: as queer as the Alaskan summer day is long. It was conspicuous to me from the age of five, when I developed an erotic attachment to a comic-book superhero; one look at that male physique bulging with muscles, and something deep in my psyche said, “Yes, please!” It became conspicuous to my parents not long after. I’d been thinking superhero thoughts and got what must have been my first full-fledged boner, which terrified me at that young age. 

“Mommy, Daddy!” I howled as I fled to their bedroom for help. “It won’t go down, it won’t go down! I think it’s broken!” 

I was too young at the time to be able to remember today the incident with clarity, so I can only imagine the bemused smirks suppressed on their faces. Now imagine those smirks morphing into worried frowns, if I had truthfully answered my mother’s next question: “Well, Christian, what were you thinking about?” 

“Nothing,” I said after a considered pause. Somehow, even at that tender age, I’d sufficiently metabolized the cultural taboos around sexual desire to know enough to lie about it.

The antigay bias behind the negative reactions was cloaked in respectability thanks to something neither Bobbie, Scott, nor I had reckoned with. Two misconceptions that held sway in the 1990s (and that horrifically is resurging today) converged to fuel the animus: (1) Anything gay is inappropriate for youngsters; and (2) comics are strictly a juvenile medium. The first falls flat immediately when one considers that there are gay kids, as I had been; gay parents and relatives; and gay people and issues in the news, a constant feature in the era of AIDS. The mere existence of gay people could no longer be considered taboo, and the assumption that any mention of gay people requires discussion of explicit sexual content is patently false; Alpha Flight #106, with a story as sexually safe as a cloistered eunuch, is the perfect rebuttal. (Besides, nothing that moved the sexual-activity needle beyond the somewhat suggestive, regardless of the orientation involved, could get past the Comics Code Authority, a 1950s relic that reviewed all of Marvel’s and DC’s books at the time.) The second is a peculiarly American stance, since comics in Europe and Japan are just as likely to be read by adults, and even on U.S. shores the notion that only kids read comics is belied by the millions of comics fans over the age of twenty-one. 

But in 1992 those two misconceptions could be put together to arrive at the conclusion that nothing gay should appear in comics. So Kelly Corvese and I, the two openly gay staffers, had to sit in that emergency meeting as Terry Stewart made that clear to our faces. I imagine this was how those Jews who started the comics business must have felt, identities hidden behind new names, cranking out special Christmas-themed issues, and nary an explicitly Jewish superhero in sight. 

It was as if we had been told not to bother to exist.

But the most amusing mismatch of all was when Bobbie assigned me to edit Marvel Swimsuit. A stand-alone special published annually, Marvel Swimsuit was exactly what it sounds like: a Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue knockoff, which is to say, an excuse for Marvel’s already super-endowed superheroines to show off their curves, for the titillation of adolescent males and adults developmentally adjacent to adolescent males. It was now in the hands of me, a gay man. 

I was up-front with Bobbie, who couldn’t have been especially enamored with what Marvel Swimsuit peddled either. If I was going to do Swimsuit, I was doing it my way. No more Captain America in the distant background in frumpy board shorts, while Black Widow fills the page in little more than a thong; from now on, the guys and gals of the Marvel Universe would flaunt it on an equal footing, a fifty-fifty ratio. Not only did that better encompass the kinds of things I and presumably other readers like me wanted to see, but it would inoculate Marvel from charges of sexism. Equal opportunity objectification. 

It turns out that nobody objectifies better than a gay man. I rounded up some truly amazing comic-book artists and instructed them to take their cue from the most provocative images of the era: the Calvin Klein underwear ads and Herb Ritts and Bruce Weber photos, the pouty-lipped close-ups and the glorification of dramatically lit body parts. And with that, for two issues in a row, I turned the artists loose. 

I don’t think readers quite knew what hit them. As the comic-book writer Warren Ellis wrote in his newsletter, “That year’s issue was the gayest thing you ever saw. Like, gaydar installations all over the Northern Hemisphere just straight up burst into flames. Anyone who beheld that book from a distance of twenty feet became, by genetic testing, 3% gayer. It was so fucking funny, it was so not what Marvel did at the time, and it was so well played.” 

And for whatever reason, my second issue was the last time Marvel published Marvel Swimsuit.

And that was how I learned about the murder of George Floyd, though at that time his name had not yet been released to the public. By some strange twist of fate, my run-in with Amy Cooper and the far graver, lethal encounter between George Floyd and his murderer, the police officer Derek Chauvin, had occurred on the very same day. Both incidents would be captured on video for the world to see—the latter by the teenager Darnella Frazier, who had the presence of mind to record the events unfolding before her. If she hadn’t, one can only guess what line of bullshit (sorry: fabrication offering plausible deniability) we African Americans would be expected to swallow in the aftermath of Mr. Floyd’s death. (To that point, in findings published in September 2021, The Lancet—one of the most respected medical journals in the world—revealed that about 55 percent of fatal encounters with the police in the United States between 1980 and 2018 were listed as another cause of death. This discrepancy disproportionately involved Black victims.) For once, all Americans could witness for themselves, in moments adjacent to each other by a few hours, what we African Americans have been saying for decades: in the morning, the underlying bias affecting police perceptions; and in the afternoon, its fatal consequences.