OF COURSE, the irony is that while Seduction of the Innocent was a mostly crackpot-conservative call to arms to protect children, Wertham was right about the homoeroticism pervading comic books. Superheroes are idealized images of masculinity presented as heroes for young boys. They have little to do with women — except to rescue them or be chased by them. (Did Lois Lane ever stop pursuing Superman?) And they did often sport cute young boy-toys: Batman and Robin, Aquaman and Aqualad, Captain America and Bucky, Green Arrow (whose real name is Oliver Queen) and Speedy. Not only that, but the art work in comic books was often highly eroticized, as Wertham notes: "Robin is a handsome ephebic boy, usually shown in his uniform with bare legs. He often stands with his legs spread, the genital region discretely evident." And all superheroes live outside of society — often they have been driven out or hurt in some manner for which they are compensated with super powers. They are, by definition, not "normal," and their desire for justice and to help people is almost always driven by their outsider status. With few exceptions, their interest in heterosexuality or heterosexual relationships is (for a variety of reasons) verboten, beyond them, or simply a matter of indifference.

Although Wertham was wrong in suggesting that superhero comic books were turning boys queer, he was surely correct in pinpointing how their unspoken and lightly coded homoeroticism was an essential part of the sexual imagination and psychological make-up of young boys. So it shouldn’t come as a surprise that when the homosexual subtext becomes more explicit — as it has in recent issues of Green Lantern — those once-innocent and unspoken male-male fantasies have become more troubling not only to morality watchers, but also to some of the male readers themselves.

While Peter Sprigg, of the Family Research Council, reiterated the most banal anti-gay sentiments ˆ la Fredric Wertham on Phil Donahue’s new show — claiming that homosexuality led to AIDS, that homosexuals were more likely to be battered by a partner than to be queer-bashed, and that Winick was not "doing homosexuals any favors by saying it’s okay for you to engage in homosexual behavior, when it leads to [AIDS]." This, of course, is what we have come to expect from the Family Research Council. But the anxiety about Terry Berg’s homosexuality runs in deeper cultural channels than the FRC’s knee-jerk political posturing.

The letters column following the Green Lantern issue in which Terry "came out" was filled with cranky missives. And the Green Lantern message boards are full of anti–Judd Winick sentiment. A man responding to a news story about Green Lantern dealing with hate crimes asks, "What’s really behind all of this?" before answering his own question: "It’s the gay strategy of moving towards thought control. With Hate Crimes legislation, anyone could be cited for even saying that the gay life style is wrong! That person could be accused of stirring up violence against gays, which is baloney." Another messenger writes, "I’m not [going to buy these issues]. As a matter of fact, I dropped Green Lantern from my pull list with this issue. Winick can push his views on someone else." And another has this advice for Winick: "I have a challenge for you. I want you to stop pigeon-holing your stories. Stop seeking the praise of any one interest group by pandering a story to them. I know that your editor is Bisexual, and encouraged you to do this to face down his own past demons, and I know that GLAAD absolutely adores you, but you need to be less 'realistic' in your stories, especially since statistically there’s not a lot of realism in a poor gay kid getting his teeth kicked in by angry straights. Unfortunately, most crime in NYC still involves drug addicts and other miscreants attacking folks for money. I should know, I live there." The problem, according to another writer, is that identity politics has ruined America: "I find that this 'grouping' in America, this catering to identity groups and not individuals, to be a dangerous thing. Let’s not get all political, but I get nervous when group issues, and not individual issues, move to the fore."

Reading through the message boards, you can’t help but be struck by two themes: the conviction that serious issues ruin comic-book stories, and the fact that deep-seated anxiety about male homosexuality is still with us. The first concern is disingenuous: from the beginning, comic books have consistently reflected social concerns. Not only were the original superheroes all Roosevelt liberals, but in the 1970s, the comic-book industry dealt with a full range of topical issues, including racism, civil rights, the Vietnam war, government corruption, urban crime, and environmentalism. In a 1970 Captain America comic, the very nature of a superhero is questioned. "This is the age of the anti-hero. The age of the rebel and the dissenter," muses the disconsolate patriot. "And in a world rife with injustice, greed, and endless war, who’s to say the rebels are wrong? I’ve spent a lifetime defending the flag and the law. Perhaps I should have battled less and questioned more!" In this tradition, dealing with queer bashing makes perfect sense.

But beneath the letters and the messages is a deep anxiety about the very presence of open male homosexuality in the story. Once the specter of homosexuality is taken out of the coy and coded, the subtext of Batman and Robin has to be faced more forthrightly. This is threatening because so much of Western culture is founded on the (mostly suppressed, usually desexualized) myth of male/male romance. From the Babylonian epic Gilgamesh and the Arthurian stories of the Knights of the Round Table to The Last of the Mohicans, Moby-Dick, Huckleberry Finn, and Lethal Weapon, chronicling the adventures of two guys on their own has been a compelling narrative to men of all sexual orientations. That is one of the superhero comic books’ great sources of appeal and one of the reasons why they have been so successful with both little boys and bigger boys. This is not to say that comic books and superheroes are about nothing but repressed homosexual longings. Such reductionism would be silly. One of the pleasures of reading comics — or any literature — is that they give way to a multitude of readings that inspire a wide range of insights. But because we live in such a homophobic culture, the homoeroticism in comic books is always going to be one reading that raises anxiety as well as hackles.

ONE OF THE REASONS Fredric Wertham’s analysis of the homoeroticism of Batman and Robin was so potent in the 1950s is that the culture was at a critical turning point: Kinsey had broken the silence about the prevalence of male homosexuality in society, youth culture posed a looming threat to adults, and psychoanalysis had become part of mass culture, giving Middle America a new lens through which to view behavior formerly regarded as completely "innocent." But Wertham’s "uting" f homoeroticism, which made such an impression in the 1950s, has essentially been lost because he has been written off as a crackpot who was on a silly, even dangerous, crusade against comic books. Except for a few essays that now take seriously his work on topics such as the role of German psychiatrists during the Holocaust and the psychological harm caused by segregation (used in the 1954 landmark Supreme Court school-desegregation case Brown v. Board of Education), as well as his work helping to open mental-health clinics in Harlem during the 1940s, he is generally known as a crank and a fool. But while his belief that homosexuality was a mental disorder was wrong, his analysis of the homoeroticism in comic books was astute.

It is ironic that by making the incipient homosexuality in superhero comic books more visible — and giving it a contemporary political context — Judd Winick prompted a backlash far more complex than the one faced by comic books in the 1950s. For today’s angry response is coming not just from self-appointed moral crusaders like the Family Research Council, whose threadbare, laughable arguments have been around since long before the '50s. Now the antagonism to gay content springs from the readers themselves, who apparently cannot bear the anxiety that open and honest portrayals of homosexuality arouse. To quote that other great, if nebbishy, comic superhero, Walt Kelly’s Pogo: "We have met the enemy and he is us."

Michael Bronski is the author of The Pleasure Principle: Sex, Backlash, and the Struggle for Gay Freedom (St. Martin’s, 1998). He can be reached at mabronski@aol.com