Spine Intact, Some Creases. Victor J. Banis
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were worried about their boys showering with homos! In 1950 you dropped the soap at your own peril.
Not to be outdone by anyone’s Hoey, J. Edgar Hoover came up with a staggering 14,414 federal workers whose backgrounds were “suspect.” Armed with these numbers, he got additional money from Congress to start his “Sex Deviates” program. Handsome FBI agents in sexy costumes began to spend their time cruising in gay bars and clubs—a tactic that police would employ right into the present era. Talk about a cushy job. Soft lights, good music, the occasional blow-job—and no nasty robbers taking potshots at you. Oh, a jealous queen might try to scratch your eyes out, but you have to expect some downside.
You can be sure that some of the information these dedicated cruisers gathered went into their own little black books. You never knew when you might be faced with a cold, lonely night.
The rest of it went into Hoover’s files and was used to warn colleges and law enforcement agencies, among others, of the dangerous perverts within their organizations. The rationale for this was that as homosexuality was illegal, the knowledge of an individual’s homosexuality made him subject to blackmail. That this threat could be negated by removing the legal constraints on homosexuality seemed not to have occurred to anyone at the time.
It was not until 1977, by the way, that the Sex Deviates files were destroyed—or at least we are told they were destroyed. No one ever said what happened to those little black books. By that time the official files numbered between a quarter and a half million pages. To put that in perspective, think of each page as the potential ruin of a life, the destruction of a career. Sadly, there were many for whom the tragedy was more than “potential.”
Things got worse. In 1954 the crusaders turned their attention to the comic books, beloved of the nation’s youngsters and not a few oldsters as well. As early as 1948, New York psychiatrist Fredric Wertham had launched his attack on the comic book industry, charging that comic books created juvenile delinquents and made perverts of their youthful readers. Wertham was a senior psychiatrist for the Department of Hospitals of New York City, and treated mostly troubled children. He found that without exception these children were reading comic books—nearly all children did in those days. Wertham saw a cause and effect in action. Comic books were teaching these youngsters that crime pays, good doesn’t always win over evil, and authority figures needn’t be taken too seriously.
At first no one had taken him too seriously. Undeterred, in 1954 in his book Seduction of the Innocent he broke the news to the unsuspecting world that Batman and Robin were gay, pointing out their “sumptuous quarters, with beautiful flowers in large vases.” Even the presence of Alfred, the butler, was somehow proof of the pair’s perversion, though personally I don’t recall a single comic book that showed the three of them in bed together. “Batman is sometimes shown in a dressing gown,” Wertham pouted. “It is like a wish dream of two homosexuals living together.” Well, yes, now that I think of it, if it weren’t for that pesky Penguin.…
Robin is described as “a handsome ephebic boy, usually shown [with] bare legs […] devoted to nothing on earth […] as much as to Bruce Wayne. He often stands with his legs spread, the genital region discreetly evident.”
Frankly, it would seem to me that a genital region “discreetly evident” would be preferable to one flagrantly evident but what do I know about costumed ephebes? I’ve never had one devoted to me in that way. Certainly not one in tights.
As for the presence of women, there is only “the Catwoman, who is vicious and uses a whip.” I can only thank God the man never visited San Francisco’s late September Folsom Street Fair, high holy days for the leather set. I shudder to think what he would make of some of those ladies and I am sure many of them have never even seen a comic book.
Don’t think it was only this lavender duo who were corrupting innocents, either. Captain America had his young Bucky, the Torch had Toro, and the Green Hornet almost never went out at night without Cato. Practically every superhero had his little boy wonder. Granted, Cato was the Green Hornet’s servant, but we have all heard about backstairs romances. What is certainly apparent is that adoption agencies in those days were quite liberal when it came to pairing up bachelors and young male wards.
Nor did the women come off Scot free. In Wertham’s opinion, Wonder Woman was “a frightening image […] her followers are the gay girls.” To be honest, most of the gay girls I knew got turned on to Sheena, Queen of the Jungle. I think it was the animal skin teddies, which you have to admit are sexier than bulletproof bracelets.
Wertham made no mention of Superman but I think we can agree that those blue tights and the red skimpies were a giveaway. Be honest now, how many genuinely straight men can you picture gadding about town in that get up? The cape alone would raise eyebrows almost anywhere west of Greenwich Village.
Seduction of the Innocent launched a full scale investigation in Congress, headed by Senator Estes Kevauver. Can you see the scene? The busy Senator comes home for the evening and his wife asks, “Estes, darlin”, what matters of world importance did you deal with today?” and he replies, “Little honey, today my fellow Senators and I got into that Rascally Robin’s padded tights. That’s the last time he’ll give Batman a hand.”
Well, all right, what he actually did say, in addressing the opening session of the Senate Subcommittee to investigate Juvenile Delinquency, in 1954, was “The Subcommittee wishes to reiterate its belief that this country cannot afford the calculated risk involved in feeding its children a concentrated diet of crime, horror and violence.”
With that, they were off and running. It’s hard now to think anyone could have taken all this seriously, but Wertham had proved to be good at exploiting the press and arousing librarians, teachers, parents and churches.
Wertham described comic books as a “correspondence course in crime […] a distillation of viciousness […] the world of the strong, the ruthless, the bluffer, the shrewd deceiver, the torturer and the thief.” Frankly, I think that is rather a harsh description of Donald Duck, though those nephews could be pretty feisty.
Yes, true, there was stronger stuff, too, and admittedly the comic book industry didn’t put many limits on their writers and artists. “Don’t chop the limbs off anybody,” DC Comics advised its authors. EC Comics—i.e., William Gaines—had practically no restrictions. In EC Comics, people suffered being devoured by rats, chopped up, skewered, buried alive, and countless other degradations, limited only by the authors’ imagination. Gaines argued before the subcommittee that even children could tell the difference between fiction and reality.
* * * *
In 1952, George Jorgensen, an ex-GI, set aside his Batman comics long enough to travel to Denmark for a sex-change operation, coming home as Christine Jorgensen. This only fueled the anti-gay hysteria sweeping the country. In the 1956 presidential race Walter Winchell would cry that “a vote for Adlai Stevenson is a vote for Christine Jorgensen,” which truly made no sense at all. It’s doubtful if the two even met, and so far as I know Stevenson had no plans to name Jorgensen to his cabinet had he been elected. What post would it have been? Secretary of Lingerie and Make Up? (“My fellow Americans, I want to speak to you frankly about the Menace of Mascara.…”)
The problem had become, who was a real man to trust? Not his Washington bureaucracy apparently, where perverts skulked beneath every desk, like early Monica Lewinskys in long pants. Not the men in military uniform, any one of whom might be a WAAC at heart, nor the comic book superheroes, when the increase in pulse rate they inspired might rouse Walter Winchell’s suspicions. And now not even his women, who might merely be physically altered male sex perverts.
Elvis Presley’s hip shaking caused him to be labeled “morally insane.” In San Francisco, poet Allen Ginsberg was charged with obscenity and put on trial for his Howl. Almost everywhere they looked the crusaders found someone at whom to point a finger. Holy Moley, was everyone a deviate?
Well, yes, probably so, since the media made a habit of lumping together every sort of sexual nonconformity under the general label “sex deviates.” So adulterers, peeping toms, flashers, cross dressers, masturbators, homosexuals, foot fetishists,