Why is it when Daddy Warbucks takes in an orphan it’s cute, but when Batman does it he’s a pedophile?
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No matter the quality of the production, the musical Annie almost always plays to sold-out houses and rakes in profits for a theatre. Even if the choreography and the sets are terrible, the kids are always cute, and the story is so heartwarming: an orphan girl escapes from her abusive “caretaker” and is taken in by Daddy Warbucks, a Manhattan socialite with no family of his own. He learns to love her like a daughter, and she learns to love him like a dad. It’s corny, touching, and fun for the whole family, just like most classic musicals.
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But there’s another fictitious orphan-billionaire duo that’s been famous since the 1940s: Dick Grayson and Bruce Wayne, better known as Batman and Robin. Like Annie to her Warbucks, Robin added some levity to the dark universe of Batman. He gave the loner superhero a companion. He showed us that being super-rich means little if you have no one to share life with. Catsuit-clad girlfriends come and go, but having a son is forever.
Yet very few find Robin’s story touching in the way we find Annie’s. Most are uncomfortable with it. The dynamic duo has been the target of anti-gay hysteria since the 1954, when psychiatrist Frederic Wertham published an anti-comics “exposé” insinuating that Batman & Robin “is like a wish-dream of two homosexuals living together.”
Sixty-two years later, I’d like to think we know better. At the very least, we know the difference between a gay man and a pedophile. Gay men have healthy and consensual relationships with other men; pedophiles have unhealthy encounters with people who don’t consent, and the gender of their victims doesn’t matter. Homosexuality between consenting adults hurts no one, but pedophilia does.
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The story of Robin is not a homosexual fantasy. It’s a fantasy for boys who want to be heroes and want the fatherly love that their real fathers aren’t around to give them.
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But even in 2016, I’m not always convinced we know the difference between a male caretaker and a pedophile. We drum up hysteria about grown men following young girls into the bathroom, completely disregarding the fact that young girls have fathers who “follow them into the bathroom” to protect them. We romanticize the possessive dad who threatens his daughter’s prom date with a shotgun, but when a dad wants to nurture his own child, male or female, he is met with scorn. We celebrate the idea that a woman can be a Jedi Knight, a Ghostbuster, or President of the United States, but we shun and distrust men who would rather spend time around young people. Batman never stood a chance.
Robin was notably excluded from the darker, “cooler” Batman installments like Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy, and in the most recent rendition of Batman on the silver screen, Robin is already dead at the beginning of the movie. Directors tease the idea of including him in the films, but none is brave enough to do so, presumably because they worry that a teenage sidekick will detract from the “edginess” of Batman’s character. Every Batman comic is different, but moviegoers like the cold, brooding Batman who seems invincible because he has nothing to lose. He loves no one and lets no one love him. The addition of Robin complicates this mythos…unless, of course, Robin is already dead.
The “wish-dream” Dr. Wertham spoke of is not real. The story of Robin is not a homosexual fantasy. It’s a fantasy for boys who want to be heroes and want the fatherly love that their real fathers aren’t around to give them. It’s everything that Annie is to orphan girls…but it’s for boys, and that makes us insist on adding sexual undertones to it.
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It teaches us that providing emotional support to those same boys either makes you “less of a man” or it makes you a predator.
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Come to think of it, Annie’s own Daddy Warbucks doesn’t offer much on the emotional side of parenting; he just protects Annie and takes care of her financial needs: ensuring that she never has to work because his servants will take care of her …but that she will always eat well, be well-dressed, and have fantastic hair. It’s a Cinderella story, but with adoption replacing romance. Nobody has ever tried to write sexual undertones into the story, and nobody should. To do so would be an insult to single-parent adoptive families everywhere.
So why is it OK when we do it to Batman? And why does he get a free pass for putting a teenage boys life in danger every night by recruiting him to fight homicidal villains like the Joker, but then get called a pedophile for wanting to treat the kid like a son? What does this teach men who want to grow up to be fathers? It teaches them that it’s OK to put boys in life-threatening harm’s way if it teaches them how to “man up.” It teaches us that providing emotional support to those same boys either makes you “less of a man” or it makes you a predator. In Batman’s case, it’s the latter.
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Some might be inclined to accuse me of overthinking and overreacting to fictional characters in a comic book franchise. But I’m not the one overreacting. It’s the people who make jokes, post internet memes, and write entire books about the alleged sexual undertones between these characters. They are the ones overreacting. I’m reacting to the 15 million American children who live without fathers, the 5 million among those who live without any parents at all, and the millions of single American men who are afraid to provide homes for those children, lest society meet them with the same skepticism and hostility that they meet Batman. Me being upset about that isn’t an overreaction at all; it’s a natural reaction.
Also by Giorgio Selvaggio
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Photo: Getty Images