Tight Trousers
In an Op-Ed today in the NYTimes, Frank Rich said the following while discussing the import of right-wing attacks on cartoon surrogates in promoting the militant homosexual agenda:
This, too, has its antecedent in the McCarthy era. In his novel "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay," Michael Chabon was extrapolating from actual history when one of his heroes, a gay comic book artist, is hauled before Congress to testify about pairing up "strapping young fellows in tight trousers" as superheroes. A Senate committee of the time did investigate the comics. Its guiding force was the psychiatrist Fredric Wertham's fear-mongering 1954 tome "Seduction of the Innocent," which posited that Batman and Robin could corrupt children by inducing a "wish dream of two homosexuals living together." The decency cops of that day, exemplified by closeted gay right-wingers like J. Edgar Hoover and Roy Cohn, escalated a culture war into one with human costs by conflating homosexuality with the criminality of treason.
Since I'd wondered why no one seemed to be exercised at the apparent long-term relationship between Bruce Wayne and his "ward" and their joint penchant for dressing up in "tight trousers" and engaging in what can only be described as out-of-the-mainstream S&M activities, it's a bit of a relief to know that it was indeed noticed and investigated in the McCarthy Era.
These are truly serious issues that Spellings and Dobson are toying with, and we should neither overlook their over-reaching self-righteousness nor their dangerous hysterical fear-mongering just because the apparent targets of their attacks happen to be charming animated creatures.
I should probably blame my father for letting me watch Batman & Robin on television when I was young, since now I'm grown up and indulging in my "wish dream of two homosexuals living together", although to be honest (and probably more forthcoming than most people might like), Isaac and I have never dressed up in "tight trousers" to fulfill any sexual fantasies. Could it be because neither of us were ever really "strapping young fellows"?