When DC announced they were turning one of their mainstream characters gay, I guessed Green Arrow. So I was half right. Why did I guess Arrow? Maybe there’s just something sexually suspect about the color green in comics. For instance, I don’t know if the Green Hornet is gay, but he had his own suspiciously cute sidekick long before Batman met Robin.
Once Green Lantern was the newly confirmed bachelor, I wasn’t exactly amazed by DC’s bravery and boldness. But I was happy enough. I mean, Hal Jordan, founding member of the Justice League? That’s solid. Right up there with Flash and that guy who talks to fish. With a good writer, he could be the Kurt Hummel of the superhero ensemble cast.
But as we all now know, DC meant that other Green Lantern. The one who lives on Earth 2.
I teach a course on superheroes, which is pretty much what you need to understand the ever evolving DC multiverse. So let me make it simple: Earth 2 ain’t us.
They’re talking about some guy named Alan Scott. Who, yes, was the original 1940 Green Lantern. But, I’m sorry, unless you’re visualizing a clashing red and green ensemble with a high-collard cape, that’s not the Green Lantern. When DC first rebooted their universe in the late 1950’s, Lantern got the full makeover: costume, origin, alter ego. The retired Alan Scott didn’t belong to a Corps of interplanetary policemen. He was an Aladdin’s lamp knock-off. His lantern was magic.
And I have absolutely nothing against him. But a gay Green Lantern on Earth 2 is not earth-shattering. It’s not even earth-2-shattering. As one reader commented at comicbookmovie.com: “So what if he’s gay? This is Earth-2 and this is not the same Alan Scott from the golden age, this is an alternate version of the character like the gay Colossus in Ultimate Marvel.”
That’s right. Gay superheroes aren’t just secondary characters like, say, Oscar Martinez on The Office. Their entire universe is secondary.
And yet the conservative activist group One Million Moms is orchestrating an email campaign “to
This article originally appeared on: http://www.afterelton.com/comics/2012/06/gay-green-lantern-not-exactly-earth-2-shattering