The Ultimate Death Match: One Million Moms versus Gay Superheroes

The Guardian reports that a religious/conservative organisation calling itself One Million Moms is calling for a boycott of Marvel and DC Comics, until they remove those nasty gay superheroes Northstar and the Golden Age Green Lantern* (and presumably Apollo and Midnighter and the current incarnation of Batwoman, though those characters are not mentioned) from their respective line-ups. Because those self-proclaimed One Million Moms fear that reading about gay superheroes could turn children gay.

The image accompanying the Guardian article is misleading by the way, because it’s a still from last year’s Green Lantern film, which featured not Alan Scott but Silver Age Green Lantern Hal Jordan, who is not gay. And while I don’t know about the sexual preferences of Tomar-Re, the alien Green Lantern in the film still, I’m pretty confident that he and Hal Jordan are not a couple.

Now the complaint of the One Million Moms is completely ridiculous, because comics (or books or movies) don’t turn people gay, but seeing a hero like themselves can help gay or lesbian teens. Besides, children are hardly the core customer demographic for comic books and haven’t been for more than twenty years now.

This isn’t the first time that the One Million Moms have attempted to combat the rising tide of gayness in American mainstream comic books, by the way. They did the very same thing – writing letters and calling for a boycott of the offending issue – earlier this year when there was a gay wedding in an Archie comic (which are actually aimed at a younger demographic than Marvel or DC’s superhero comics). Interestingly, the gay couple in Archie is interracial, too, just like Northstar and his soon to be husband. Plus, one half of the couple wears a military uniform, which makes it even more controversial given the only recently revised policies of the US military on GLBT soldiers. The boycott call of the One Million Moms was a resounding success, by the way: The issue in question sold out.