Is joker gay
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But what is rather notable here is that the Joker directly references Dr. Frank-N-Furter, the alien scientist in the cult movie The Rocky Horror Picture Show (Jim Sharman, 1975). Wherever she was, he would follow.
Had Harley been gender-flipped, the dynamic in this case would have been the same, but because of the over-representation of heterosexuality in the media, it felt even more stale.
In Chuck Dixon and Graham Nolan's "Devil's Advocate," he mentions an ex-boyfriend who "broke his heart," while in Kevin Smith, Walt Flanagan and Sandra Hope's "Batman: Cacophony,"he explicitly propositions a surprised male associate.
Next Page: Is Joker The Straight Man Of His Own Joke?
The Straight Man?
The Joker has also had relationships with women.
Written by Matthew Rosenberg, each issue had two stories: the first one was the ongoing conflict between two men that believed themselves to be the real Clown Prince of Crime.
The effect is more sexy than grotesque thanks to the art of Marini. Not all people can relate to heroes, many of them love villains."
There's also a case to be made for ambiguity. A fully outed homicidal maniac in the guise of something intended to entertain children could further the bigoted conflation of LGBTQ people with abnormality and monstrosity.
They come from an old tradition, even older than cinema, from vaudeville and Burlesque theater, later used by comedians like Laurel and Hardy and Charlie Chaplin, and then assimilated into animation like the Warner Bros shorts.
A recent case of much ado about nothing was the infamous ‘pregnant Joker’ story that appeared in issue four of The Joker: The Man Who Stopped Laughing (2022-2024).
This content is published for the entertainment of our users only. The ambiguous nature of the character has allowed him to be reimagined numerous times for comics, animation, and feature films among other mediums. Is he trying to spook the Caped Crusader or getting dolled up for a date with him? Shestakova's campaign rests on the issue of equal representation as well as combatting erasure, after all.
She fell in love with comic books and Pop Culture in general, when her grandfather lent her his large collection of Editorial Novaro Spanish translations of USA and European series. Especially given the iconic villain’s ambiguous nature, backstory, and motivations.
Is The Joker Queer, Straight Or Something Else
A petition on Change.org started by Elena Shestakova calls for DC Entertainment to "Make The Joker Gay Again," compacting the long-running speculation about the DC villain's sexuality into a clear call to action.
"The Joker is a character with almost 80 years [of] history, half of which he was portrayed as homosexual," Shestakova states.
Nobody expected that this series would be seen in high definition in the future – or that we would still be talking about it more than fifty years since it was aired – and that all its splendor and defects would be highly noticeable [1].
In my original essay, I overlooked the Joker that appears in the nineties film Batman (Tim Burton, 1989).
Firstly, he is disfigured, both by his discolored skin and two grotesque scars left by a butcher of a surgeon when attempting to suture a bullet wound in his cheeks. The tale is about eight pages in length and is amusing and disgusting in equal measure.
However, it sparked controversy on social media because the mere image of a pregnant Joker – an ultimately very feminine image – was enough to provoke the fury of incels, a group notorious for being being particularly misogynistic.
Recently, I was asked to translate my essay into Spanish for the comic site Zona Negativa, which I did with the generous permission of editors Rich Handley and Lou Tambone. Some of my favorites are Hillbilly Hare (Robert McKimson, 1950), Rabbit Fire (Chuck Jones, 1951), Rabbit Seasoning (Chuck Jones, 1952) and Bedevilled Rabbit (Robert McKimson, 1957).
[6] I wrote in more detail about Ledger’s Joker as featured on Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight (2008) in my original essay.
[7] An article about the pregnant Joker controversy and the comments from writer Matthew Rosenberg can be consulted at this link.
[8] The story of how Tim Curry was considered originally to voice the Joker in Batman: The Animated Series can be read in Fixing the Laughter: Voice Casting the Joker on Batman: The Animated Series by John Trumbull, The Man Who Laughs (2023) published by Crazy 8 Press.
The iconic Batman villain Joker has been one of DC‘s most notorious characters for decades.
The Clown Prince of Crime is wearing a miniskirt, wig, garters and stockings. I took the occasion to revisit, augment and correct my original essay. Valentina speaks Spanish, English, French, Italian and some German, and can still be found on Twitter/X as @rossi_tg, and in Bluesky as @rossi-tg.bsky.social.
Corrections:
- In the original essay, Harley Quinn’s profession is mentioned as a psychiatrist, she is actually a psychologist.
- The story ‘Dreadful Birthday, Dear Joker… !’ originally published in Batman 321, was published in Batman Novaro 1117 not in Batman Novaro 244 as stated in the original version of this essay.
References:
[1] The sixties Joker as represented by César Romero is discussed at length in the essay Delicious!