Wouldn't "bi-sexual" be more accurate?
Personally I don't know anyone who flipped preference in all my years.
Actually, no. I've met kids who were fathered by gay men who only came out after divorcing the kid's mother. I've known guys who were married, had kids, and then came out as gay years later. It's not bisexual just because you CAN have sex with a woman, if you are "forcing" yourself to do it just to prove you're straight. So, on that score, I'd say no, not bi-sexual.
Think of it this way. It's preference. If you go to a meal at a friend's house and they serve lobster, and you really HATE lobster but you don't want to offend your friend who went to all this trouble, what do you do? You eat your lobster and put on a happy face. Then years later, when you and your friend are talking, you say "You know, I never told you this, but I HATE lobster." Did the fact that you ate the lobster -- even with a happy face on -- mean that you LIKED lobster for that moment? Of course not. You HATE lobster. But you ate it anyway because of the social pressure associated with not offending your friend.
What if its just more than an announcement? What if there is a very good story written to go along with? One that describes the character as having always been gay, and tells what they have been through? The character could be someone others could identify with as they struggle to come out of the closet. What if they make it part of the character from now on?
I think its cool that this is happening. Im not gay, but Captain Jack Harkness is one of the coolest characters ever! Its just becoming part of normalcy, in fact, I think it would be abnormal for one of the characters to NOT come out of the closet.
And I think its cool that it isn't a new character. That would be more of a token. Someone struggling with who they are is a story people can identify with.
To me, what makes it tokenism is the marketing aspect of it, especially the "big announcement." And I'm not gay either, but I still find the whole thing crass and stupid. MAybe they can write whatever the story is in a convincing way, but the reason why I'm against using an existing character for this is the DECADES -- in some cases almost a CENTURY -- of the characters being straight in most cases.
Think of it this way.
Gay Superman?
Gay Batman?
Gay Wonder Woman?
Gay Flash?
Gay Green Lantern?
All of these characters have had opposite-sex significant others, and not in the way I described where they just "put on a brave face."
For the record, though, I have the same issue with repeated "reboots" of continuity. It made sense in '85 for them to reboot DC. And even that created problems. But now they do it, what, every 5 years or so? It cheapens all of it and turns it into an excuse to just toss continuity out the window. I'm sure there's marketing data to suggest that comics have a roughly 5-year window during which they're most heavily consumed by an individual, so it doesn't make sense to keep telling the same story for longer than 5 years.
But you know what? It still sucks. Comics evolve, but that doesn't mean they need to radically change every five years, and it doesn't mean they have to do stuff like this just to turn a buck.
I suppose a big part of what steams me about this is the "announcement" aspect. That, to me, is the biggest sign of "MARKETING PLOY." They have to "announce" it because (A) it's a major character, and (B) that means they can't just let it evolve naturally.
And you know why? Because it wouldn't be "natural." With any of the established characters, this will be a "WTF?! Where'd THAT come from?" moment.
You know what this will be like? Back in the early 2000s, Law and Order had just gotten rid of Angie Harmon, and brought on...um....I don't remember her name. She was blonde. Anyway, she was only on as an assistant DA for, like, one or two seasons. At the end, though, she got fired. And as she was getting fired, she said "Is this because I'm GAY?" And the entire audience -- and even the character to whom she said it!!! -- was like "What?" It came completely out of left field. NOBODY expected it, and it wasn't natural or organic to the story. There were no hints about it, no suggestions, no internal dilemma with the character saying "I hate that I can't come out at work..." or something. Even within the episode, which, I think, centered on gay hate crime or something along those lines, it was totally out of left field.
It was just bad storytelling. And the fact that nobody here can guess who the character is that will be "outed" as gay pretty much tells me that this will be done in a really cheap, lousy way. There's been no lead-in for it. There's been no build-up. It'll just be like, "WTF?! Aquaman's gay?! So what the hell is up with his relationship with Mera?! Or Dolphin?! How the hell do they explain that?!"
If there was some year-long or multi-year layering of stories that gradually developed this side of the character, hinted at it, that sort of thing, to the point where no announcement was necessary, yeah, I'd have no problem with it.
But that apparently hasn't happened. If it has, hey, my apologies and I hope they do the story right. but my bet is that this is just a cynical ploy to gin up the controversy mill and get people talking. And I take that as demeaning on multiple levels. It's demeaning to gays that they can be used as a marketing gambit. It's demeaning to the audience because it assumes that they're dumb enough to say "WHAAAAAT? I MUST READ THIS!!!"
You know what'd be courageous? If this was part of a multi-year plan, which played out before the public's eyes, and NO announcement was made. THAT would be courageous, because that'd be like saying "Yeah. Aquaman's gay. If you've been reading for the last four years, you'd probably have picked up on that. And you know what? We didn't do an announcement for it because it's not something that ought to NEED an announcement. Aquaman is who he is. Gay people are who they are. nobody should need to 'announce' their sexuality to the world as if they can't live their life openly. People should just...be themselves. And that's what Aquaman is doing, and what he's been doing all this time. So, no, we didn't announce it. We told a story instead, because that's the business we're in: storytelling."
