Darling, Batsy, My Sweet...I'm Queer

It’s weird being a queer Joker fan. 

Joker’s queerness has been expressed in many different ways over the years of endless musical chairs of comic writers and artists, but it’s being usually swallowed by a tide of angry male voices for whom the character is about something else entirely. This happens a lot. I’m no stranger to toxic male fans drowning me out; theirs become the only voices anyone hears until they control the narrative on a character.

I’m a Rick and Morty fan, and somehow maladjusted dudes who misinterpret Rick’s worst behavior as something the show is actually advocating have come to be synonymous with what the show means. Never mind that I’ve spent many an episode crying and shuddering at how all too real the depiction of narcissistic parentage and its consequences is and how rarely that issue is reflected in media.

Have I mentioned I really hate this phenomenon?

I reject it. I refuse to “let” them have it. And really, in a post “death of the author” era where the internet can connect marginalized groups, I don’t see why we should let anyone have final say on the interpretation of any media we love. There’s always more to glean from art than what the loudest fans say there is and, even more than what the author tells you you’re allowed to see. This is how I’ll forever feel about the Joker, and while it feels dangerous to even attempt to rebel against the tide here, I just can’t help it. This queercoded psychotic clown has been on my mind for far too long, and he won’t leave me be.

Maybe it’s because he’s the first queercoded villain in comics that I ever really saw. My first real foray into fandom was communing with fellow queer folks whose eyebrows had raised when they read the very same comic panels I had, assuring each other that the evidence wasn’t something we’d made up. Firsts are a powerful thing: they make big stamped impressions in the libraries of our memories. You never forget them. Perhaps that’s why the Joker’s impression on me as a character whose queerness is often erased has been indelible. Every time a new film iteration of him crops up, even though I know it won’t be what I want, I heave a little dismayed sigh at the dashed hope and saddle up to fork over the money for a movie ticket.

That said, I think there’s been an inordinate tilt toward talking about the Joker in terms of his screen (both large and small) incarnations, which, with maybe the exception of Cesar Romero’s portrayal, haven’t leaned into the queer subtext in nearly the same extent as the comics. With a character that’s been around for this long, it’s hard to know where to start and what to include (truth be told, I could probably make this article the length of War and Peace if I wanted a truly exhaustive list of all the queercoded instances), but I want to talk about some of my favorite moments, the comic panels that first pop into my head when I think about Joker. 

Straight people love to take characters like Deadpool and Joker and say that the flirting they dole out to their adversaries (or reluctant cohorts as the case may be for Deadpool and his beloved baby boy Spidey—he canon calls him that, don’t give me that look. Google it.) is a joke. Hell, I’ve even seen straight guys bend over backwards to say Graham and Lecter were “just pals” in Bryan Fuller’s Hannibal adaptation. It takes some serious mental gymnastics, but they’re always up to the task. It’s simply to make the men on the receiving end uncomfortable, they say.

And the thing is, sometimes these characters are being written by straight men who do see it that way, who are afraid to go all in and confirm the queerness, but at the end of the day, I don’t know that their intent really matters. What they might pen as a cruel joke about the “predatory gay” trope can be picked up on by queer readers as a villain unhealthily obsessed with his target for reasons beyond power struggles over Gotham City. 

My fellow elder millennials often talk about how all the queercoded villains from Disney and animated shows we grew up on (Editor’s Note: Hi, that’s me), many of whom were designed with the intent to equate queerness with villainy, didn’t go as planned by their creators. It just made us figure out our orientation early on, before we could even name it, but we still felt that inexplicable pull, drawn to these characters time and time again. The bad queer representation they manufacture usually just backfires. It doesn’t make us want to be less queer but want something better for our queer characters instead.

So let’s march through some of the ways (good, bad, and in between) that the sexuality of my dear Jokey Pants has been depicted.

The Joker has been physically drawn as a man with effeminate characteristics since the very beginning, but as Bart Bishop rightfully notes in The Joker As Sexual Predator: Rape, Queer Readings And Anticipatory Outrage For Suicide Squad, it isn’t until Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns that we start to see actual acknowledgement of this: 

“The comic book Joker conceptually lends himself to a queer reading. He’s dressed in bombastic colors, acts flamboyant and appears to be wearing makeup. Although that was later retconned as chemical burns and bleached skin, his first appearance in Batman #1 gave no explanation. Miller’s take, however, is shown applying his own lipstick, and furthermore refers to Batman as ‘darling’ and ‘my sweet’. His final struggle with Batman is exacerbated by the closeness and intimacy of the knife, and is framed as a love scene.”

Let’s take a look at the panels in question, shall we? Oh, and that symbolically erotic fight? It takes place in the Tunnel of Love ride at a carnival. Yes, you read that correctly.

If you’re remotely into comics, you know that Frank Miller’s intentions and handling of sexuality and gender are fraught with problems, but again, if we’re looking strictly for evidence of the queercoding tradition, for better or worse, Miller’s turn here is pivotal. It’s a very significant moment in the Batman comics canon for many reasons, but this is certainly one of them.

Grant Morrison picked up this thread in Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth (which has some very gorgeous art courtesy of David McKean so check it out if you’ve never read it) albeit in the usual problematic way wherein Joker’s queerness is predatory and othering. Joker tells Batman to “loosen up, tight ass,” delivers an unwanted swat to the flying nocturnal mammal man’s bottom, to which Batman responds by demanding, “take your filthy hands off me, degenerate!” 

If Joker’s appearance is what began this queer subtext journey, the pervasive thread of Joker’s free-flowing approach to his sexuality and identity juxtaposed with Batman’s uptight, repressed sense of self is what continued it, churning a deep, strong current of a “two sides of the same coin” narrative that is the crux of the relationship between these two. The basis of their tango is Joker continually baiting Batman, planting seeds of doubt about his moral character, asserting that Bats is just like him, that he’s compelled by Joker because of this connection he tries to deny.

The comics often frame this as revolving around Batman’s moral objection to killing, the Joker willing to be the one who dies at Bruce’s hands if it means proving that the urge was simmering there all along. (Now, if you’re well-versed in Batman comics, you know it’s arguable that Bruce has killed people, even if most of those kills can be hand-waved as unintentional, but it remains one of his tenets anyway.) 

But if you’re doing a queer reading of these comics, you can easily take Joker’s taunting to mean “you’re like me because you’re queer deep down too; don’t you want to let go like I have and stop running from it?” Joker is wild and unrestrained and chaotic whereas Bruce is controlled and packed to the gills with issues he refuses to deal with—past trauma, depression, and, just maybe, repressed sexuality that manifests in a twisted attraction to the Clown Prince of Crime that leaves him sparing the villain’s life over and over again despite knowing Joker won’t be stopped until someone finally kills him. This is something that doesn’t go unnoticed by the people in Batman’s life. 

Scott Snyder and Greg Capullo’s run remains my favorite Batman writer and artist team up, and a lot of that is due to how honestly they acknowledged this, continuing the story in a way that didn’t shy away from the ongoing obsession Batman and Joker have indulged in with each other. About Death of the Family, Synder says: 

“I wanted it to be a story where the Joker is forcing Batman down a twisted version of memory lane, saying, ‘I know you loved these adventures we had together.’...Really, what the Joker's trying to say to him is that it was better before. ‘You were thrilled by me. You won't admit it, but you love that I came along to help you be stronger, to fuel your fantasy, and you do that for me, too. Together, we're more of a family than any of these people.’ In that way, the trip down memory lane was really meant as a kind of love letter to Batman from the Joker.”

Capullo imbues the accompanying art with these themes too:

“When they are lying in the pool of blood, I shaped the pool like a heart. And there is this little crack going through the heart. In ‘Death of the Family,’ using Scott's words, we had a love story—Joker loves Batman. Where here, it was the reverse of that. He has more hatred, in a way, because Batman broke the Joker's heart. I was really trying to make it have a loving ending in the middle of this blood bath. Even in the way Bruce was lying next to Joker and the way that he would look over at him, I really tried to make it as poignant as possible while in the midst of this bloody mayhem.”

The storyline and dialogue is more blatant than ever before with Death of the Family. Joker wants the world to burn so that only he and Batman remain, a warped version of Achilles and Patroclus. It’s a sentiment Heath Ledger’s Joker, arguably the most iconic and talked about film portrayal of the character, echoes as well. “Kill you? I don't want to kill you. What would I do without you? Go back to ripping off mob dealers? No you… You. Complete. Me.” he says before issuing more of the same “us against them” rhetoric: “Don't talk like one of them—you're not, even if you'd like to be. To them you're a freak like me... they just need you right now.”

See, I said Synder and Capullo brought me my favorite version of the perilous flirtation between these two, but it’s hard to slap a superlative like that on Family when Batman: Europa exists too. Joker’s queerness has been communicated through his feelings about Batman quite frequently, and Europa leans into that idea with all the subtlety of a guillotine blade. The story revolves around Joker being the key to Batman curing himself of a disease he's been injected with that is rapidly killing him. The entire comic is a whirlwind demented version of a romantic European vacation between these two. Seriously. 

They go to Paris, and Joker rambles intelligently about the charm of the city and the sights he's seen there, how he would live there if he had to move from Gotham, and Bruce silently muses about Joker's past. The curiosity these two have about each other, the dangerous fascination, hits a pretty large peak here, partly because there's not a lot of separation between them, no distraction but each other. They're roaming from city to city together, trying to solve the mystery, Bruce reluctantly accepting the need to cooperate with his nemesis, and guess what? 

In the end, the cure is blood. Joker needs to ingest Bruce's blood, and Bruce needs his. Blood-sharing is often used to depict eroticism and romantic connection in fantasy; the tradition of swooning women baring their necks to blood-feasting vampires is longstanding and continues today. Some of my favorite panels from this comic (which is so gorgeously drawn and colored, please read it sometime) have Bane taunting Batman about his Joker dependency. As I’ve touched on, Bruce trying to pretend it’s one-sided is a huge theme in the Batman comics, and in Europa, we see Batsy begging Bane not to kill Joker with a side of Bane revealing he orchestrated all of this in a bid to get Batman to just admit it for once. 

This comic also features this “can’t interpret it in any other way” script note:

There are many other examples of varying overtness—the Joker actually propositioning a man for anal sex in Batman: Cacophony, the adorable Lego Batman scene that shows the two characters exchanging humorous professions of love (“I hate you, Joker.” I hate you, too. “I hate you more.” I hate you the most. “I hate you forever.”) over the backdrop of a romantic sunset. And the Arkham video games! Bless the script writers and developers for that, and bless Mark Hamill for making Joker come alive. They took subtext and made it text as much as Scott Synder did in the comics.

Joker leaves Batman voicemails about how he sees the sexual tension in Bruce’s eyes when he looks at him. He ties Batman to a chair and sits on his lap, slinging an arm around his neck. Joker is obsessed with Bats, and doesn’t particularly care who knows it in the Arkham-verse. It’s done very playfully, and I have such vivid sense memories of the winter I finally put the Arkham Asylum disc in and eagerly began my first playthrough, a spark of recognition running up my spine as Joker began flirting with his nemesis straightaway: “Ah yes, that’s the psychotic clown I know.”

Playing those games is what reignited my interest in the character and led me to the internet to find out who else had picked up on this. The internet might have birthed innumerable cesspools, but I’m forever grateful for the way it’s connected me with other queer folks, leading to so much wonderful discussion of queer subtext we’ve picked up on in our separate pockets of the globe, eager to have someone to gush to about it. After doing that for years with fellow Joker fans, I can’t help but hope for a new, queerer version of the Joker penned by a queer person in the future.

What would that look like?

Is it possible to erase all of the damaging predatory tropes and queerness as villainy that has already been written? I don’t know. What I do know is, whether or not an attempt to do that would fail, I’d be miles more interested in seeing the result of attempts at reclaiming this character than seeing yet another similar Joker adaptation of an edgelord man who snapped. Will I see the newest movie anyway? Yep. Maybe I’ll be pleasantly surprised by what I find, but either way, I still think it’s time for something new. 

You might be thinking “but why should I give a fuck about rewriting an old flawed character when there are queer creators out there with new characters to give birth to?” And I get it. I’m an AFAB queer person walking around the world in a skin people immediately clock as female so I understand why, in this exhausting climate of shit impacted upon shit, people are anxious for the current Joker movie to not even exist. I’m wary too. 

But I spent a lot of time in the world of fandom and fanfic, a world that trades in the business of righting canon wrongs. All fiction writing is problem solving in one way or another, but with fanfic you’re solving “problems” (putting in quotes because I don’t want to be uncharitable to authors whose original work has inspired fix-it fanfic; after all, what constitutes a problem in a story’s plot or characterization is always subjective) that aren’t our own making. When it’s challenging, sometimes that just makes it all the more thrilling, taking seemingly insurmountable failings in representation and letting your brain twist and turn around the “hows” and “what if’s” until you’ve figured out a plausible way to make it happen.

I ate up Bryan Fuller’s Hannibal series in all its arthouse-fever-dream-cannibal-love-story glory. It’s a great example of how the dynamic of “morally reprehensible queer villain who sees the potential for darkness in his moral counterpart” can be a really compelling exploration of morality and identity when done well and with care. So I do think it could be possible in the right hands. While I don't know for certain that it can be done with the Joker, it's definitely an itch I’m still dying to scratch.