Man saves world! He's gay! Whatever next?

Pretty well every founding myth of American culture is basically a homosexual one

Oh, yeah – like we didn't know about this one all along. DC Comics, a publisher of comic books, has bitten the bullet, and in its new issue of The Authority – some magazine about men saving the world in their underpants – has introduced two "superheroes" who are identified as being gay. Apparently they're called Apollo and the Midnighter, they fall in love with each other, they get married and adopt a child. Wa-hey, you may say.

I don't know why they bother, really. I don't have any intention of reading about the get-her adventures of Apollo and the Midnighter, but nothing about the pictures in the papers sounds remotely new to me – just a bit more obvious than previously. They have terrible hair, they have fabulous knockers, they spend all their time chasing around the world averting danger with various labour-saving devices. Basically, it sounds exactly like every other action hero that has ever been invented – I mean, is it just me, or is the job description of "super-hero", like "super-model", not in itself the teensiest bit swishy? The great joke about the BBC sitcom My Hero is that comic-book heroes don't have a wife at home. They just don't, and never have.

This is traditionally the point at which one starts speculating lewdly about the masculinity of Superman and his ever-so-slightly suspect gentlemanly behaviour towards Lois Lane. Not to mention SpiderMan – though one yawned one's way through the movie, it was pretty clear that the camera was much more interested in lovingly detailing the anatomies of Willem Dafoe and Toby Maguire than the dull girl.

As for Batman – well, frankly, you can write this one yourself. The costumes in the movies got swishier and swishier with every sequel – all those moulded plastic nipples – but it was never that heterosexual from the start. Bruce Wayne and his "ward" and his dodgy butler and all that Young Master Robin, all those preppy Calvin Klein interiors upstairs and the fabulous Philippe Starck hi-tech gadgetry downstairs – puh-lease. And every so often, someone bringing up Batman's fiancée who died so tragically after being so supportive to his interest in bodybuilding and costume design – yeah, right.

From one point of view, all this looks like quite a positive thing. Great! You don't have to be heterosexual to save the world – gay people can be super-heroes too. That was the line taken by Peter Tatchell, who mostly talks a lot of sense. "This could have a tremendously beneficial effect on the mental and emotional health of teenagers who are struggling to come to terms with their homosexuality," he said. "It shows honesty, diversity, and acceptance in the comic-book genre."

That's a generous sort of thing to say, and I don't say that a lonely teenager won't find Apollo and the Midnighter a more positive image than, say, Mr Humphries out of Are You Being Served? But it doesn't seem a terribly useful one to me, and it does make me giggle a little bit. You could regard the outing of Batman and Robin and the creation of a pair of muscle-mary super-heroes as a positive image. On the other hand, you could just as well say that hard-pressed publishers of comics always need some weird gimmick to characterise their protagonists, and being gay will do as well as anything else. He saves the world! He's gay! Whatever next?

More helpfully, one could point out that pretty well every founding myth of American culture is basically a homosexual one. Walt Whitman said it quite clearly, but there it is in Moby Dick, in Huckleberry Finn, in a million war movies about My Best Buddy – quite often, as in Pearl Harbor or Top Gun, the interests of such films, ornamented with great stiff thickets of Freudian symbolism, look quite embarrassingly smutty to the European audience. Just think of how efficiently Heart of Darkness was stripped of the crucial business about Kurtz's fiancee for Apocalypse Now; American myths are of soldiers dying in each others' arms and, as Oscar Wilde said, of killing the thing they love. Of course they were going to end up ogling improbable masculine anatomies in the pages of comic books.

So I'm quite amused by the whole idea of Apollo and the Midnighter, and if it really did make anyone out there think of gay people in a different way, it wouldn't be a bad thing. But it does seem like business as usual rather than any very remarkable step forward, and it is, like most open portrayals of gay people in American fictions, on the level of a piquant gimmick. Really, the challenge is one that hardly seems tempting or interesting; to portray gay people as perfectly ordinary, and marked by no sense of exoticism or difference. Unlike the lurid pages of The Authority, that would be something I would pay to see.

p.hensher@independent.co.uk

The writer's novel 'The Mulberry Empire' has been chosen for the 2002 Booker Prize long-list