“Mainstream culture will one day make its peace with gay Americans,” the editorial said. Things had started to evolve by 1992, when Northstar, another Marvel hero, came out - an event that was praised in an editorial in The New York Times. In the story, Bruce Banner, the alter ego of Marvel’s Hulk, is at a Y.M.C.A, where two gay men try to rape him. One of the earliest mainstream comics to feature gays or lesbians appeared in 1980. (As part of her new back story, she leaves the military because she refuses to lie about being a lesbian.) She eventually fell into obscurity, but was rebooted in 2006. The character of Batwoman was introduced that year as a love interest for the Caped Crusader. The book helped inspire congressional hearings and led to the creation in 1956 of the Comics Code Authority, in which the comics industry set standards on what comics could depict. In one section, Wertham described Batman and Robin as “a wish dream of two homosexuals living together.” It has been a steady evolution for an industry that had moved to censor itself in a number of ways after “Seduction of the Innocent,” a 1954 book by the psychiatrist Fredric Wertham, raised concerns about sex, gore and violence and suggested a link between reading comics and juvenile delinquency.
