The Lesbian counterpart of Batman may be found in the stories of Wonder Woman and Black Cat. The homosexual connotation of the Wonder Woman type of story is psychologically unmistakable. The Psychiatric Quarterly deplored in an editorial the “appearance of an emminet child therapist as the implied endorser of a series….which portrays extremely sadistic hatred for all males in a framework which is plainly Lesbian.”
For boys, Wonder Woman is a frightening image. For girls she is a morbid ideal. Where Batman is anti-feminine, the attractive Wonder Woman and her counterparts are definitely anti-masculine. Wonder Woman has her own female following. They are all continuously being threatened, captured, almost put to death. There is a great deal of mutual rescuing, the same type of rescue fantasies as in Batman. Her followers are the “Holliday Girls,” i.e. the holiday girls, the gay party girls, the gay girls. Wonder Woman refers to them as “my girls.” Thei attitude about death and murder is a mixture of the callousness of crime comics with the coyness of sweet little girls. When one of the the Holliday girls is thought to have drowned through the machinations of male enemies, one of them says: “Honest, I’d give the last piece of candy in the world to bring her back!” In a typical story, Wonder Woman is involved in adventures with another, a princess, who talks repeatedly about “those wicked men.”
In the Black Cat stories, the superwoman in ordinary life is a young girl like any other. but when she goes into action, she is “Black Cat” and has donned a sort of Superman uniform. In a story called “Mr Zero and the Juvenile Delinquent” a little boy is mercilessly beaten and is about to be kicked, as he lies helplessly on the floor, when Black Cat intervenes. On a educational page i nthe same book she gives good advice for violence as instruction in self-defense:
“Swing the upper part of your body forward while slammig the edge of your left hand against his larynx. The impact will knock him down.” At least!
Excerpt from chapter 7: “I WANT TO BE A SEX MANIAC!”
Here’s the Black Cat story Wertham mentions. It ran in Black Cat #27 (cover dated Feb 1951) and was the Christmas issue for December 1950.
