A Batman researcher said 'gay' in a talk to schoolkids. When asked to censor himself, he quit
An author's clash with a Georgia school district over a brief mention of homosexuality in a presentation highlights the reach of conservatives' push for what what they call parents' rights.
I have a lot of questions about different parts of this title that I don't understand, but I support him.
Marc Tyler Nobleman was supposed to talk to kids about the secret co-creator of Batman, with the aim of inspiring young students in suburban Atlanta’s Forsyth County to research and write.
Then the school district told him he had to cut a key point from his presentation — that the artist he helped rescue from obscurity had a gay son. Rather than acquiesce, he canceled the last of his talks.
I want the title of “Batman researcher”
...batman researcher?
Comic Book Historian would have been a better title. I thought "batman" might have been referring to an unrelated school or something.
Then the school district told him he had to cut a key point from his presentation — that the artist he helped rescue from obscurity had a gay son. Rather than acquiesce, he canceled the last of his talks.
“We’re long past the point where we should be policing people talking about who they love,” Nobleman said in a telephone interview. “And that’s what I’m hoping will happen in this community.”
They didn't ask him not to "say 'gay'", as the title all but claims. They asked him to participate in the erasure of a relevant gay person from a story he was teaching to children.
Wait, was it a relevant person?
It's the son of the artist, right? Did the son have anything to do with Batman? Did the son's sexual orientation have anything to do with Batman?
What else is relevant about the son? Was he an artist? A writer? What did he do for a living? Did he have any relevant health disorders? Food preferences? Did he have any children?
BROADLY SPEAKING, your sexual preferences are the least interesting or relevant things in any conversation, unless we're considering dating each other.
I don't know the history of Batman so maybe it's actually relevant, but my gut says it's just not.
He should have let himself be fired. Then he could have brought a lawsuit against the school district over the matter. The school district would have had to demonstrate their reason to fire him on the record. If the researcher received damages for wrongful termination, the taxpayers would know it's their money that is being frivolously spent to support someone's homophobic agenda.
Probably couldn't get them for wrongful termination. At-Will employment is a bitch.
But he could likely get unemployment for being terminated without cause, which is a different thing.
a….batman researcher? 🤣
Head of the Batman Research Institute at the Harvard School of Comics.
He was the researcher they needed but not the researcher they deserved.
I am the night... researcher.
Batman researcher? quit? who was paying him in the first place?
Something something something R & D in a big building somewhere downtown
Why was someone from Batman, Turkey even teaching these kids?
Or Batman, Australia (suburb of Melbourne)
Batman researcher?
My man still trying to find out who this mysterious caped crusader is.
Yet another thing I'll never understand about cricket ffs
AKA: World's Greatest Researcher.
He quit researching Batman?
Quit the talk.
Both. He quit the talk AND quit researching Batman. He is now on sabbatical in a trailer near Bend, OR. He has been drinking since yesterday.
Batman researcher
So a comic book enthusiast? Is this dude the real life Comic Book Guy?
"Worst. School talk. Ever."
This is such bullshit.
was he talking about robin
The was talking about robbin'
The world is way more tribalistic than most people realize.
You say or do anything that goes against the tribe you're in, you're going to have a bad time.
That’s pretty much all it is or has ever been. I’m fine with it though. We are what we are.
I’m just happy to be here to play a little music and video games.
My tribe’s music of course. My tribe makes the best music. Of course I feel that way.
I think you have it backwards. People realize tribalism so intrinsically it doesn't even register.
The beauty of the social justice push we've seen from the 70s to today is that it actively tries to counteract the human tribal instinct to create a more fair and inclusive world. Granted, I'm not sure how successful it's been at removing tribalism... it just seems to have redefined the tribes.
This is a weird headline. Ok the guy really is a Batman researcher. I'm not sure why it was so important to mention that the Batman co-creator's son was gay though, unless that was somehow relevant to the creation process or his life experience or something.
It's important from a narrative standpoint in telling his own story of researching this; the point of these talks is much less about teaching kids the history of the co-creator of Batman than it is telling the story of the researcher and writer who put that history together. The point is to hopefully inspire a few kids to go down a similar path themselves.
It was presumed, since Bill Finger's only child was a gay man who died thirty years ago, that no heir to his estate existed. The researcher discovering that Bill had a granddaughter would lose its impact without the knowledge that his only child was gay.
Finger died in obscurity in 1974, with artist Bob Kane credited as Batman’s only creator. Finger’s only child was a son, Fred Finger, who was gay and died in 1992 at age 43 of AIDS complications. Bill Finger was presumed to have no living heirs, meaning there was no one to press DC Comics to acknowledge Finger’s work.
But Nobleman discovered Fred Finger had a daughter, Athena Finger. That, he said, is a showcase moment of the presentation he estimates he has given 1,000 times at schools.
“It’s the biggest twist of the story, and it’s usually when I get the most gasps,” Nobleman said. “It’s just a totally record-scratch moment.”
Nobleman’s research helped push DC Comics into reaching a deal with Athena Finger in 2015 to acknowledge her grandfather and Kane as co-creators. That led to the documentary “Batman & Bill,” featuring Nobleman.
Yeah it's a vital component of the story, and any pushback reaks of 'dont say gay'.
The same reason famous women inventors and inventors of color are often singled out to us in gradeschool.
Because history was written almost exclusively by (or at least authored by if they had others write it) heterosexual Caucasian men who largely wrote themselves as the victors of every war, inventor of anything they could take credit for, etc.
A child in that biased vacuum might come to the incorrect conclusion that straight Caucasian men are the best and the brightest rather than the truth: that they're merely the writers of their own historical press releases.
Gay people have invented, authored, and created for all of human history, largely under the guise of being straight lest they be shunned and cast out of halls of power.
That's why it's important to demonstrate to children that creation comes from people who look like and have similar identities to themselves. Imagine being a 13 year old realizing you're gay and remembering that civilization was created largely by straight people who largely also chose to make gay people's lives living hells, if they let them live at all.
His son would’ve been his only heir eligible to receive compensation if DC ever made things right, but he died young (from AIDS) and never had any children himself (because he was gay).
Edif: He did have a child! Wow!
Wow!
And this reaction is precisely the reason why the son being gay is a key point of the talk (it's the twist of the story, and Finger's gay son having a daughter who could demand restitution was the only reason DC eventually recognised him as co-creator!), and why removing that fact from the talk wouldn't just be homophobic, but also profoundly stupid (not that being homophobic isn't profoundly stupid already, of course, but this makes it stupidity squared).
Why are straight white people the only people who don't need a plot justification to exist?
Non-straight here: It would be just as weird to mention heterosexual people being straight when it's irrelevant to the conversation, IMO. If you're making a point to mention the person's sexuality, there should be a reason for it.
In this case, it did have that. He was known to be gay, but turned out to have a daughter that no one knew about.
