dcwomenkickingass:

The other day I wrote about the importance of gender representation on the creator panels at NYCC. Today I’m writing about the importance of representation beyond gender in comics.

We hear so much about superhero comics designed for the straight white males. But the…

This was how I felt about Avengers Academy, Young Avengers, and especially Runaways. I wish I’d had these books as a kid ten years ago.

This was the age of Queer Eye and Will and Grace, where flamboyant gay men were suddenly fashionable. At least I watched anime. Sailor Uranus and Sailor Neptune helped make what I was feeling make a lot more sense and made me feel more normal, but I would have really benefited from seeing a broader representation of LGBTQ folks, especially women.

The prevailing wind from Japan was that lesbians were okay, but one of them had to be more butch while the other was more femme. The translation delay back in those days particularly exacerbated this problem, since by the time shows got to the US they and their social norms were almost half a decade behind. Dated as they were, anime series like Ranma 1/2 and Here Is Greenwood still offered my only appealing alternative to the gender views I had access to in a red state in the early 2000s, the best of which was the moderate Second Wave feminism of the heterosexual career moms around me.

When it came to sorting out anything beyond how I felt about kissing boys, the best I had to go by were the filtered and sanitized echos of a foreign subculture. My own culture pretty determinedly ignored that teenagers could be sexual, much less homosexual. A decade later, I am amazed by what you can put in a comic book — not just Nico and Karoline kissing, but Finesse propositioning Reptil for sex, or heck, Veil and Striker lying in the same bed in their underwear. 

I love it, and it has to continue. For everyone’s sake.