I Hate Being Wrong

Ladies and Gentlemen, (Via Rhiannon) Mr. Chuck Dixon:

We needed a scene in which Connor undeniably had sex with a female so we could stop the assumptions that Connor was gay.

Let me start off by saying that is the stupidest excuse for having a sex scene I've heard outside a Laurell K. Hamilton plot.

And it serves to kill some of my interest in Connor Hawke.

I didn't read much of Dixon's Green Arrow, just the Green Lantern crossovers, JLA and the relaunch. From them, though, I never got the impression of a homosexual man. Instead I thought he was asexual.

Now, for those of you unfamiliar with the term "asexual" as applied to human beings, let me explain it to you the best I know how. If you've ever been pretty drunk while a remarkably attractive person is kissing you and begging you to spend the night but you turn them down because you don't feel like going to the trouble of undoing a button fly on somewhat tight jeans, the term might just apply to you. If its not shyness that keeps you from approaching the gorgeous person who sent you a drink, but an unwillingness to give up your seat in a crowded and noisy club, the term probably does apply to you. I don't mean anyone who turns down sex in a "it's not my type" or "I'm aroused but repressed by low self-esteem or cultural taboo" way. I mean someone who turns down sex in a "I have better uses for my energy" way.

Its a lot more complicated than that, and there's probably a bunch of people ready to nitpick this definition, but the basic idea is no real interest in sex.

That's not to say there's no interest in romance or attraction, which is where I got my impression of Connor Hawke. He liked women, but really didn't have an active sex drive.

It fit with his whole relaxed archer persona. Like Ollie, pretty much all of his sexual needs were met. Unlike Ollie, he required very little in that department.

Until, of course, I saw these pages.

Instead he's just another repressed, sheltered young man for writers to project their own adolescent sexual insecurities through, or play off cliches and cheap jokes with.

This character is strange. I'm reasonably certain that he was a 90s attempt at racial diversity. I remember one comic that described him as part white, part Asian, and part black. But, they gave him blonde hair and most of the artists draw him like a white man anyway, so nobody knows unless they specifically point it out.

In the meantime, he seemed, to a lot of people, like a chance at sexual diversity. A lot of people read him as gay, and I'm sure I'm not the only one who read him as asexual. They can still make him bisexual if they want (there's really no way to close that door on future writers). But that message board conversation proves that he was created to be a stock heterosexual young man.

And he looks like a stock white man, unless you go out of your way to point it out in the story (and you shouldn't have to).

They could, of course, have let it be subtle and been ambiguous so that individuals could project on him, relate him to themselves or people they've known. But that intense need to establish sexuality early on shut the door on that, and made the DC universe just a little less diverse, and a little less interesting, than it could have been.

In the end, of course, it proves nothing but Dixon's double-standard on censoring homosexual relationship. People experiment, even asexuals, and a single love scene doesn't set things in stone. A later writer could establish him as gay and retcon this out, or explain it away as him doing what he thought he was supposed to do and have a big awakening sexuality storyline.

The only difference now is, as opposed to being irked that he's gay rather than asexual like I'd thought, I'd find myself logging online in sadistic glee to read Dixon's reaction.