a rainbow at the gates of hell
Okay, first you have to go read Queer Quest: Constantine straightwashing and fan fundamentalism, because that is my lovely wife doing what she does best, and because I'm not going to bother rehashing everything she says there.
Done that? Okay. In light of that awful new TV show, I've run back to read all of Hellblazer, and this time I've kept an eye out for all the queer characters that have appeared. More than that, I've made a list! It's one saturated with spoilers, which is unfortunately unavoidable, but perhaps it will be of interest to ... someone. Somewhere.
Queer Characters in Hellblazer
An exhaustive list, unless I missed something. (Oh, and this is just the main comic; maybe I'll do the specials and sidestories someday. Maybe.)
John Constantine (Smith, Azzarello) - I love John Smith forever because he gets one issue of Hellblazer -- only one, ever -- and he uses it to write into canon that John is bi. That's issue #51, mind you, but it doesn't come into play until Azzarello takes the reins in the 140s. I'll get there in a minute.
Ray Monde (Delano) - One of those stately old homos of England. Ray is an older HIV+ man whom John obviously thinks the world of, and from a couple flashbacks, it's clear they've been friends a while. He's got an admitted crush on John, but nothing ever happened between them, as Ray's monogamous heart ever belongs to his soldier sweetheart, who died in 1982. Ray tries to protect Zed from some awful cultists but winds up getting stabbed to death; he shows up in the occasional dead-guy roll calls, though usually in a friendly way. While I'm not too fond of the automatic gay = AIDS connection, I realize that in 1988, having a wonderful, sympathetic HIV+ gay man in a comic book was a pretty edgy thing. Not only that, but John gets a demon blood transfusion at one point that gets compared to AIDS, so I like that Ray provides context for what it means to live with a chronic infectious illness.
Zed + all her goddess-worship feminist pagan followers (Delano) - Zed's something else -- her powers are connected to art, symbology, and representations, and she hooks up with John pretty quick after meeting him. She's got a whole 'cult wants her to give birth to the messiah' thing going on, but after Ray's death, she gets kidnapped and John kind of leaves her once he figures he's made the world safe for her (or defiled her too much for angels to fuck, take your pick). She reinvents herself as the head of a pagan group on an island, where they live comfortably and have lots of sex with anyone they want to. Hooray for pagan whateversexuality! And if the 'head of a pagan group' thing sounds cheesy, it's important to note she's still a super-powerful magician, so all this earth-hugging and rug-munching actually gets shit done.
Marj (Delano) - A lovely lady who's part of a merry band of hippies. She's an important girlfriend of John's for several issues, but at one point her adolescent daughter Mercury goes missing, and as part of the ordeal of finding her, Marj goes to hook up with Zed's crew and even winds up having semi-ritualistic sex with Zed herself. (I'm sure John wishes he could have been there to see that, but he wasn't.) Their bisexuality is handled really well, I feel: on the one hand, they're not presented as though they're 'really' lesbians, for whom John was a fluke, but now they've turned and will never come back; on the other hand, they're not painted as sexual tourists who are 'really' straight but will make out with girls at a party for guys to see. Nope, they just have sex with whom they like, when they like, and if they can use it to locate missing people, so much the better.
Sam and Jo (Delano) - More of Marj's merry band, who are never outright stated to be a couple but who pretty clearly are. They don't do a whole lot -- short of butching up Sam by saying it's short for 'Samson' -- but they like John a lot and he likes them. The run of lesbians and bisexual women is interesting here, because they present in the context of two places outside the margins of society that allow for with female empowerment: hippies and pagans. The world sucks for gays and sucks for women, so it makes sense that once you get outside of the world's normative social confines, you find both gay women and women willing to take the opportunity to be gay.
Ken and Hal (Delano) - They own the hotel where John stays in this arc; John affectionately calls them a "gruesome twosome", and they're shown waking up in the middle of the night next to one another in bed. They get eaten by the Fear Machine, but before they do, Ken speculates that they've been put into one of the concentration camps for gays he's been hearing rumors of in the gay press, then makes a point of his HIV- status. The point actually is that these guys are afraid, and that their terror is the Fear Machine's fuel. You can read this both as a nod to gay culture hysteria -- obviously, state-sponsored camps are not real, and even if they were, this is so much worse than one of them could ever be -- and as an acknowledgment of the real terrors gay men live with in 1989.
Simon (Delano) - A journalist investigating a bunch of suicides. John finds him hog-tied in the closet with a plastic bag over his head, then has a real 'this isn't what it looks like' when Ken and Hal discover him trying to save Simon from suffocating. (To be absolutely fair, Ken and Hal seem mostly put off by what appear to be incredibly unsafe sexual practices, which, you know, it's a legitimate concern.) But no, someone tried to kill Simon, and he gets on the case with John, who has read and is really impressed by Simon's work. Eventually, Simon too gets eaten by the Fear Machine -- or, well, sacrificed to it to summon a big nasty god. There are five men in that sacrificial group, all of whom die, and three of whom are gay.
Anthea and Sara (Gaiman) - Anthea chats up John at a memorial party for Ray, gets him back to her place, and awkwardly tries to seduce him because she and her never-pictured partner, Sara, want a baby. John refuses and gets upset, but after some various goings-on that include exorcising the ghost of a homeless man by hugging it, she and John end the issue hugging one another similarly. It's a little awkward, but John's reasons for taking offense are pretty reasonable, and I like that her being a partnered lesbian is a turn-off, not -on. (Keep this in mind for later.)
The King of the Vampires + various followers (Ennis) - The King is the biggest poncy douche ever, but that's the joke; he offers John vampiric immortality and John is like, you are a gigantic tool, go away. He comes back, though, largely to fuck with John, and at one point is running around with two lovers, Darius and Mary, who engage in full-panel bloody threesome makeouts. Mary likes the guy, obviously, but Darius is really in love, and when John kills the King, Darius is last seen heading up to the sunlight. (Apparently he doesn't off himself but becomes the next King of the Vampires? Lame! But that happens in Hitman, which I am not reading, so I can pretend it doesn't happen.) Anyway, considering all the gothy queerbaiting Anne Rice what-not in vogue in 1993, which this issue ran, it's nice to see vampires actually go, yep, we're fuckin'.
Davy (Ennis) - Admittedly, it isn't clear if Davy identifies as gay, but he is a rentboy who offers John sex at a time when John obviously does not have the money to pay for it (John politely refuses); as they are both homeless at the time and it's cold out, they sleep leaning on one another. It's revealed that Davy has contracted HIV through selling himself for rough sex, and when the King of Vampires kills him to make John upset, John is indeed upset! This is another case where I'm not bothered by the gay = AIDS connection, because not only is blood a major component of this storyline (see: vampires), but it's presented to John as though it should freak him out, and it doesn't.
Carol and Sylvia (Ennis II) - John's downstairs lesbian neigbors. Carol is friendly to John, and then she and Sylvia have a fight because Sylvia wants to be an activist and Carol doesn't want to get into all that icky political stuff about gay rights and hairy legs and feminist poetry. And then Carol and John have sex, during which John considers awarding himself some sort of prize for sleeping with a lesbian; of course, when they're still in bed afterward, Sylvia shows up again and blackens John's eye. Or maybe Carol punches him? It happens offscreen. I hope they both punch him. ...You must realize, too, this little side plot has nothing to do with anything else going on in this horrid little arc. Literally nothing. You could have taken it all out and not even noticed. (Mike Carey also makes a very snide reference to this incident in his last issue, and good for him for doing so.)
Norman Cooper (Ennis II) - He's a horrible, evil mob boss' horrible, evil brother, and he literally gets raped to death by a fuckpig demon with a three-foot cock who calls him a sodomite and says this is Hell's specific punishment for sodomites, as decreed by God, and Jesus wept, Ennis, what the hell happened to you in the fifty-odd issues you were away? Or are you just trying to be as recreationally offensive as possible?
The prisoners (Azzarello) - Okay, so: There is a lot of fairly gross prison gay in the 'Hard Time' arc, and a fair bit of awful prison rape to boot. So let it stand as a blanket observation that there are a lot of men having sex with men in these issues, some of whom (seem to) identify as gay, some of whom (loudly) identify as straight, and most of whom remain unlabeled. Nearly all of them want John's ass, though motives range from a power play to the fact that John's ass is such a pretty one.
The old homeless dude (Azzarello) - Dude: "Say there, fancypants. You some kind of faggot?" John: "No. Why you ask?" Dude: "'Cause I am." That is the extent of their interaction, and is John's welcome to Doglick, West Virginia. I'm still chewing over what it means.
S.W. Manor (Azzarello) - John's one boyfriend. A pretty straight-up evil dude; also the first openly gay man who really manages to be gay in a not-poncy-British way. He is a sexy shirtless buff guy into awful pain and power sex stuff, and suffice it to say he's bad news all over everything. He falls for John when they're both young and stupid, during which time John pulls a fast one on S.W.; when they meet up again, it's because S.W. has decided to spring a very elaborate trap for John. They're lovers who get depicted in some pretty sexy panels, but even though S.W. is referred to as John's boyfriend at one point, their relationship is part of John's long, destructive con. Now: Am I annoyed that John's one boyfriend is a sham relationship designed to trap a very bad man? Yes. Am I extra-annoyed because all his girlfriends have been basically blameless angels who just get fucked over by circumstances? Yes. Is this an amazing storyline? Hell yes. I just wish it weren't the sole evidence of John's bisexuality -- and evidence easy enough to dismiss, considering how it's all part and parcel of revenge. But I love to hate S.W. so much that I can't even be too mad.
No, wait, S.W. needs another paragraph. He exists in the midst of a long storyline about a bunch of awful people: guys in the prison, dirty cops, carjackers, rednecks making bestiality porn, bank robbers, rapists, serial killers, white supremacists. So in the context of Azzarello's run, I can't read his being gay and evil as offensive, since holy shit, everyone is basically awful. It's not a novel concept that gay people can be just as awful as anyone else. The sadness is that this is the only clear, indisputable representation of John's sexual interest in men -- but I can't hold Azzarello responsible for that, since he picked a story and stuck to it. What's a shame is that no one before or after saw fit to include a positive gay relationship for John. What's even worse is how the end of the comic and the New 52 both straightwash John so bad that it makes his relationship with S.W. look even faker and more awful, as though having a boyfriend were only something he could do while in the midst of a con.
It is also super-duper worth noting that the Hellblazer wiki has a Category:Lovers page, to which S.W.'s own entry does not belong. There are no other men listed there. If you ever wonder how someone can declare John's bisexuality gratuitous, look no further than fandom itself.
...Shit, I didn't even realize until this time through, S.W. is a gay masochist Bruce Wayne. That's awesome.
The sex club members (Azzarello) - A whole variety of folk who belong to the S&M sex club, few named, mostly seen during police interviews. While they are played pretty fetish-y, they have all just been dragged from a night at a a sex-club-turned-crime-scene into a police station. (I'm also pretty sure that this bunch includes the only trans* character who's showed up? Unless I really missed something along the way. Also hilarious: how the wiki assumes she's a woman who has some magical implant just above her vagina.)
Scrape Gillis (Carey) - A dealer in antiques and other magical objects who gets killed by a handsome Russian boy he picked up in a bar -- or, uh, the monsters behind what said boy was selling. In fact, getting killed is pretty much the first thing that happens to him; everything else happens either in flashback or to his poor ghost. So he's a very important character to getting this arc going, just also a dead one.
And then ... pretty much nothing. Carey has the reins for 40-odd issues, and Scrape, the only clearly gay character, shows up almost first thing in his run. Mina has some references to real-life gay historical figures, and there's a man in Diggle's run with a cage full of phantom sex slaves that, for one panel, includes characters who are not young hourglass-shaped ladies. Issue 250 has a character John refers to as a 'ponce', but he's just a prissy museum curator, and there's nothing specific said about his sexuality. So that's about it.
Okay, that's the list! Now, if you're dying to hear more of my super-duper-rambly chewing over these things in particular and geek culture at large, I've got a whole 'nother LJ-cut, just for you.
John Constantine started life as a blue-collar magician, a contrast to DC's other characters like Dr. Strange and Zatanna, the ones who were well-heeled magician royalty. More than once, he looks down on the idea of these people who use magic as casually as if they're turning on a tap. He's from an impressive magical pedigree, it's true, but he had to learn how to do it on his own. When he says that the true secret of magic is that "any cunt can do it", he's his own evidence.
So when he started, placing him on the margins was key, and one of the ways to do that was to put him with the homos. Put him in a boarding house run by a gay couple -- one where it's implied that most, if not all, of the other lodgers are gay and closeted -- and you imply that's because the respectable establishments won't have him. Send him out to live with a hippie commune where a lesbian couple is an unremarkable sight, and you make clear just how far to the margins he has to go to find a place that accepts him. For all of Delano's run, queers are pretty unquestionably Good Guys; when they sometimes die, it's because they get munched up by the plot like everyone else, not that they die for special gay reasons. Also, while it could have been terribly offensive to give John "AIDS" by infecting him with demon blood, having an actual, positively portrayed HIV+ character for immediate contrast makes it seem like a comparison instead of a condemnation.
That makes John's bisexuality another outsider marker. You know that guy's a real rake if he cares so little about social conventions that he can indulge his desires for men when they occur. His only having "the odd boyfriend" lets you know he's not a closeted gay man, but a man who is mostly attracted to women but also has some sexual feelings for men (perhaps just like you, dear comic-reader!) and is both powerful and confident enough to go for it. On top of that, calling them 'boyfriends' lets you know he's not just occasionally bringing a guy home and kicking him out the next morning, but that there's an emotional component involved, not matter how brief or how disastrously it ends for the other participant. This is a magus who doesn't play by the rules, including sexual ones.
The way all the male gay is just implied means you get the roguish quality without actually having to see homos smooch. The one time John ends up in bed with a naked-ish man (as he cuts poor Simon free of his bonds), it becomes a this-isn't-what-it-looks-like scene almost instantly. The actual gay men are generally the toothless, adorable kind England seems fond of, and John's affection for them doesn't translate to interest. Still, Delano's run presents homophobia and AIDS discrimination as bad things, and I can see how this might appeal to an already-marginalized demographic (comic nerds c. 1988) that would react negatively to depictions of bullying, even if those people getting bullied are queers.
There is, of course, something else to be said here about the differences between gay men and lesbians in Delano's run, and part of that seems to be how gay men are devotedly gay, but gay women are probably bisexual. It's not even just a 'gay for John' thing; honestly, it seems to be more of a 'generally straight but gay for magic' alignment. Then again, few of the lesbians occur outside of a specifically pagan/magical context, so it's hard to tell. (Sam and Jo are the exceptions, and they're such minor characters that it's hard to extrapolate much.) Lesbian sex gets to be sexy and topless, of course -- at least, when performed by sexy bi ladies, the most notable of whom had already had sex with John anyway. The monogamous lesbians are presented neither as desirable nor as especially undesirable, though, which is nice. So while there's obviously plenty there for eye candy, there's also an acknowledgment that some lesbians are just livin' their lives and aren't there for your gaze, which, for geek culture, seems an uncommon acknowledgment. However, I don't think it's that strange, considering that there are lot of women of various ages, races, social arrangements, and body types represented throughout Hellblazer. Not all women are objects of desire, and some of those women are lesbians. Big deal ... so long as they're not boning down. But who wants to see ugly women get it on, am I right?
By the time Ennis shows up (for the first time, anyway), it's May 1991; the vampire storyline starts just two years before Interview With the Vampire, in fact, if that helps contextualize the King of Vampires any. Darius' affection for the King seems sweet, but they were just straight-up murdering a dude together in the same issue, so however cute it is, it's tempered by their being blood-drinking monsters. With them, the gay is presented as part of the decadence -- the King gets to show off how much power he has by having all kinds of beautiful people attend ostentatiously to him. It's similar to how John's bisexuality marks him as above the rules, only now it's definitely part of being the sexy bad guys we love the hero to destroy.
In the character of Davy, gay is still presented as being non-normative, only now in a way that'll get you killed. Look at the difference between the series' two prominent HIV+ characters: Ray contracted AIDS while in a monogamous (but apparently open in an unspecified manner) relationship with his one true love, while Davy gets it from having sex he doesn't really like for money. Davy's death is from a vampire, not AIDS, but he's not allowed to succumb to the former without a mention of how the latter would have killed him eventually.
This is a little more in line with pulp-novel types of gay representation: dangerous libertine men, the less-dangerous libertine men who love them, tragic hookers with hearts of gold. Unlike the previous gay Hellblazer characters, though, these guys are supposed to make you think of sex. The King looks like James Dean (a resemblance made unfortunately difficult by Steve Dillon's terminal sameface syndrome), and when you see him lounging all seductive-like and promising John immortal life, yeah, there's that attraction/repulsion thing going on. The repulsion, however, is key, because it lets you NO HOMO safely off into the sunset. Even though Ennis keeps writing until November '94, the King of the Vampires bites it (ha ha) in September '93.
There's a forty-issue break between Ennis' contributions (filled by Paul Jenkins, whose run is also no homo), and when Ennis returns in September '98, the gays are much more sinister. The evil mob dude whose sexuality is completely irrelevant to the plot, for instance, is identified as gay (a 'shirtlifter', and I had to look that one up) not because he's depicted doing anything with or feeling anything about other men, but because a) a whore under his auspices outs him, and b) the demon fucks him to death for it while declaring it God's just punishment.
The lesbians in Ennis' second run are just as awful. Both are sexy, but one's all political and butch, while the other's femme and milquetoast about the whole lesbian identity and willing to sleep with a dude. The butch one shows up again and (presumably and comically) beats up John in the stereotypical man-discovers-cheating-wife way, proving that she's the man of the relationship. And John gets to pat himself on the back because he's a manly and irresistible enough man that he can bag a lesbian! One who isn't a dedicated, ideological dyke, of course. While this could have been an interesting dilemma, the fact that they really just exist to give John special lesbian-curing-penis cred makes me want to set the whole arc on fire.
I didn't mention the awful mpreg earlier, because I don't consider that queer so much as vile, but there you go. It's not a case of a dude with a vagina either -- I'll skip the disgusting details, but suffice it to say that it was horrible and non-consensual. It's also intended to be a blasphemous, parodic inversion of the virgin birth, so take that as you will.
The shift between the two is so ridiculous, you'd think two different people wrote it. If you've read Ennis' other stuff, though, you know he's not a homophobe; I give him much love for his Authority sidestory stuff, because he is a man who can write a character telling a gay joke in a way that both condems the character for it and owns up to how it was a pretty funny joke. So what the hell happened?
I'm willing to bet a large component to that answer is Preacher, which ran 1995-2000. I'll spare you my thoughts on Preacher itself, but suffice it to say that Ennis was a nobody in American comics when he started Hellblazer. When he returned, it was after having started a popular series with content so regularly vulgar and viscerally disgusting that he'd set a reputation for himself. Thus, his return has the feel of someone who's gone off the dudebro EXXXTREEEME rails because, well, that's kind of what's happened.
I do want to note too, though, that in that four-year gap, gay visibility spiked in fiction ... for the ladies. Fangirls wanted the pretty boys to kiss, and moreover were willing to write lots of exciting fanfic about it. Sexy Vampire Wave Mark One was sweeping the nation and making the ladies swoon. (Mark Two would have to wait for Twilight.) The internet made it even easier for girls to take all the things you love and imagine the men in them kissing one another.
Hellblazer has never been for the ladies, but at the start, it wasn't not for the ladies. It was just for comic readers, and comic readers were boys, so QED, its shooting for the default audience meant it wound up pitching toward a male audience. But a growing awareness of geek girls in fandom meant that gender lines started to be drawn even more clearly than they had in the past. Doing things like making the King of the Vampires desirable might give the impression that this was a comic for stinky girls, and we wouldn't want that, because the second that happens, boys are forbidden by the Gender Police to touch it. Does reassuring readers that God wants gays' souls punish-fucked forever make them feel better about themselves? What about claiming that one out of two lesbians are really women who secretly want dick? I'd say these are important questions, except I don't actually want to know the answers.
Which brings things to Azzarello's run, which starts in March 2000, and honestly, I still don't quite know what to make of it. I love his thirty-issue storyline, even if I had to read it a couple times through to pick out just what all was happening. It's tight and well-plotted and intense. It takes on some awful parts of American culture and just rolls around in the filth. While I can see why some people hate the tonal shift from the rest of the comic, I love it. Azzarello tosses you into the middle of the story, and you either keep up with him or you get left behind.
It also is that favorite of all words: problematic. I don't want to rehash everything I said above, but I'm keeping it in mind as I go forward.
The storyline ostensibly deals with marginalized sex and sexuality with the expected cultural scorn (ha ha, prison rape; tee hee, bi guy likes to get peed on; lol, that chick has a dick), but turns those knee-jerk reactions on their heads by both encouraging compassion for those who deserve it and presenting some equally awful straight people next to those who don't. This is also a story about extreme people in extreme situations, too, so it's not like it's setting up a universalizing Good Heterosexuals vs. the Bad Gays. It's very clear who the 'normal' people are in Azzarello's run, and they're confused and frightened and totally out of place.
I also don't think it's particularly notable that all the gay here is male, as it's such a male storyline; women are involved and important in places, but the plot-guiding transactions happen between men. If I had to venture a guess, I'd say it's because this storyline isn't so much about sex as it is about power and privilege. Rape in the prison is explicitly about either showing power or allowing one's self to be dominated in exchange for protection. (For context, Oz ran from 1997 to 2003.) The impoverished Appalachian townsfolk make humiliating porn videos and sell them on the internet because that's their only means of economic survival. The man in the snowbound bar got his Filipino wife from a catalogue, then regrets having done this to her when it looks like she's about to be raped by bad guys. John picks up a lady hooker and takes her to bingo night with him, where he proceeds to taunt the church ladies by pointing out that their disapproval masks jealousy. The BDSM club is a business, and when it becomes a murder scene, it's the nobodies and the employees who wind up in the police station, not the celebrity clients. The two cops who investigate said murder conduct themselves unethically both legally and in terms of improper interpersonal flirtation.
And then there's S.W., who a monster, pure and simple -- but with a couple of interesting twists. First, it's almost refreshing to see someone so openly sexual who isn't using that sexuality to predator on a bunch of helpless ladies, and while it's a low bar, it's still worth notice. Second, the fact that he's stinking rich means that his crimes of economic and personal exploitation are presented as being on par with his coercive sexual acts; for instance, he doesn't molest kids, but he does feed them to vampire bats, and you can decide for yourself if that's worse. And third, the fact that he's a dedicated hardcore masochist who wants his dead parents' approval makes complicated his presentation of power elsewhere.
Sidebar: It's hard to say whether or not this run does a good portrayal of BDSM and its subculture. More accurately, I think, it presents BDSM done unsafely, then calls it out as having been done unsafely. S.W. doesn't like to get flogged for fun, he likes to get flayed bloody. The sex club is a place of empty, violent hedonism, to the point of employee contempt for the patrons. Nobody here seems to be providing proper emotional before- or aftercare -- except, well, John.
In light of all that, it actually makes perfect sense that John himself winds up honey-trapping S.W. From Azzarello's first issue, which literally starts with coercive sex in prison, sex and power are identified as the twinned currency of the story. Presumably John could have found some other, gayer man to do the job, in the way he often uses his female associates as sexy bait for one straight dude or another, but John is not a man to give up that much access -- and besides, this is delicate work. His best move is to get involved in that sexual subculture, make S.W. fall in love with him, convince S.W. that said affection is mutual, tie him up, and feed him to the ghosts. It's brutal, but S.W. was willing to kill one of John's friends and send John to prison for the rest of his life, so it's not without precedent.
Am I miffy that this is the only time in the whole comic John gets his gay on? Absolutely. But that's a larger structural criticism. In terms of this particular storyline, it's a brilliant move, and I give it two thumbs up.
Hellblazer fans don't like Azzarello's run. There are plenty of reasons to dislike it, sure, but the wiki entries for these issues have a notable discomfort to the sexual content that I don't think should be ignored. Even if you can explain away any gay desire on John's part by claiming that he's just playing the long con, there are still plenty of sexy, sexy panels that make it clear he and S.W. were boning. More than that, even: "I came in his hand. He wiped it on my face." I mean ... damn.
Cultural attitudes toward The Gay have changed dramatically over the last ~15 years, to the point of much more positive cultural presence. Scrape Gillis is the last clearly gay character in Hellblazer. These two things are not unrelated.
I'm never mad when an author individually chooses to tell a particular story that has no obviously gay characters in it. I know that Warren Ellis is a good dude who loves gay folk, and his (brilliant) ten-issue run has no identifiably gay characters in it. That's okay! Same with Denise Mina's thirteen issues, which introduce very few new characters and maintain John's lady love interest from the prior storylines. Sure! This is even more understandable with writers like Mina, who keep the cast list small.
It's like the Bechdel Test, though, in that what I'm doing here is not condemning individual issues/stories/authors/whatever, but pointing out the shape of larger trends. Looking at it in context like that is kind of stunning: It's not just that the prevalence of queer characters goes from a some to a few, it goes from tons to none.
Scrape was introduced and killed in issue 177 (December '02). The series ended at issue 300 (January '13). That's a long, straight stretch, especially when you put it up against the glut of definitively queer characters in the first five years. Their ranks don't just thin, they drop to zero. Even the hints are barely hints. But how can this be, you ask? Mike Carey, for instance, loves homos! Well, yes, judging from his other work, he seems to. But I think even Mike Carey's good intentions couldn't overcome the twin forces of backlash from Azzarello's run and the growing sense of besieged entitlement in established comic culture.
I can't help seeing in that long gap the awful straight white male cultural gatekeeping of geek culture, especially in terms of larger marketability of the title. Society's increased okayness with gayness means that gay characters become over time marked less culturally and more politically. Declaring John bisexual in 2012 instead of 1992 would have been read as a move to 'shoehorn' in diversity or appease some imaginary bloodthirsty liberal representation cabal. So if you don't have to worry about petty garbage like representation, you get to concentrate on the things that matter. Like ... straight white men and their amazing straightness.
I cannot properly express how bad the last fifty issues of Hellblazer are; it would take another 7000 words to crack the surface of its badness. The incredibly short version is that all women are irresistably interested in John all the time and wrap their entire lives and identities around him and fall apart when he stops paying exclusive attention to them (or, worse, marries a manic pixie dream girl a third his age). I swear there are more tits-out sex scenes in the last thirty issues than in the preceding 270. It's gross, but it's indicative of the kind of macho-man fanboy mentality that has devolved into shit like GamerGate. It also couldn't be more different from the way the early issues present shit-kicked, marginalized John the Loser as a face often only a homo could love.
Instead, what you get with Milligan are lots of kind-of hints but zero substance. There's a male-identified (maybe?) Babylonian demon who is currently appearing as a creepy schoolgirl, and who gets magicked into being in love with John briefly. Shade the Changing Man demands John kiss him for a vague reason related to replicating a scene with one of John's dead girlfriends, and anyway, Shade's an alien obsessed with that dead girl and from some other series, says the wiki, which explains why he feels completely out of place. At one point Gemma (John's niece) kisses Epiphany (John's -- ugh -- wife), but just to startle her (and John clarifies later that Gemma's "not into girls like that"). A character named Georgie says she's given up on men, but not to any identifiable alternative, and as part of what seems like a temper tantrum. John calls the First of the Fallen homoerotic-looking, bait to which the First does not rise. There's a quick mention of how most demons are asexual, something not borne up by the rest of the series, but all right. ...And okay, I will admit that I may have missed someone else in Milligan's run, but a) I doubt it, and b)those last fifty issues are so stomach-churningly horrible, you'll forgive me if I skimmed rather than re-read them.
That's the kind of half-assed shit people pull when they're trying not to look like total troglodytes but don't want to deal with the actual icky awful rainbow mess. Everything there is gay enough for plausible deniability against charges of homophobia while still being ha-ha-just-kidding enough that it can all be straightwashed away without much effort.
Straight white men will not pay attention to anything that isn't all about straight white men. At least, that's what I've been led to believe, considering the holy hell that rises whenever anyone suggests lately that diversity in media is good. No, we get told, it's a plot from the political correctness police. Why do we have to keep pandering to special interests and minorities? Why can't we all just agree to focus on the pale males that everyone can identify with?
Thus, if I can bring it back to the TV show, of course John's bisexuality is gratuitous. It's gone from being a marker of his roguish outsider status to being a biohazard warning that would scare off all the straight men in a fifty-mile radius. Maybe at some point I'll unload with both barrels about the white-hat-washing that the show's been giving John, making all his bastard choices into noble, justified ones. Suffice it to say for now that if you're going to make him a superhero instead of an antihero, he can only color outside certain pre-approved lines. Smoking means he's a rugged man's man who doesn't pay attention to those pansy-ass death warnings on the cartons! His unkempt appearance means he's too cool for sissy things like fashion or looking presentable! Bisexuality means his show should be airing on LOGO instead, because a character like that could only appeal to gays and women, not real people.
And marketability is a whole big issue, one that shouldn't be underestimated. For reference, here's how the comic thinks of and markets itself: Issue 195, dated June '04, is when the title of the comic as presented on the covers goes from being 'Hellblazer' to 'John Constantine: Hellblazer', though his name is in a tinier, simpler font; starting in issue 200 (November '04), both his name (no colon) and the title are in the same font, with the size of his name increased so as to be unmissable, and little TMs after both. It stays that way until Issue 256 (August '09), when the 'John Constantine' part goes to a smaller, thinner font, which is how it remains to the end of the comic. Constantine, that ridiculous movie, came out in February 2005. For a while there, the comic was a movie tie-in as much as anything.
There are many great things about comics' becoming more than a niche market! There are also some shitty things, and one of those is how it's fed a sense of geek entitlement. There's no ComicsGate equivalent to GamerGate in part because the industry profits aren't even comparable, but they get made into the more profitable TV series and movies, which absolutely can't chance giving the impression that they're for the 'wrong' audience. Thus, creators of the live-action adaptations get applauded for their dedication to minutiae in the source material while being allowed to use that same perceived dedication as a justification for not addressing larger issues or contexts or fanbases -- and without regard to how awareness of potential future adaptations might change the content of the source material itself.
All things considered, I can't get too bothered about the show's leaving John straight. I mean, it was obvious from the start that it was going to be a terrible piece of television. I'm glad that they don't have that to blame it on.
...I guess I don't have a very good conclusion here, so let's go for a tl;dr: Hellblazer! It's better than you'd expect about the gays, right up into it becomes worse than you'd expect about the gays! Azzarello's run is great in isolation and troubling in the context of the larger series! If you decide to read it, here's your field guide to locating the queers! Whatever you do, don't go past issue 250!
The Aristocrats!
Done that? Okay. In light of that awful new TV show, I've run back to read all of Hellblazer, and this time I've kept an eye out for all the queer characters that have appeared. More than that, I've made a list! It's one saturated with spoilers, which is unfortunately unavoidable, but perhaps it will be of interest to ... someone. Somewhere.
Queer Characters in Hellblazer
An exhaustive list, unless I missed something. (Oh, and this is just the main comic; maybe I'll do the specials and sidestories someday. Maybe.)
John Constantine (Smith, Azzarello) - I love John Smith forever because he gets one issue of Hellblazer -- only one, ever -- and he uses it to write into canon that John is bi. That's issue #51, mind you, but it doesn't come into play until Azzarello takes the reins in the 140s. I'll get there in a minute.
Ray Monde (Delano) - One of those stately old homos of England. Ray is an older HIV+ man whom John obviously thinks the world of, and from a couple flashbacks, it's clear they've been friends a while. He's got an admitted crush on John, but nothing ever happened between them, as Ray's monogamous heart ever belongs to his soldier sweetheart, who died in 1982. Ray tries to protect Zed from some awful cultists but winds up getting stabbed to death; he shows up in the occasional dead-guy roll calls, though usually in a friendly way. While I'm not too fond of the automatic gay = AIDS connection, I realize that in 1988, having a wonderful, sympathetic HIV+ gay man in a comic book was a pretty edgy thing. Not only that, but John gets a demon blood transfusion at one point that gets compared to AIDS, so I like that Ray provides context for what it means to live with a chronic infectious illness.
Zed + all her goddess-worship feminist pagan followers (Delano) - Zed's something else -- her powers are connected to art, symbology, and representations, and she hooks up with John pretty quick after meeting him. She's got a whole 'cult wants her to give birth to the messiah' thing going on, but after Ray's death, she gets kidnapped and John kind of leaves her once he figures he's made the world safe for her (or defiled her too much for angels to fuck, take your pick). She reinvents herself as the head of a pagan group on an island, where they live comfortably and have lots of sex with anyone they want to. Hooray for pagan whateversexuality! And if the 'head of a pagan group' thing sounds cheesy, it's important to note she's still a super-powerful magician, so all this earth-hugging and rug-munching actually gets shit done.
Marj (Delano) - A lovely lady who's part of a merry band of hippies. She's an important girlfriend of John's for several issues, but at one point her adolescent daughter Mercury goes missing, and as part of the ordeal of finding her, Marj goes to hook up with Zed's crew and even winds up having semi-ritualistic sex with Zed herself. (I'm sure John wishes he could have been there to see that, but he wasn't.) Their bisexuality is handled really well, I feel: on the one hand, they're not presented as though they're 'really' lesbians, for whom John was a fluke, but now they've turned and will never come back; on the other hand, they're not painted as sexual tourists who are 'really' straight but will make out with girls at a party for guys to see. Nope, they just have sex with whom they like, when they like, and if they can use it to locate missing people, so much the better.
Sam and Jo (Delano) - More of Marj's merry band, who are never outright stated to be a couple but who pretty clearly are. They don't do a whole lot -- short of butching up Sam by saying it's short for 'Samson' -- but they like John a lot and he likes them. The run of lesbians and bisexual women is interesting here, because they present in the context of two places outside the margins of society that allow for with female empowerment: hippies and pagans. The world sucks for gays and sucks for women, so it makes sense that once you get outside of the world's normative social confines, you find both gay women and women willing to take the opportunity to be gay.
Ken and Hal (Delano) - They own the hotel where John stays in this arc; John affectionately calls them a "gruesome twosome", and they're shown waking up in the middle of the night next to one another in bed. They get eaten by the Fear Machine, but before they do, Ken speculates that they've been put into one of the concentration camps for gays he's been hearing rumors of in the gay press, then makes a point of his HIV- status. The point actually is that these guys are afraid, and that their terror is the Fear Machine's fuel. You can read this both as a nod to gay culture hysteria -- obviously, state-sponsored camps are not real, and even if they were, this is so much worse than one of them could ever be -- and as an acknowledgment of the real terrors gay men live with in 1989.
Simon (Delano) - A journalist investigating a bunch of suicides. John finds him hog-tied in the closet with a plastic bag over his head, then has a real 'this isn't what it looks like' when Ken and Hal discover him trying to save Simon from suffocating. (To be absolutely fair, Ken and Hal seem mostly put off by what appear to be incredibly unsafe sexual practices, which, you know, it's a legitimate concern.) But no, someone tried to kill Simon, and he gets on the case with John, who has read and is really impressed by Simon's work. Eventually, Simon too gets eaten by the Fear Machine -- or, well, sacrificed to it to summon a big nasty god. There are five men in that sacrificial group, all of whom die, and three of whom are gay.
Anthea and Sara (Gaiman) - Anthea chats up John at a memorial party for Ray, gets him back to her place, and awkwardly tries to seduce him because she and her never-pictured partner, Sara, want a baby. John refuses and gets upset, but after some various goings-on that include exorcising the ghost of a homeless man by hugging it, she and John end the issue hugging one another similarly. It's a little awkward, but John's reasons for taking offense are pretty reasonable, and I like that her being a partnered lesbian is a turn-off, not -on. (Keep this in mind for later.)
The King of the Vampires + various followers (Ennis) - The King is the biggest poncy douche ever, but that's the joke; he offers John vampiric immortality and John is like, you are a gigantic tool, go away. He comes back, though, largely to fuck with John, and at one point is running around with two lovers, Darius and Mary, who engage in full-panel bloody threesome makeouts. Mary likes the guy, obviously, but Darius is really in love, and when John kills the King, Darius is last seen heading up to the sunlight. (Apparently he doesn't off himself but becomes the next King of the Vampires? Lame! But that happens in Hitman, which I am not reading, so I can pretend it doesn't happen.) Anyway, considering all the gothy queerbaiting Anne Rice what-not in vogue in 1993, which this issue ran, it's nice to see vampires actually go, yep, we're fuckin'.
Davy (Ennis) - Admittedly, it isn't clear if Davy identifies as gay, but he is a rentboy who offers John sex at a time when John obviously does not have the money to pay for it (John politely refuses); as they are both homeless at the time and it's cold out, they sleep leaning on one another. It's revealed that Davy has contracted HIV through selling himself for rough sex, and when the King of Vampires kills him to make John upset, John is indeed upset! This is another case where I'm not bothered by the gay = AIDS connection, because not only is blood a major component of this storyline (see: vampires), but it's presented to John as though it should freak him out, and it doesn't.
Carol and Sylvia (Ennis II) - John's downstairs lesbian neigbors. Carol is friendly to John, and then she and Sylvia have a fight because Sylvia wants to be an activist and Carol doesn't want to get into all that icky political stuff about gay rights and hairy legs and feminist poetry. And then Carol and John have sex, during which John considers awarding himself some sort of prize for sleeping with a lesbian; of course, when they're still in bed afterward, Sylvia shows up again and blackens John's eye. Or maybe Carol punches him? It happens offscreen. I hope they both punch him. ...You must realize, too, this little side plot has nothing to do with anything else going on in this horrid little arc. Literally nothing. You could have taken it all out and not even noticed. (Mike Carey also makes a very snide reference to this incident in his last issue, and good for him for doing so.)
Norman Cooper (Ennis II) - He's a horrible, evil mob boss' horrible, evil brother, and he literally gets raped to death by a fuckpig demon with a three-foot cock who calls him a sodomite and says this is Hell's specific punishment for sodomites, as decreed by God, and Jesus wept, Ennis, what the hell happened to you in the fifty-odd issues you were away? Or are you just trying to be as recreationally offensive as possible?
The prisoners (Azzarello) - Okay, so: There is a lot of fairly gross prison gay in the 'Hard Time' arc, and a fair bit of awful prison rape to boot. So let it stand as a blanket observation that there are a lot of men having sex with men in these issues, some of whom (seem to) identify as gay, some of whom (loudly) identify as straight, and most of whom remain unlabeled. Nearly all of them want John's ass, though motives range from a power play to the fact that John's ass is such a pretty one.
The old homeless dude (Azzarello) - Dude: "Say there, fancypants. You some kind of faggot?" John: "No. Why you ask?" Dude: "'Cause I am." That is the extent of their interaction, and is John's welcome to Doglick, West Virginia. I'm still chewing over what it means.
S.W. Manor (Azzarello) - John's one boyfriend. A pretty straight-up evil dude; also the first openly gay man who really manages to be gay in a not-poncy-British way. He is a sexy shirtless buff guy into awful pain and power sex stuff, and suffice it to say he's bad news all over everything. He falls for John when they're both young and stupid, during which time John pulls a fast one on S.W.; when they meet up again, it's because S.W. has decided to spring a very elaborate trap for John. They're lovers who get depicted in some pretty sexy panels, but even though S.W. is referred to as John's boyfriend at one point, their relationship is part of John's long, destructive con. Now: Am I annoyed that John's one boyfriend is a sham relationship designed to trap a very bad man? Yes. Am I extra-annoyed because all his girlfriends have been basically blameless angels who just get fucked over by circumstances? Yes. Is this an amazing storyline? Hell yes. I just wish it weren't the sole evidence of John's bisexuality -- and evidence easy enough to dismiss, considering how it's all part and parcel of revenge. But I love to hate S.W. so much that I can't even be too mad.
No, wait, S.W. needs another paragraph. He exists in the midst of a long storyline about a bunch of awful people: guys in the prison, dirty cops, carjackers, rednecks making bestiality porn, bank robbers, rapists, serial killers, white supremacists. So in the context of Azzarello's run, I can't read his being gay and evil as offensive, since holy shit, everyone is basically awful. It's not a novel concept that gay people can be just as awful as anyone else. The sadness is that this is the only clear, indisputable representation of John's sexual interest in men -- but I can't hold Azzarello responsible for that, since he picked a story and stuck to it. What's a shame is that no one before or after saw fit to include a positive gay relationship for John. What's even worse is how the end of the comic and the New 52 both straightwash John so bad that it makes his relationship with S.W. look even faker and more awful, as though having a boyfriend were only something he could do while in the midst of a con.
It is also super-duper worth noting that the Hellblazer wiki has a Category:Lovers page, to which S.W.'s own entry does not belong. There are no other men listed there. If you ever wonder how someone can declare John's bisexuality gratuitous, look no further than fandom itself.
...Shit, I didn't even realize until this time through, S.W. is a gay masochist Bruce Wayne. That's awesome.
The sex club members (Azzarello) - A whole variety of folk who belong to the S&M sex club, few named, mostly seen during police interviews. While they are played pretty fetish-y, they have all just been dragged from a night at a a sex-club-turned-crime-scene into a police station. (I'm also pretty sure that this bunch includes the only trans* character who's showed up? Unless I really missed something along the way. Also hilarious: how the wiki assumes she's a woman who has some magical implant just above her vagina.)
Scrape Gillis (Carey) - A dealer in antiques and other magical objects who gets killed by a handsome Russian boy he picked up in a bar -- or, uh, the monsters behind what said boy was selling. In fact, getting killed is pretty much the first thing that happens to him; everything else happens either in flashback or to his poor ghost. So he's a very important character to getting this arc going, just also a dead one.
And then ... pretty much nothing. Carey has the reins for 40-odd issues, and Scrape, the only clearly gay character, shows up almost first thing in his run. Mina has some references to real-life gay historical figures, and there's a man in Diggle's run with a cage full of phantom sex slaves that, for one panel, includes characters who are not young hourglass-shaped ladies. Issue 250 has a character John refers to as a 'ponce', but he's just a prissy museum curator, and there's nothing specific said about his sexuality. So that's about it.
Okay, that's the list! Now, if you're dying to hear more of my super-duper-rambly chewing over these things in particular and geek culture at large, I've got a whole 'nother LJ-cut, just for you.
John Constantine started life as a blue-collar magician, a contrast to DC's other characters like Dr. Strange and Zatanna, the ones who were well-heeled magician royalty. More than once, he looks down on the idea of these people who use magic as casually as if they're turning on a tap. He's from an impressive magical pedigree, it's true, but he had to learn how to do it on his own. When he says that the true secret of magic is that "any cunt can do it", he's his own evidence.
So when he started, placing him on the margins was key, and one of the ways to do that was to put him with the homos. Put him in a boarding house run by a gay couple -- one where it's implied that most, if not all, of the other lodgers are gay and closeted -- and you imply that's because the respectable establishments won't have him. Send him out to live with a hippie commune where a lesbian couple is an unremarkable sight, and you make clear just how far to the margins he has to go to find a place that accepts him. For all of Delano's run, queers are pretty unquestionably Good Guys; when they sometimes die, it's because they get munched up by the plot like everyone else, not that they die for special gay reasons. Also, while it could have been terribly offensive to give John "AIDS" by infecting him with demon blood, having an actual, positively portrayed HIV+ character for immediate contrast makes it seem like a comparison instead of a condemnation.
That makes John's bisexuality another outsider marker. You know that guy's a real rake if he cares so little about social conventions that he can indulge his desires for men when they occur. His only having "the odd boyfriend" lets you know he's not a closeted gay man, but a man who is mostly attracted to women but also has some sexual feelings for men (perhaps just like you, dear comic-reader!) and is both powerful and confident enough to go for it. On top of that, calling them 'boyfriends' lets you know he's not just occasionally bringing a guy home and kicking him out the next morning, but that there's an emotional component involved, not matter how brief or how disastrously it ends for the other participant. This is a magus who doesn't play by the rules, including sexual ones.
The way all the male gay is just implied means you get the roguish quality without actually having to see homos smooch. The one time John ends up in bed with a naked-ish man (as he cuts poor Simon free of his bonds), it becomes a this-isn't-what-it-looks-like scene almost instantly. The actual gay men are generally the toothless, adorable kind England seems fond of, and John's affection for them doesn't translate to interest. Still, Delano's run presents homophobia and AIDS discrimination as bad things, and I can see how this might appeal to an already-marginalized demographic (comic nerds c. 1988) that would react negatively to depictions of bullying, even if those people getting bullied are queers.
There is, of course, something else to be said here about the differences between gay men and lesbians in Delano's run, and part of that seems to be how gay men are devotedly gay, but gay women are probably bisexual. It's not even just a 'gay for John' thing; honestly, it seems to be more of a 'generally straight but gay for magic' alignment. Then again, few of the lesbians occur outside of a specifically pagan/magical context, so it's hard to tell. (Sam and Jo are the exceptions, and they're such minor characters that it's hard to extrapolate much.) Lesbian sex gets to be sexy and topless, of course -- at least, when performed by sexy bi ladies, the most notable of whom had already had sex with John anyway. The monogamous lesbians are presented neither as desirable nor as especially undesirable, though, which is nice. So while there's obviously plenty there for eye candy, there's also an acknowledgment that some lesbians are just livin' their lives and aren't there for your gaze, which, for geek culture, seems an uncommon acknowledgment. However, I don't think it's that strange, considering that there are lot of women of various ages, races, social arrangements, and body types represented throughout Hellblazer. Not all women are objects of desire, and some of those women are lesbians. Big deal ... so long as they're not boning down. But who wants to see ugly women get it on, am I right?
By the time Ennis shows up (for the first time, anyway), it's May 1991; the vampire storyline starts just two years before Interview With the Vampire, in fact, if that helps contextualize the King of Vampires any. Darius' affection for the King seems sweet, but they were just straight-up murdering a dude together in the same issue, so however cute it is, it's tempered by their being blood-drinking monsters. With them, the gay is presented as part of the decadence -- the King gets to show off how much power he has by having all kinds of beautiful people attend ostentatiously to him. It's similar to how John's bisexuality marks him as above the rules, only now it's definitely part of being the sexy bad guys we love the hero to destroy.
In the character of Davy, gay is still presented as being non-normative, only now in a way that'll get you killed. Look at the difference between the series' two prominent HIV+ characters: Ray contracted AIDS while in a monogamous (but apparently open in an unspecified manner) relationship with his one true love, while Davy gets it from having sex he doesn't really like for money. Davy's death is from a vampire, not AIDS, but he's not allowed to succumb to the former without a mention of how the latter would have killed him eventually.
This is a little more in line with pulp-novel types of gay representation: dangerous libertine men, the less-dangerous libertine men who love them, tragic hookers with hearts of gold. Unlike the previous gay Hellblazer characters, though, these guys are supposed to make you think of sex. The King looks like James Dean (a resemblance made unfortunately difficult by Steve Dillon's terminal sameface syndrome), and when you see him lounging all seductive-like and promising John immortal life, yeah, there's that attraction/repulsion thing going on. The repulsion, however, is key, because it lets you NO HOMO safely off into the sunset. Even though Ennis keeps writing until November '94, the King of the Vampires bites it (ha ha) in September '93.
There's a forty-issue break between Ennis' contributions (filled by Paul Jenkins, whose run is also no homo), and when Ennis returns in September '98, the gays are much more sinister. The evil mob dude whose sexuality is completely irrelevant to the plot, for instance, is identified as gay (a 'shirtlifter', and I had to look that one up) not because he's depicted doing anything with or feeling anything about other men, but because a) a whore under his auspices outs him, and b) the demon fucks him to death for it while declaring it God's just punishment.
The lesbians in Ennis' second run are just as awful. Both are sexy, but one's all political and butch, while the other's femme and milquetoast about the whole lesbian identity and willing to sleep with a dude. The butch one shows up again and (presumably and comically) beats up John in the stereotypical man-discovers-cheating-wife way, proving that she's the man of the relationship. And John gets to pat himself on the back because he's a manly and irresistible enough man that he can bag a lesbian! One who isn't a dedicated, ideological dyke, of course. While this could have been an interesting dilemma, the fact that they really just exist to give John special lesbian-curing-penis cred makes me want to set the whole arc on fire.
I didn't mention the awful mpreg earlier, because I don't consider that queer so much as vile, but there you go. It's not a case of a dude with a vagina either -- I'll skip the disgusting details, but suffice it to say that it was horrible and non-consensual. It's also intended to be a blasphemous, parodic inversion of the virgin birth, so take that as you will.
The shift between the two is so ridiculous, you'd think two different people wrote it. If you've read Ennis' other stuff, though, you know he's not a homophobe; I give him much love for his Authority sidestory stuff, because he is a man who can write a character telling a gay joke in a way that both condems the character for it and owns up to how it was a pretty funny joke. So what the hell happened?
I'm willing to bet a large component to that answer is Preacher, which ran 1995-2000. I'll spare you my thoughts on Preacher itself, but suffice it to say that Ennis was a nobody in American comics when he started Hellblazer. When he returned, it was after having started a popular series with content so regularly vulgar and viscerally disgusting that he'd set a reputation for himself. Thus, his return has the feel of someone who's gone off the dudebro EXXXTREEEME rails because, well, that's kind of what's happened.
I do want to note too, though, that in that four-year gap, gay visibility spiked in fiction ... for the ladies. Fangirls wanted the pretty boys to kiss, and moreover were willing to write lots of exciting fanfic about it. Sexy Vampire Wave Mark One was sweeping the nation and making the ladies swoon. (Mark Two would have to wait for Twilight.) The internet made it even easier for girls to take all the things you love and imagine the men in them kissing one another.
Hellblazer has never been for the ladies, but at the start, it wasn't not for the ladies. It was just for comic readers, and comic readers were boys, so QED, its shooting for the default audience meant it wound up pitching toward a male audience. But a growing awareness of geek girls in fandom meant that gender lines started to be drawn even more clearly than they had in the past. Doing things like making the King of the Vampires desirable might give the impression that this was a comic for stinky girls, and we wouldn't want that, because the second that happens, boys are forbidden by the Gender Police to touch it. Does reassuring readers that God wants gays' souls punish-fucked forever make them feel better about themselves? What about claiming that one out of two lesbians are really women who secretly want dick? I'd say these are important questions, except I don't actually want to know the answers.
Which brings things to Azzarello's run, which starts in March 2000, and honestly, I still don't quite know what to make of it. I love his thirty-issue storyline, even if I had to read it a couple times through to pick out just what all was happening. It's tight and well-plotted and intense. It takes on some awful parts of American culture and just rolls around in the filth. While I can see why some people hate the tonal shift from the rest of the comic, I love it. Azzarello tosses you into the middle of the story, and you either keep up with him or you get left behind.
It also is that favorite of all words: problematic. I don't want to rehash everything I said above, but I'm keeping it in mind as I go forward.
The storyline ostensibly deals with marginalized sex and sexuality with the expected cultural scorn (ha ha, prison rape; tee hee, bi guy likes to get peed on; lol, that chick has a dick), but turns those knee-jerk reactions on their heads by both encouraging compassion for those who deserve it and presenting some equally awful straight people next to those who don't. This is also a story about extreme people in extreme situations, too, so it's not like it's setting up a universalizing Good Heterosexuals vs. the Bad Gays. It's very clear who the 'normal' people are in Azzarello's run, and they're confused and frightened and totally out of place.
I also don't think it's particularly notable that all the gay here is male, as it's such a male storyline; women are involved and important in places, but the plot-guiding transactions happen between men. If I had to venture a guess, I'd say it's because this storyline isn't so much about sex as it is about power and privilege. Rape in the prison is explicitly about either showing power or allowing one's self to be dominated in exchange for protection. (For context, Oz ran from 1997 to 2003.) The impoverished Appalachian townsfolk make humiliating porn videos and sell them on the internet because that's their only means of economic survival. The man in the snowbound bar got his Filipino wife from a catalogue, then regrets having done this to her when it looks like she's about to be raped by bad guys. John picks up a lady hooker and takes her to bingo night with him, where he proceeds to taunt the church ladies by pointing out that their disapproval masks jealousy. The BDSM club is a business, and when it becomes a murder scene, it's the nobodies and the employees who wind up in the police station, not the celebrity clients. The two cops who investigate said murder conduct themselves unethically both legally and in terms of improper interpersonal flirtation.
And then there's S.W., who a monster, pure and simple -- but with a couple of interesting twists. First, it's almost refreshing to see someone so openly sexual who isn't using that sexuality to predator on a bunch of helpless ladies, and while it's a low bar, it's still worth notice. Second, the fact that he's stinking rich means that his crimes of economic and personal exploitation are presented as being on par with his coercive sexual acts; for instance, he doesn't molest kids, but he does feed them to vampire bats, and you can decide for yourself if that's worse. And third, the fact that he's a dedicated hardcore masochist who wants his dead parents' approval makes complicated his presentation of power elsewhere.
Sidebar: It's hard to say whether or not this run does a good portrayal of BDSM and its subculture. More accurately, I think, it presents BDSM done unsafely, then calls it out as having been done unsafely. S.W. doesn't like to get flogged for fun, he likes to get flayed bloody. The sex club is a place of empty, violent hedonism, to the point of employee contempt for the patrons. Nobody here seems to be providing proper emotional before- or aftercare -- except, well, John.
In light of all that, it actually makes perfect sense that John himself winds up honey-trapping S.W. From Azzarello's first issue, which literally starts with coercive sex in prison, sex and power are identified as the twinned currency of the story. Presumably John could have found some other, gayer man to do the job, in the way he often uses his female associates as sexy bait for one straight dude or another, but John is not a man to give up that much access -- and besides, this is delicate work. His best move is to get involved in that sexual subculture, make S.W. fall in love with him, convince S.W. that said affection is mutual, tie him up, and feed him to the ghosts. It's brutal, but S.W. was willing to kill one of John's friends and send John to prison for the rest of his life, so it's not without precedent.
Am I miffy that this is the only time in the whole comic John gets his gay on? Absolutely. But that's a larger structural criticism. In terms of this particular storyline, it's a brilliant move, and I give it two thumbs up.
Hellblazer fans don't like Azzarello's run. There are plenty of reasons to dislike it, sure, but the wiki entries for these issues have a notable discomfort to the sexual content that I don't think should be ignored. Even if you can explain away any gay desire on John's part by claiming that he's just playing the long con, there are still plenty of sexy, sexy panels that make it clear he and S.W. were boning. More than that, even: "I came in his hand. He wiped it on my face." I mean ... damn.
Cultural attitudes toward The Gay have changed dramatically over the last ~15 years, to the point of much more positive cultural presence. Scrape Gillis is the last clearly gay character in Hellblazer. These two things are not unrelated.
I'm never mad when an author individually chooses to tell a particular story that has no obviously gay characters in it. I know that Warren Ellis is a good dude who loves gay folk, and his (brilliant) ten-issue run has no identifiably gay characters in it. That's okay! Same with Denise Mina's thirteen issues, which introduce very few new characters and maintain John's lady love interest from the prior storylines. Sure! This is even more understandable with writers like Mina, who keep the cast list small.
It's like the Bechdel Test, though, in that what I'm doing here is not condemning individual issues/stories/authors/whatever, but pointing out the shape of larger trends. Looking at it in context like that is kind of stunning: It's not just that the prevalence of queer characters goes from a some to a few, it goes from tons to none.
Scrape was introduced and killed in issue 177 (December '02). The series ended at issue 300 (January '13). That's a long, straight stretch, especially when you put it up against the glut of definitively queer characters in the first five years. Their ranks don't just thin, they drop to zero. Even the hints are barely hints. But how can this be, you ask? Mike Carey, for instance, loves homos! Well, yes, judging from his other work, he seems to. But I think even Mike Carey's good intentions couldn't overcome the twin forces of backlash from Azzarello's run and the growing sense of besieged entitlement in established comic culture.
I can't help seeing in that long gap the awful straight white male cultural gatekeeping of geek culture, especially in terms of larger marketability of the title. Society's increased okayness with gayness means that gay characters become over time marked less culturally and more politically. Declaring John bisexual in 2012 instead of 1992 would have been read as a move to 'shoehorn' in diversity or appease some imaginary bloodthirsty liberal representation cabal. So if you don't have to worry about petty garbage like representation, you get to concentrate on the things that matter. Like ... straight white men and their amazing straightness.
I cannot properly express how bad the last fifty issues of Hellblazer are; it would take another 7000 words to crack the surface of its badness. The incredibly short version is that all women are irresistably interested in John all the time and wrap their entire lives and identities around him and fall apart when he stops paying exclusive attention to them (or, worse, marries a manic pixie dream girl a third his age). I swear there are more tits-out sex scenes in the last thirty issues than in the preceding 270. It's gross, but it's indicative of the kind of macho-man fanboy mentality that has devolved into shit like GamerGate. It also couldn't be more different from the way the early issues present shit-kicked, marginalized John the Loser as a face often only a homo could love.
Instead, what you get with Milligan are lots of kind-of hints but zero substance. There's a male-identified (maybe?) Babylonian demon who is currently appearing as a creepy schoolgirl, and who gets magicked into being in love with John briefly. Shade the Changing Man demands John kiss him for a vague reason related to replicating a scene with one of John's dead girlfriends, and anyway, Shade's an alien obsessed with that dead girl and from some other series, says the wiki, which explains why he feels completely out of place. At one point Gemma (John's niece) kisses Epiphany (John's -- ugh -- wife), but just to startle her (and John clarifies later that Gemma's "not into girls like that"). A character named Georgie says she's given up on men, but not to any identifiable alternative, and as part of what seems like a temper tantrum. John calls the First of the Fallen homoerotic-looking, bait to which the First does not rise. There's a quick mention of how most demons are asexual, something not borne up by the rest of the series, but all right. ...And okay, I will admit that I may have missed someone else in Milligan's run, but a) I doubt it, and b)those last fifty issues are so stomach-churningly horrible, you'll forgive me if I skimmed rather than re-read them.
That's the kind of half-assed shit people pull when they're trying not to look like total troglodytes but don't want to deal with the actual icky awful rainbow mess. Everything there is gay enough for plausible deniability against charges of homophobia while still being ha-ha-just-kidding enough that it can all be straightwashed away without much effort.
Straight white men will not pay attention to anything that isn't all about straight white men. At least, that's what I've been led to believe, considering the holy hell that rises whenever anyone suggests lately that diversity in media is good. No, we get told, it's a plot from the political correctness police. Why do we have to keep pandering to special interests and minorities? Why can't we all just agree to focus on the pale males that everyone can identify with?
Thus, if I can bring it back to the TV show, of course John's bisexuality is gratuitous. It's gone from being a marker of his roguish outsider status to being a biohazard warning that would scare off all the straight men in a fifty-mile radius. Maybe at some point I'll unload with both barrels about the white-hat-washing that the show's been giving John, making all his bastard choices into noble, justified ones. Suffice it to say for now that if you're going to make him a superhero instead of an antihero, he can only color outside certain pre-approved lines. Smoking means he's a rugged man's man who doesn't pay attention to those pansy-ass death warnings on the cartons! His unkempt appearance means he's too cool for sissy things like fashion or looking presentable! Bisexuality means his show should be airing on LOGO instead, because a character like that could only appeal to gays and women, not real people.
And marketability is a whole big issue, one that shouldn't be underestimated. For reference, here's how the comic thinks of and markets itself: Issue 195, dated June '04, is when the title of the comic as presented on the covers goes from being 'Hellblazer' to 'John Constantine: Hellblazer', though his name is in a tinier, simpler font; starting in issue 200 (November '04), both his name (no colon) and the title are in the same font, with the size of his name increased so as to be unmissable, and little TMs after both. It stays that way until Issue 256 (August '09), when the 'John Constantine' part goes to a smaller, thinner font, which is how it remains to the end of the comic. Constantine, that ridiculous movie, came out in February 2005. For a while there, the comic was a movie tie-in as much as anything.
There are many great things about comics' becoming more than a niche market! There are also some shitty things, and one of those is how it's fed a sense of geek entitlement. There's no ComicsGate equivalent to GamerGate in part because the industry profits aren't even comparable, but they get made into the more profitable TV series and movies, which absolutely can't chance giving the impression that they're for the 'wrong' audience. Thus, creators of the live-action adaptations get applauded for their dedication to minutiae in the source material while being allowed to use that same perceived dedication as a justification for not addressing larger issues or contexts or fanbases -- and without regard to how awareness of potential future adaptations might change the content of the source material itself.
All things considered, I can't get too bothered about the show's leaving John straight. I mean, it was obvious from the start that it was going to be a terrible piece of television. I'm glad that they don't have that to blame it on.
...I guess I don't have a very good conclusion here, so let's go for a tl;dr: Hellblazer! It's better than you'd expect about the gays, right up into it becomes worse than you'd expect about the gays! Azzarello's run is great in isolation and troubling in the context of the larger series! If you decide to read it, here's your field guide to locating the queers! Whatever you do, don't go past issue 250!
The Aristocrats!