Pictures courtesy of ABC TV and DC Comics and Jim Krolz
Oh, its alright, go ahead and laugh. Everyone does now who knew of my obsession then. When that theme music started and the trumpets and disco music began to blare and that cartoon image came onscreen, you couldn't have torn me away from that TV with plyers and a tractor chain. To this day my brother STILL teases me about it and my parents just roll their eyes to heaven and change the topic to the rising cost of soybeans. For years I was embarrassed about my all too apparent obsession with HER, or as I liked to call her in code, WW, because I was too embarrassed to actually utter her name whenever I announced that I was going to watch her on television. Years later I didn't even acknowledge that I knew anything about the character, much less that I had spent the first ten formative years of my life slavishly devoted to her. Yes my dears, you've grasped it at last, the long dormant secret is out; my pre-adolescent 7 year old soul was obsessed with a near religious intensity with all things Wonder Woman.
I remember the first comic book of hers I ever bought. We were living in my grandfather's house in King City, so I couldn't have been more than seven. ( It was actually Wonder Woman Vol.34, No.220, October-November 1975. See below. I actually found it, can you belIEVE it? Hee! Ain't the net fab?!?) So yah, I would have been seven. It was odd, I remember looking at the picture on the front years later, and thinking of how much the bust they drew of WW (that's the head you know!) looked a heckuva lot like Jane Russell. But I digress....
It was all part of a progression, as I recall. I remember as a really little kid of around three or four, I tended to become obsessed with, or have crushes on, dark haired women. (To this day, I don't know why. It wasn't a Freudian Oedipal thing, as my own mother's hair was auburn and in the summer the sun would streak it blonde.) It started with Disney's Snow White, and I guess the next logical step was Wonder Woman, and then it segued into LIVE women, such as the actress playing Wonder Woman, Lynda Carter herself, and then other actresses like Vivien Leigh and Audrey Hepburn as I got older. There was never a sexual allure about these women for me, although they were all staggeringly beautiful. It was more of an extreme identification in some way, although I'm not sure I could formulate a theory as to what that identification might have been. I do remember thinking, even as a youngster, that women were inherently more graceful than men, and moved better. They weren't large and bulky and boxlike. Perhaps it was the feline quality inherent in certain women I subconsciously admired. Whatever it was, the idea of a beautiful young woman with tremendous physical power was incredibly appealing. I could never relate to the muscle bound behemoths of Superman, or Batman, much less the Hulk (although my brother ironically was as obsessed with the Green Goliath as I was with the Amazon princess...did I mention he's straight?) as I simply didn't look like that, and despairingly never would. To my pre-adolescent brain, a slim and fragile looking young woman lifting a car, or leaping three stories into the air seemed to have more in common with me than the Hulk did, that was for sure. I was small boned, and felt quite fragile and weak and funny looking to boot, and here was this sympathetic and beautiful woman bending steel bars with her bare hands. What wasn't to like?
Oh, I'm not saying Wonder Woman made me gay, don't be stupid. Just to prove my point, one afternoon when I was seven, I managed to talk my five year old brother and his friend Mark into being deputized as "co-Wonder Women" and we ran around our grandparents' backyards in makeshift Wonder Woman costumes, looking nothing so much like midget transgendered Amazons. As I recall our behaviour was mostly hollering and fighting about who got to play with the magic lasso, and who's turn it was to fly the invisible plane. Most un-Amazon like. My brother, who in all likelihood has blocked this little childhood excursion into his feminine side right out of his brain, grew up to be captain of his hockey team, a ladies man, and a happily married father of three in the suburbs. Mark fronts a rock'n roll band mostly in his underwear, singing about bed wetting and is apparently intent on reliving Robert Plant's imaginary life. I simply note all of this as proof positive that not all little boys who play with Amazons grow up to be gay. You have to do it right, or it just doesn't take.
If Wonder Woman didn't make me gay, then I think she was a fairly good indicator that I was going to be. My parents certainly thought so, and although I'm sure it gave them a great many sleepless nights, they bit their tongues. Occasionally however, out of desperation they suggested that I might want to dress up as Batman or Spiderman or some MALE superhero for a change as opposed to cutting out construction paper tiaras, bracelets and breastplates to match.
I collected the comics, I watched the series (violent fistfights ensued with my brother on Friday nights over whether we were watching Wonder Woman or Donny and Marie. I wanted to watch Wonder Woman naturally, and he was all for Donny Osmond in sequins. And he's the straight one. Go figure.) and when it went off the air, I was crushed, although to be truthful, I never really approved of her moving to California and trying to become a pop singer.
As time went on, I grew older and although my interest shifted away from our favourite Amazon, and I added new idols to my firmament of powerful divas; Katharine Hepburn, Bette Davis, Judy Garland, etc., I never forgot my first excitement over the image of a raven haired beauty in an invisible plane, spinning her magic lasso. Occasionally too, I would pick up a comic to see how Diana was faring in Man's World. After all, a lot had changed since I was seven. Although immortal, Diana was thirty years older too.
Why did she still fascinate me, and admittedly still does, some thirty-one years after I first saw her battling Chronos outside the UN building? What is her enduring appeal for gay men? That she made such a powerful influence on a generation of women is old news. That she also was perhaps the first female iconic character of power for a generation of gay boys growing up in the shadow of the women's movement is a fact that is seemingly never remarked on. Like the Bionic Woman and so many other iconic female characters that were either in comics or on television, Wonder Woman had a near universal appeal to all sexes and ages. Phil Jimenez, the legendary artist and writer who redefined the Amazon princess in her latest incarnation said that, “My theory always remains that these women were both super strong and they were sex symbols to men. I think for a lot of young gay men, at least for me, what appealed to them was that they were super heroic – they did these heroic feats, they went to fantastic worlds, they fought these super villains. So that was appealing on one level. On the other level, they were also sexually desirable to men, which I think, when you’re young and you’re into men but you don’t know how or why, I think that’s a very appealing quality, because not only are you saving the world, but cute boys want you all along the way.”
But finally, I always thought Lynda Carter said it best when asked about the lasting allure of the iconic character she played for three years on television. She said Wonder Woman's appeal was ''the combination of a woman being a woman but also having a masculine side. She could be strong and beautiful like they [gay men] can be strong and beautiful. I think there's such a strong archetype there for gay people, that secret self. It's that hidden self that's not about being defined by secrets or by sexuality, but being defined by your heart. So many of us have to hide our lives in order to make other people comfortable. And when you stop hiding your life to make other people comfortable, you begin to love yourself.''
Phil Jimenez quotes from Superheroes and the feminine mystique
by Travis D. Bone, courtesy of the Gay and Lesbian Times
Lynda Carter quotes from Wondrous Woman by Randy Schulman courtesy of the Metro Weekly
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