I have no problem with actual gay characters, who are with consenting adults. Comic book characters should not all be heterosexual. That's like saying they should all be white. Leave those characters who were firmly established as heterosexual to remain so, since, much as the Right Wing would like to think otherwise, gays are born gay, you don't become gay. Creators can create new characters that are gay. Dark Knight Returns is not a what if tale. Year One, All-Star Batman, Dark Knight, DK2, are in the Earth-31 Dark Knight Universe continuity in DC's Multiverse seen in Countdown: Arena. “Anything I come up with about any of these characters is DKU,” Miller said. In his Dark Knight work, Miller has given readers a glimpse into the twilight years of Batman’s career. In Batman: Year One, he’s shared the beginning of the Batman saga. So where does All-Star Batman fall in his Batman time-table? “Year Three.” - Frank Miller. http://forum.newsarama.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=27218 Batman and Superman are not gay characters. They are firmly established as heterosexuals. We are closely acquainted with the lives of the characters in comics. We can even "hear" their thoughts. The notion that Superman and Batman should be friends is very much at odds with who the characters are at heart. Only after both characters were white washed and sanitized to the point that they had little in common with their beginnings did we reach a place where they could hang out together - though the considerations there were more commercial than logical. This was because DC editor Whitney Elseworth created a Editorial Advisory Board in 1941 trying to make Batman and Superman as wholesome and tame as possible to protect DC from the growing criticisms of comic books in the 1940s and 1950s by Sterling North, Fredric Wertham, Greshon Legman, and the U.S. Senate. http://www.geocities.com/Athens/8580/Hist2.html http://www.english.ufl.edu/imagetext/archives/exhibit1/dc.shtml These book excepts are from Comic Book Nation about the Editorial Board DC had:
And the effect on Batman:
"If you want superheroes who hate each other, go read Marvel."
I don't have to read Marvel for conflict amongst superheroes. There's plenty of that at DC.