A Batman researcher said 'gay' in a talk to schoolkids. When asked to censor himself, he quit

Marc Tyler Nobleman was supposed to talk to kids about the secret co-creator of Batman, with the aim of inspiring young students in suburban Atlanta’s Forsyth County to research and write.

Then the school district told him he had to cut a key point from his presentation — that the artist he helped rescue from obscurity had a gay son. Rather than acquiesce, he canceled the last of his talks.

Dark Knight Detective

Feels like they're Robin you by not granting it.

Comic Book Historian would have been a better title. I thought "batman" might have been referring to an unrelated school or something.

I dunno, would he mention the artist had a straight son? Or is it just a son in that case?

Wait, was it a relevant person?

It's the son of the artist, right? Did the son have anything to do with Batman? Did the son's sexual orientation have anything to do with Batman?

What else is relevant about the son? Was he an artist? A writer? What did he do for a living? Did he have any relevant health disorders? Food preferences? Did he have any children?

BROADLY SPEAKING, your sexual preferences are the least interesting or relevant things in any conversation, unless we're considering dating each other.

I don't know the history of Batman so maybe it's actually relevant, but my gut says it's just not.

Probably couldn't get them for wrongful termination. At-Will employment is a bitch.

But he could likely get unemployment for being terminated without cause, which is a different thing.

I am the night... researcher.

Something something something R & D in a big building somewhere downtown

My man still trying to find out who this mysterious caped crusader is.

Yet another thing I'll never understand about cricket ffs

Or Batman, Australia (suburb of Melbourne)

Quit the talk.

The was talking about robbin'

I think you have it backwards. People realize tribalism so intrinsically it doesn't even register.

The beauty of the social justice push we've seen from the 70s to today is that it actively tries to counteract the human tribal instinct to create a more fair and inclusive world. Granted, I'm not sure how successful it's been at removing tribalism... it just seems to have redefined the tribes.

That’s pretty much all it is or has ever been. I’m fine with it though. We are what we are.

I’m just happy to be here to play a little music and video games.

My tribe’s music of course. My tribe makes the best music. Of course I feel that way.

It's important from a narrative standpoint in telling his own story of researching this; the point of these talks is much less about teaching kids the history of the co-creator of Batman than it is telling the story of the researcher and writer who put that history together. The point is to hopefully inspire a few kids to go down a similar path themselves.

It was presumed, since Bill Finger's only child was a gay man who died thirty years ago, that no heir to his estate existed. The researcher discovering that Bill had a granddaughter would lose its impact without the knowledge that his only child was gay.

Finger died in obscurity in 1974, with artist Bob Kane credited as Batman’s only creator. Finger’s only child was a son, Fred Finger, who was gay and died in 1992 at age 43 of AIDS complications. Bill Finger was presumed to have no living heirs, meaning there was no one to press DC Comics to acknowledge Finger’s work.

But Nobleman discovered Fred Finger had a daughter, Athena Finger. That, he said, is a showcase moment of the presentation he estimates he has given 1,000 times at schools.

“It’s the biggest twist of the story, and it’s usually when I get the most gasps,” Nobleman said. “It’s just a totally record-scratch moment.”

Nobleman’s research helped push DC Comics into reaching a deal with Athena Finger in 2015 to acknowledge her grandfather and Kane as co-creators. That led to the documentary “Batman & Bill,” featuring Nobleman.

The same reason famous women inventors and inventors of color are often singled out to us in gradeschool.

Because history was written almost exclusively by (or at least authored by if they had others write it) heterosexual Caucasian men who largely wrote themselves as the victors of every war, inventor of anything they could take credit for, etc.

A child in that biased vacuum might come to the incorrect conclusion that straight Caucasian men are the best and the brightest rather than the truth: that they're merely the writers of their own historical press releases.

Gay people have invented, authored, and created for all of human history, largely under the guise of being straight lest they be shunned and cast out of halls of power.

That's why it's important to demonstrate to children that creation comes from people who look like and have similar identities to themselves. Imagine being a 13 year old realizing you're gay and remembering that civilization was created largely by straight people who largely also chose to make gay people's lives living hells, if they let them live at all.

His son would’ve been his only heir eligible to receive compensation if DC ever made things right, but he died young (from AIDS) and never had any children himself (because he was gay).

Edif: He did have a child! Wow!

Why are straight white people the only people who don't need a plot justification to exist?