(LifeSiteNews) — A year ago, I wrote a short column on DC Comics’ decision to create a new series making America’s iconic Man of Steel … a bisexual. CNN published a glowing report on how the new Superman was a more open-minded hero who had moved on from Lois Lane and now also crushed on male reporters. I’m not invested in any American comic book franchises (I tended toward Tintin and Asterix growing up), but as Rod Dreher noted at the time, the fact that Superman has always been identified as quintessentially American made the move a culturally significant one.
It was also a short-lived one. People, as it turns out, didn’t much care for the idea, and DC Comics is cancelling the series after only 18 issues due to poor sales. Tom Taylor, the author of the series, told The New York Times last year that the new Superman had to be bisexual because “the idea of replacing Clark Kent with another straight white saviour felt like a missed opportunity.” Customers responded by intentionally missing the opportunity to buy Taylor’s work.
Speaking to the National Review — which broke the news of the cancellation — a spokesman for DC Comics insisted that the series was not cancelled, but the sales numbers (the fourth in the series placed only 55th in the best-selling comic rankings with a pathetic 37,500 copies) don’t lie.
Superman’s bisexual successor is not the only sign that audiences are getting fatigued with the relentless Pride Parade of LGBTetc characters in familiar franchises and new films, which we are told we must enjoy lest we evidence our homophobia. Another example is the alleged “romantic comedy” Bros, in which men flirt and couple with one another and the realities of gay subcultures are, for the most part, safely avoided. Every single member of the cast, the film’s creators proudly informed everyone, identified on the alphabet soup spectrum. Most people yawned boredly and recommitted to not watching bros.
At First Things, Carl Trueman has an interesting take on the failure of Bros to attract many viewers:
Romance depends upon sex being costly. It was the difficulty of obtaining sex, the need for that delicate, complicated, and unpredictable interpersonal dance between two people, that was the very essence of what it was to be romantic. In a world where sex is not simply casual but remarkably cheap, the notion of romance is dead. Romance requires a particular kind of culture in order to make sense. A world of hookups, one-night stands, and all-pervasive pornography is not one that gives people the cultural grammar and syntax to understand it. That the movie apparently contains scenes of sex and nudity is hardly exceptional today. But that’s the point: A world where sex and nudity are displayed on the screen is not a world where romance has any place…And, while the Bros team might regard its box office failure as discouraging, it might just as easily be evidence of the triumph of the LGBTQ movement in wider society as it is of a residual resistance to the same. Please don’t blame homophobia for your commercial failure. Romance is dead. And you helped to kill it.
Despite the collapse of Bros at the box office, the steady stream of LGBT content is only going to intensify. As comedian Jimmy Kimmel noted about the failure of LGBT film Call Me By Your Name to make any money: “That’s not the point. We don’t make films like Call Me By Your Name for money. We make them to upset Mike Pence.” The point is to mock the values America was founded on; to gloat at those who still believe them; and to revel in our ongoing decline. Romantic comedies about straight couples have been crude and pornographic for years now, with the content steadily getting more degraded as the years go by and Hollywood tries to drag the eyeballs of their audience away from Pornhub to their latest offering. Now, Hollywood offers Brokeback Mountain with laughs — if you find the vileness of our culture something to chuckle about.
