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birds of gay

(originally published in yuri zine - i've moved most of the footnotes to parentheticals for tumblr readability!)

I. This Too Is Yuri¹

Birds of Prey (1995-2009) is a comic about power, control, physicality, the internet, and convincing your girlfriend to set aside her moral principles. Well, not quite.

Some quick background for people who haven’t spent the last year in DC hell: Birds of Prey is one of the more famous female team comics, mostly starring Barbara Gordon and Dinah Lance, though there’s a rotating cast of other women who come and go (Helena Bertinelli joins the team later in the run.) The comic started off with a handful of one-shots, continuing to be a top seller for a decade. (There was also a brief and very doomed TV series, which apparently featured t.A.t.u's “All The Things She Said” during a deeply homoerotic fight scene.)²

Barbara Gordon, formerly Batgirl, is the daughter of Gotham police chief Jim Gordon. At the beginning of Birds of Prey, she’s acting as Oracle, a sort of technosupergenius capable of hacking everything from Army satellites to banks. (DC Comics has a lot of ideas about what a library degree prepares you for. Clearly I missed the hacking classes.) She’s forged this role for herself after the Joker shot her in the spine; in Birds of Prey, she’s paralyzed from the waist down and uses a wheelchair.

Dinah Lance is the Black Canary, one of the most talented martial artists in the world. She fights crime in fishnets, the costume her mother (the first Black Canary) wore. (This is one of the more normal ways to react to a superhero parent I’ve seen in comics, actually.) At the beginning of Birds of Prey, Dinah is reeling from the death of her longterm ex, Oliver Queen/Green Arrow, and also the loss of her powers, a sort of superhuman shriek that can blast through walls or knock out opponents.

Cue the yuri. In Birds of Prey, Barbara (Babs) acts as Dinah’s handler, sending her on missions that range from comic-book normal to absolutely wild (Dinah fights a dinosaur at least twice.) Babs books her travel, orders her food, buys her clothes, and acts like a jealous girlfriend any time Dinah works with another woman without Babs orchestrating it.

¹ I struggled with how to frame this essay almost as much as I struggled to research it. Birds of Prey debuted during the days of the “old internet,” making it fairly challenging to find contemporary fan responses (more on this later.) So there was a great temptation to say this, the archival gap, too is yuri. But while I love to talk about research methods I think an essay about my attempts to get into comics DC++ servers is not actually that interesting, and also oh my god I want to talk about Dinah Lance and Barbara Gordon and their nightmare relationship.

² “But We’re Out of Time: Queer(ed) Nostalgia and WB’s The Birds of Prey” covers the show; it’s also a great read about queering memory. Very funny to read this blog after scrolling through a lot of forum posts deeply upset about the show when it first aired.

Black Canary/Oracle: Birds of Prey (1995), Chuck Dixon and Dick Giordano, p. 16

Birds of Prey: Manhunt #1 (1996), Chuck Dixon and Matt Haley, p. 14

The intimacy only goes one way, though. Despite her exhaustive knowledge of Dinah, Babs remains a voice in Dinah's ear for the first 21 issues of the run. Dinah doesn't know the name of the woman who sends her into danger every other week.

Critically, Barbara keeps her identity-- not just her superhero and civilian identities, but also her identity as a disabled woman-- secret. She has nearly unlimited access to information about Dinah, as well as the rest of the world; and she will not allow herself to be known. Her anonymity and her remove are her power and control. This makes the little worms in my brain do a sort of unhinged samba. If yuri is about absence, as the tumblr memes go, about reaching out and trying to grasp something you can never quite have, well!

Birds of Prey #3 (1999), Chuck Dixon and Greg Land, p. 11

Birds of Prey #13 (1999), Chuck Dixon and Greg Land, p. 16

Birds of Prey #19 (2000), Chuck Dixon and Butch Guice, p. 14

Identity, both in its revelation and its concealment, is a key feature of any superhero comic. Who has a secret identity? Who is allowed to know it? Identity in comics is about who you are, of course, but it is also about safety, about masking and unmasking, about intimacy and trust, about having a place to go when you hang up the spandex. As the Black Canary, Dinah doesn’t wear a mask; her identity is something of an open secret, and it’s only her relative obscurity among civilians that keeps her safe in her day-to-day life. Oracle, on the other hand, is so much of a cipher that most of the villains trying to target her don’t even know that she’s a woman, a fact she regularly plays to her own advantage. After all, who would suspect a poor disabled girl of being the ruthless cyberwarrior who’s been blackmailing them for months? Barbara’s weaponization of societal ableism and sexism leads to some very girl power rah-rah moments. But Barbara isn’t just someone who (depending on the writer) either overcomes or reclaims her disability; she’s also kind of a hot mess.

II. More Girlboss War Criminals

Throughout the comic’s 127 issues, Babs is consistently portrayed as both deeply caring and also manipulative, secretive, and frankly, a little unhinged.<3 Even after she and Dinah meet in person for the first time in issue 21, she keeps key mission and personal info from her friends, who she regularly refuses to admit are actually her friends; she emotionally manipulates both Dinah and, later, other members of the team; she goes to incredible lengths to maintain her independence. Her past history with Power Girl is hinted at so darkly that every time Power Girl appears on screen I hear “No Children” start to play.

Birds of Prey #17 (2000), Chuck Dixon and Butch Guice, p. 15

I love this for Babs, in part because it positions her as Birds of Prey’s Batman, despite how often she butts heads with him, and in part because it creates a nightmare codependency between her and Dinah that is just catnip for my little brain.

Where Babs is a practical master manipulator, Dinah is idealistic, stubborn, hot-headed, and reckless; she believes (often correctly) that she can either sweet-talk or punch her way out of any situation. In the early issues of the comic, she flings herself into danger so much that she comes across as having some sort of death wish.

Unfortunately, as delightful as this dynamic is, because the first 46 issues of the run were written by Chuck “Got My Start Writing the Punisher” Dixon, this means that Babs is operating as a sort of one-woman CIA and manipulating Dinah into destabilizing foreign governments because that’s what she believes is right. (This is usually happening in vaguely Middle Eastern countries, of which DC has a whole stable of fake ones so they can continue the long comics tradition of using the Middle East as a setpiece without contending with any actual political realities. Sometimes they branch out and we’re in Africa or southeast Asia instead. That’s a separate essay but one I would like to read.)

This isn’t unique to Birds of Prey, of course, but it is particularly notable here because Babs is so powerful and operates so independently. There is no Justice League to reign her in. The only person to reign her in is Dinah, who achieves only middling success because Babs constantly keeps her in the dark. Doubly unfortunately, Chuck Dixon’s era of Birds of Prey, and not Gail Simone’s later and arguably more influential run on the title, is the one that gives me the most brainworms.

III. It’s Time to Talk About Chuck Dixon

Birds of Prey was created by Chuck Dixon, who after a series of successful one-shots went on to write the first 46 issues of the series. Dixon is one of the most famous writers in comics; his runs on Detective Comics and Robin in the 90s defined those characters for decades. He’s also a profoundly reactionary homophobe; his most recent comics star a hero who is literally reskinned QAnon. Normal man with normal views! Somehow, he ended up writing a comic where the two female leads come across as deeply, deeply in love with each other, to the point that other characters comment on it. Lampshading it does not make it seem less gay, Chuck! ( This is not the only time Dixon has done this; he has a habit of being so afraid to write sex in comics that all of his characters come across as gay. Tim Drake/Robin and Connor Hawke/Green Arrow’s characterization in Dixon’s arcs laid the foundation for them to later be canonized as bi and ace, respectively.)

Birds of Prey: Wolves #1 (1997), Chuck Dixon and Dick Giordano, p. 21

I don’t have a lot of interest in trying to psychoanalyze Dixon. I don’t really care about why he wrote Babs and Dinah the way he did; in general, I think trying to psychoanalyze comics writers is a great way to make yourself deeply unhappy. But it does make me feel vaguely hysterical that the moment when Babs and Dinah finally meet in person, where Dixon called out shippers in the comic script, ends up being one of the gayest panels I’ve ever seen.

Dixon’s script, which he’s so proud of that it’s still up on his website:

PANEL FOUR

Canary crouches and holds Oracle to her. Oracle is curled in a fetal position and dripping wet. The more drama you can squeeze from this the better. We're going for The Pieta as opposed to anything that HINTS of the sexual. This scene is apparently RIPE for misinterpretation (or OVERinterpretation.) by some of our readers.

BARBARA: (WEAK) not Oracle...

BARBARA: (WEAK) BARBARA.

BARBARA: (WEAK) CALL ME BARBARA

Birds of Prey #21 (2000), Chuck Dixon and Butch Guice, p. 20

You know, the Pieta, when you’re both dripping wet, and your hand is on your platonic girlbestie’s boob.

IV. This 2 Is Yuri

This is the part where I would love to talk about the fan reaction to Dinah and Babs. There were clearly enough shippers that Dixon was both aware of and bothered by them (although I think Dixon would probably have been bothered if there was one person who thought his characters were gay, so that’s not a sure-fire barometer.) Unfortunately, Birds of Prey came out in the late 90s and early 2000s, and digital decay has not been kind to fan writing. The Wayback Machine’s coverage of forums tends to be spotty. (“Any fellow gay DC fans?” thread on the official DC forums from 2000 and “frokeback femmeslash thread” from 2006, you are my white whales. Also huge thank you to Max @zeiat for digging up some unofficial fan forums, especially Words of Prey, which were a treat to dig through even if I couldn’t see most of the posts!)

The letters pages, where DC published fan letters and which often serve as a barometer for fan response, aren't collected in the trade paperbacks that (unless I want to spend $300 on a full issue collection on eBay) are all I have access to. (The inaccessibility of fan letters is deeply depressing to me, and I think it’s unfortunate to erase that for a lot of comics history comics was intentionally positioned as a dialogue between fans and creators. There are a lot of memes about the fan poll that led to Jason Todd, the second Robin,’s in-comics death, and it is very funny, but it was part of a larger medium-wide understanding that fans did have some input into the narrative.)

I can find fans looking back on Birds of Prey, but for contemporary reactions I’m left to fill in the gaps by reading forum post titles and clicking around defunct Geocities archives. This digital absence is oddly ironic for a comic that relies so much on the internet for its plot. But it also makes sense. Queer readings, like queer fans, vanish from the archives. We find our own spaces, and those spaces are spottily recorded; when we do make it into the record, as in the case of an extremely touching letter in Green Arrow (1988), it has to be sought out and resurfaced.

But comics themselves aren’t intended to last. As objects, individual issues are fragile, usually printed on cheap paper and referred to as “floppies.” The way they make us feel isn’t meant to last either; the industry is notorious for the way it churns through storylines, characters, and creators. That was last month’s issue. On to the next! And yet comics fans are often as obsessive as we are opinionated, cataloging every appearance of characters across 70 years of comics history, writing exhaustive wiki pages for one-off villains, reading a thousand pages of comics for a character who appears in maybe 30% of that runtime. (You can read the entirety of Knightfall for Tim Drake’s Robin, but you shouldn’t.)

So where do I go from here? I’m not meant to be fixated on iterations of these characters that are nearly 30 years old. Since Birds of Prey volume 1 ended, the DC Universe has been rebooted twice. Barbara got magically healed and is back to being Batgirl, an identity DC seems unwilling to let her transcend. (There’s been a ton of academic and fan writing on Barbara’s disability and its retcons. I’d recommend in particular José Alaniz’s “Standing Orders: Oracle, Disability, and Retconning” in Disability in Comic Books and Graphic Narrative, Chris Foss, Jonathan Gray, and Zach Whalen, eds., as well as Marit Hanson’s “Mistress of Cyberspace: Oracle, Disability, and the Cyborg” in Uncanny Bodies: Superhero Comics and Disability, Scott Smith and José Alaniz, eds., and Carolyn Cocca’s “Re-booting Barbara Gordon: Oracle, Batgirl, and Feminist Disability Theories” in ImageTexT 7(4).) In current comics she’s written much younger and regularly relegated to being Dick Grayson’s supportive girlfriend— a far cry from the secretive, deeply jaded woman who forges her own identity because she has to. Dinah has fared a little better— DC is at least willing to let her be an adult.

There is a new Birds of Prey series coming out; the reviews are glowing, both from comics press and fans whose opinions I trust. But I haven’t read it yet. I will probably enjoy it when I do, but part of me will still be waiting for Babs to wheel onscreen.

That’s the lot of a comics fan: you wind up longing for deeply flawed versions of characters who haven’t existed in 15 years. And if longing for the impossible is yuri, well!

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