grayson's own words on inheritance from dick grayson: boy wonder (2011), emphasis mine for the most relevant quotes:
Interviewer: Your novel Inheritance went about as far as any DC publication has in acknowledging the homoerotic subtext some fans like to see in that couple (albeit that acknowledgment coming from the unreliable mouth of Oliver Queen). How did editorial attitudes change?
Grayson: So, this is interesting.
My intention there was to have Ollie acknowledge that reading without suggesting that it was necessarily accurate. He basically just says, “I can understand why people would jump to that conclusion.” Again, this circles back to my idea of trying to acknowledge, and trying to have the characters acknowledge, the entirety of their legends. They’re not dumb. They know what people say about them. And not all people say the same things. So let’s walk up to as much of that as possible.
I was also contrasting Batman and Green Arrow’s partnering styles. There’s a chapter in the book where Green Arrow is partnered with Nightwing and basically teasing him about being sexually ambiguous, and this material is arguably more offensive than Ollie’s line acknowledging the gay subtext. It’s got a lot of bad homoerotic innuendo and it’s poorly written and I don’t remember but I have to assume that I was hugely over-caffeinated and desperately trying to make deadline when I wrote it. It goes too far and there’s no reason for it in terms of the plot or even the characters. It is one of those hugely embarrassing learning-in-print experiences. I so wish I could rewrite that chapter—it’s undisciplined and fanfic-y in the worst sense of that designation—but I assumed that had it been truly egregious, harmful in any serious way to the characters or the company, somebody would have said something.
The whole time I worked in comics the understanding was that writers were supposed to push the envelope and that, because these characters are such icons, editorial would, whenever necessary, push back. Sometimes you would really click with an editor and they would become a genuine creative partner and sometimes you weren’t quite as much on the same wavelength, but either way, they were always very involved. If you ever wrote something unacceptable the editor would hopefully call you and give you a chance to rewrite it or sometimes they’d just get in there and fix it and you wouldn’t even know it had been changed until the issue came out, but there was no rubber-stamping. These characters were guarded. And although that may sound stifling, it’s actually hugely reassuring, because you’re never alone with the responsibility of safeguarding a legend’s reputation. As a creator working with licensed characters, you anticipate and accept and even to some extent rely on that editorial pushback. When you go too far with a mainstream superhero story, someone is always there to reel you in.
So I was delighted when I didn’t get any pushback for that line or those scenes. The licensed publication novel department is a wholly separate entity from the comics: different editors, different corporate culture, different floor of the building (at least at the time I was writing Inheritance) … so I figured that maybe they were a little less dogmatic than the guys downstairs. The edits I did get were about another issue entirely, a structural problem I had to address, so apparently the handful of cringe-worthy lines spread throughout this 336 page book that was written in three months weren’t as bad as I had feared. The novel also contained, I thought, some strong writing, and overall it accomplished what they had asked me to do. All of the material made it through editorial into publication within a company that does not hesitate to ask for rewrites, so although I would have happily rewritten the material in question, there was never a request or an opportunity to do so. And with no one giving me any feedback about it one way or another, I assumed we were okay.
In fact, I assumed we were okay for years—literally nearly a decade. I assumed we were okay until less than a month ago, when a friend in the industry let me know that there was, in fact, a huge uproar over that line of Ollie’s (or possibly the material surrounding it)—a couple of people very high up were apparently apoplectic. Again, I had no clue, but looking back now at the timing of my dismissal from Nightwing and Batwoman it’s actually quite possible that this played a major role in my being suddenly and thoroughly blacklisted at DC. And if that is the case, it’s almost worse than if those firings had in fact been arbitrary. Because although it’s a personal and professional low point and I take full responsibility for how awful that writing is, it also isn’t anywhere close to the worst of what DC has put out. I have never seen a male colleague cast out as quickly or as thoroughly as I was. And more to the point, I would have absolutely rewritten any or all of that without a second thought had I been asked to. I wasn’t the least bit wedded to the material, it was just manic silliness. And I wish I could say that it somehow forwarded the cause of gay rights or something, but it really doesn’t, it’s just dumb, coy banter. But it’s just dumb, coy banter. It’s hard to imagine that it was worth tanking someone’s career over.
It’s puzzling to me because I had always gone out of my way to be an extremely cooperative freelancer. There’s a saying that freelancers can be brilliant, fast, or easy to work with, and that the really good ones are at least two out of three. There’s not much you can do to guarantee that you’re brilliant, so you make damn sure that you’re fast and easy to work with. I was very aware of being in somebody else’s sandbox with these characters and although, as you can see from my answers to other questions in this interview, I have very strong and sometimes off-the-wall ideas about them, I honestly never made any attempt to push any kind of personal agenda or stray too far from the company line in my professional work. The mistakes I made came from rushing, and there was no reason anyone at the company would have been afraid to approach me and ask me to pull back. It’s kind of horrifying now to think that there were people that offended by it and that disgusted with me and that no one said anything. The turn-around in publishing—especially serialized publishing—is so fast that there are inevitably times when something makes it into print that never should have. I don’t know what the institutional policy on how to deal with that is, but I hope it’s not to just reflexively dismiss the creator, because they stand to lose a lot of good people that way.
In any case, I love working in long form prose and I loved working for that department and I’m very sad to learn, so many years later, that there was so much going on behind the scenes that I was not aware of. I guess the real answer to your question is that editorial attitudes have not changed very much at all. There have always been, and still are, people around who are so comfortable with gay references and humor that they hardly even notice it, and there have always been, and still are, people around who have absolutely no tolerance for it.
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