As I noted in my backstory post, a year or so ago, I grew up in a town with no comic book store and the only regular access I had to the medium was via a single rotating rack of comics and magazines in a gas station down the mountain. However, it was the late '70s and early '80s and DC had done a bang-up job of spreading their properties into the larger culture. I watched countless cartoons based on DC properties, reruns of the Adam West Batman & Robin and of course the Christopher Reeve movies. Marvel properties crept in here and there - I remember my doctor's office having a lot of Spider-Man books as a kid - but mostly it was Batman, Superman and, of course, I watched Lynda Carter spin in a circle more times than I can remember. As a very small child I was asked by an aunt what I wanted to be when I grew up and I replied that I would be Wonder Woman; I later decided that everyone should have taken that as fair warning on my eventual coming out.

So, even in a town where the only two regularly available comic books were DC's Star Trek title and the Transformers tie-in I was still well-versed in the lore of at least one publisher's heroes. Like the photos NASA publishes of the sun, in which they blot out the star itself to reveal details of the activity around it, the absence of DC comics from my town simply made their presence on TV and in film more central to my experience of them. I even had a choose your own adventure book about Superman. Rather than being told in second person it was narrated in third person so that the reader guided Superman's choices as he defended Metropolis. Brand extension was in full swing with that one and it worked: I remember almost nothing about the book itself but it certainly did a lot to educate me about the Superman mythos.

What all the DC titles that were on offer in other media had in common was the idea of a secret identity. Lynda Carter was always having to find somewhere to turn into Wonder Woman; Christopher Reeve was busy bumbling around the office in hopes Margot Kidder didn't catch on; and the whole idea of the Bat Cave and those fireman's poles in the library of stately Wayne Manor had blown my mind wide open to the idea of secrets, how we keep them and why. The older I got and the more I realized about myself - I knew I was gay by fifth grade - the more that concept of the secret identity resonated for me. Here were people I was being told were heroes and role models, to the point real heroes on the evening news were compared to them, and those characters were lying all the time in order to protect who they really were from a world that contained deadly dangers.

From a very young age I was instructed by superhero properties that some secrets are OK to keep when their revelation might endanger you or the people you love, and from an almost equally young age I knew I had a secret that endangered me.

Being able to frame my frantic attempt at remaining sufficiently closeted to survive as a heroic sacrifice to save my real self for when I most needed him? That was psychological gold. When the Clark Kent of the Christopher Reeve movies gets hit by the taxi - smashing the taxi's grille but leaving Clark unscathed - the moment in which he bobbles an explanation was something with which I strongly identified. The Adam West Batman's effortless and almost condescending maintenance of his Bruce Wayne identity, as though a part of him couldn't believe the rubes around him were buying this bullshit, was something the arrogant teen I was turning into could absolutely look to for strength and guidance. Wonder Woman's frustrating back and forth between the experience of a reliable, needed and valued force for justice on the side of the Allies and that of Yeoman Diana Prince, secretary to the guy whose ass it seemed like she was constantly having to save, was one I looked to later in life when I found ways to make connections to other gay teens and learned to think of myself not as a freak with some terrible secret but as a genuinely normal and valuable and totally okay person forced by circumstance to build a false persona in order to get by.

Wonder Woman had her invisible airplane; Batman had the cave; Superman had the Fortress of Solitude; in all those places, they wore their "real" clothes, their costumes. Even in the Super Friends cartoon, they always showed up at the Hall of Justice in their tights and masks. I don't recall anyone showing up there under their secret identities, which isn't to say it never happened, it's to say that if it did it didn't stick. I learned not just that it was alright to have a secret I had to protect but that if I hung in there long enough I would one day find a safe space, a haven to which I could turn, someplace I could relax and be myself and where others could get to know the real me. Countless mindless hours of being sold Hostess cakes between segments of terrible animation did, in fact, teach me a valuable lesson: that I could find people who would accept me.

So, thanks, DC - and all comics, everywhere - for telling me when I did really need to hear it that it does get better. I hadn't thought about this stuff in years, but ComicBookQueers got the gears of memory working so many thanks to them as well. If you're a reader of PK, you should give them a listen. Every now and then Sgt. Sausagepants and Rubber Justice and I kick around the idea of a podcast on the back-channel, but in case that never happens - and even if it does - by all means you should be checking out CBQ for excellent and entertaining discussion.