it’s such a delight to see everyone’s reactions to dc’s first pride special and all the good reviews coming in because its immensely well-deserved all around but i’ve been a little underwhelmed by the reactions specifically to the alan scott story and confused by no one acknowledging its immense significance. i’m obviously a huge huge alan fan and i’ve read every single one of his appearances, as well as a firm believer of him having been gaycoded since the days of all-american comics (1939), and i can finally say that his story in the pride special is everything i’ve ever wanted to see & everything i never thought we’d get
alan scott is a complicated man with a complicated history that has been gravely sanitized and reduced in recent years, infinite frontier (2021) #0 was disappointing for that exact reason – as much as it accomplished its goals of establishing alan as gay (not bisexual, not “queer”, not anything meaningless nor ambiguous) and closeted for the past eighty-something years, it presented too much of a reader-friendly version of him that does not truly exist elsewhere. on the other hand, sam johns & klaus janson create a literally impeccable narrative in he’s the light of my life and bring the entire special to a whole new level of storytelling. they present the real alan scott.
the story might easily be the bravest, most meaningful and significant thing dc’s ever put out there and that operates on two levels. there is, as always, the importance of alan scott – the original 1940s green lantern, the first bearer of a name that’s just second to dc’s trinity in terms of renown, a legacy character – being gay. this isn’t an oc created in the past year, this is the culmination of literal decades.
but, if not more then equally important, there’s the acknowledgement of the lifetime of fear alan’s lived through. we get the heartfelt story of his time with jimmy henton, his first love
and the immensity of a brush of a hand in a time of impossibility
but we also get something that has never before been shown in a mainstream comic book. a gay man who grew up and lived in the 30s and 40s shares his history of fear, deeply ingrained fear, for the first time in his life with his gay son
(”it was a bar for, uh, confirmed bachelors. you know, men… like us”)
(”they claimed we had corrupted moral fiber and they made us criminals to prove it”)
the reality of this, the explicitly worded reality of it, blew me away on a first read and still does. this isn’t a sad story – todd, alan’s son, is happy with his longtime boyfriend and goes to pride and does not live with the terror his father did – but the acknowledgement of what’s outright generational trauma resonates loudly and is necessary, it’s our history as much as alan’s. there’s a habit in modern lgbt comics to ignore What Came Before or to pretend coming out is always a possibility and never a matter of survival
(”at the time i did what i thought i needed to survive”)
alan scott’s story in dc’s pride special dares for a more complex narrative but one that has been sorely missing so far and the objective significance of that can’t be ignored