Yesterday the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation published the nominations for their annual awards honoring mainstream works of television, cinema, comics, and journalism that they consider to have done an outstanding job of depicting the LGBTQ community and the lives of those within it. Some of the nominees are, unsurprisingly, very close to our hearts.
True Blood is down as an Outstanding Drama Series, and in the category of Outstanding Film, ParaNorman got a nod as what is possibly the first mainstream animated children’s movie to (quietly and quickly) feature a gay character. But it’s the comics section where out affections truly lie. Not simply with the nomination for female comics writer Marjorie Liu‘s Astonishing X-Men, or the Buffy the Vampire Slayer comic, but also for Batwoman‘s third nomination for a GLAAD award for Outstanding Comic Book, meaning that since her debut run in Detective Comics, this version of Kate Kane (yes, comics nerds, she’s different enough from her 52 debut for this to be a meaningful distinction) has never missed a GLAAD nomination during a year in which she was regularly appearing in comics.
If she manages to pull of the win, it’ll also be her third, but she’s got stiff competition this year in the form of Archie Comics’ Kevin Keller, also nominated. Keller’s debut as the first out gay character in the Archie universe was a sell-out title, and the character now has his own series and his own (in a future-set story) wedding issue. May the best book win! Just kidding, GO BATWOMAN GO.
The final nomination in the Comic Book category is DC Comics’ Earth 2, featuring gay character Alan Scott, an alternate universe Green Lantern. The Beat makes a very good point in their article on the nominations: the GLAAD awards are intended to focus on efforts to include LGBTQ characters in the mainstream media, as that is where honest representation of the LGBTQ community can have the most effect on society’s acceptance of the actual people within it. Indie comics, those not published by the big comic houses like DC, Marvel, and Dark Horse, have long been a place for comics with better demographic representation. For one that came out this year, they recommend Alison Bechdel‘s return to the graphic novel, Are You My Mother? and I can’t disagree.
(via Deadline.)
