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Education

'Batman' expert has the perfect explanation for saying 'gay' at a Georgia school assembly

After being censored by the school's principle, he quit.

Harper Collins and Jack Burnley/DC Comics

Author Mark Tyler Nobleman and Batman and Robin.

Over the past few years, "Don't Say Gay" bills have been introduced across the U.S., sparking widespread controversy about how LGBTQ issues should be addressed in schools. Supporters argue they protect children from inappropriate content by restricting discussions of sexual orientation and gender identity in educational settings.

Opponents believe these bills marginalize LGBTQ individuals by fostering stigma and potentially infringing on teachers' ability to openly address students' questions or experiences.

Currently, 11 states have banned LGBTQ discussion in public schools, and 5 require parental consent.

Author and comic book expert Marc Tyler Nobleman recently found himself at the center of the controversy, and his simple rationale for using the word “gay” in his school presentations presents an age-appropriate and inclusive way to approach at the issue.

Nobleman has spoken in schools in “about 30 states and almost 20 countries” to inspire children to write and do research. He’s the author of the book “Bill the Boy Wonder: The Secret Co-creator of Batman” about the fabled superhero’s unsung co-creator.

Artist Bob Kane is known as the creator of Batman; however, Bill Finger is believed to have refined the costume and given the character his secret identity as Bruce Wayne, amongst other contributions.

Nobleman notes in his speeches that one of the significant reasons why Finger lives in obscurity is that he died in 1974, and his son, Fred Finger, was gay and died of AIDS complications at 43 in 1992. Without an heir, the movement to get Finger the proper credit lost any hope.

However, the twist in Nobleman’s presentation is when he reveals that through his research, he discovered that Fred Finger had a daughter, Athena. This led to DC Comics officially recognizing her grandfather as Batman’s co-creator in 2015.

“It’s the biggest twist of the story, and it’s usually when I get the most gasps," Nobleman told the Associated Press. “It's just a totally record-scratch moment.”

After a presentation at Sharon Elementary in Forsyth County, Georgia, on Monday, August 21, where he mentioned Fred FInger's orientation, the principal handed Nobleman a note saying, “Please only share the appropriate parts of the story for our elementary students.” So, he removed any reference to Fred Finger’s sexuality over his next two days of presentations.

The school’s principal, Brian Nelson, sent a letter to parents after the initial presentation that read: “This is not subject matter that we were aware that he was including nor content that we have approved for our students,” Nelson wrote. “I apologize that this took place. Action was taken to ensure that this was not included in Mr. Nobleman's subsequent speeches and further measures will be taken to prevent situations like this in the future.”

But after some soul-searching, in a presentation two days later, Nobleman said the word “gay” once again. After discussing the situation with the school, the remaining assemblies were canceled.

Nobleman shared his reasoning for using “gay” on X, formally known as Twitter, and his rationale makes a lot of sense. “And as I've told Jennifer [Caracciolo, the school’s chief communications officer] and her colleagues, mentioning a sexual orientation is NOT the same as discussing sexuality.”

That’s a huge point missed in much of the debate surrounding LGBTQ visibility in education. There is a big difference between discussing sexual acts—whether heterosexual or otherwise—and someone’s orientation, especially when there’s a good chance that there are children of LGBTQ parents in the audience.

Further, in a world where same-sex marriage and heterosexual marriage are treated equally, why is mentioning one orientation any different than the other?

“If a child asks me if I am married, can I say I have a wife? This is discrimination. It is also extremely insulting and dangerous to our children," Nobleman told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. "We have so much LGBTQ teen suicide because they are not welcome to speak up about their own lives in their own community.”'

Caracciolo likened saying “gay” in front of third graders to talking to kindergartners about one of the greatest atrocities in world history. “It would be almost like if someone was doing a speech to kindergartners and they talked about the Holocaust and the horrors of the Holocaust,” the district’s chief spokeswoman, Jennifer Caracciolo, said, according to The New York Times.

“I asked her not to compare a kind of love to mass murder,” Nobleman wrote in Newsweek.

After his remaining presentations were canceled, Nobleman emailed administrators involved in the controversy and asked them to take three specific actions:

-Apologize to their community for the principal's apology.

-Apologize to their community for censoring an established author who did what he was hired to do: Pump up their kids about reading, writing, and research.

-Challenge the standards that stigmatize any mention of LGBTQ people.

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The time the city of 'Batman' said movie producers stole its name and sued for royalties.

When you think of Batman, you probably think of this guy:

Image via Thinkstock.

Or this guy:


Image by Evening Standard/Getty Images.

Or this guy:


Image by Junko Kimura/Getty Images.

Or, maybe even this guy:


Image via Thinkstock.

But you're probably not thinking about these people:

Image by Ferhat 72.

That last image is an aerial view of the center of the town of Batman, Turkey.

It's home to about 370,000 people and is less than 100 miles from the Syrian border. Before the discovery of oil in the region in the 1940s, Batman wasn't much of a city — it was only home to about 3,000 people.

And it wasn't "Batman," either; it was a village named Iluh. Iluh was renamed in 1957, nearly two decades after the comic book character debuted, and took its name from a nearby river called the Batman River.

The name of the river and, therefore, the city has nothing to do with the comic book character. But in 2008, a man named Hüseyin Kalkan tried to change that.

At the time, Kalkan was the mayor of Batman (the town), and he wasn't too happy about “The Dark Knight," the film written and directed by Christopher Nolan and starring Christian Bale (he's the third Batman pictured).

"The name 'Batman' belongs to us. … There is only one Batman in the world. The American producers used the name of our city without informing us."

He told a Turkish news agency (via CNN) that "the name 'Batman' belongs to us … There is only one Batman in the world. The American producers used the name of our city without informing us."

And then Kalkan sued — according to various press reports, he brought an action against Nolan seeking untold royalty amounts.

But he didn't sue Warner Bros., who produced the movie, or DC Comics, for that matter.

Absurd, certainly, but the spark for the idea was even stranger.

A few years before the movie came out, Batman (the town, again) had fallen upon hard times. And worse, a few years before that — and horribly — the town was in the news due to a spate of “honor suicides."

As the New York Times reported, these occurred because when young women were engaged in premarital affairs, the culture sickeningly called for their brothers to kill them. To avoid this, in the words of the Times, "parents [were] trying to spare their sons from the harsh punishments associated with killing their sisters by pressing the daughters to take their own lives instead."

Bad news attracts reporters and, in this case, reporters led to crazy legal theories.

During one of Mayor Kalkan's many interviews during that period, a reporter facetiously (one hopes) asked him why the city hadn't sued the comic/movie/cartoon franchise seeking royalties.

After all, those dollars would go a long way toward balancing the city's books. (According to a Turkish news source.)

Kalkan took the question as a critique of his administration, and, as he told the media when announcing his lawsuit, “we found this criticism right and started to look for legal possibilities of a case like that."

And “The Dark Knight" was the first to fit the bill.

The lawsuit almost certainly went nowhere, of course; as of this writing a year later, there are few if any news reports discussing it further.

Nolan, on the other hand, wrote and directed "The Dark Knight Rises" for a 2012 release, without any reported legal threats from Turkish cities.

Dan Lewis runs the popular daily newsletter Now I Know ("Learn Something New Every Day, By Email"). To subscribe to his daily email, click here.

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