The joker is gay

This little man – in reality an fragment of the villain Clayface – ends up resembling the criminal clown and becomes a mini-Joker. "DC's queer villains are almost all bisexual women," the petition notes.

The Queer Prince Of Crime: A History

Ultimately, Shestakova isn't calling on DC to graft something new onto a beloved character, as some fans have interpreted, but to "restore" something that was already there.

A fully outed homicidal maniac in the guise of something intended to entertain children could further the bigoted conflation of LGBTQ people with abnormality and monstrosity. In this alternate timeline, Joe Chill never killed Thomas and Martha Wayne, instead, he managed to kill Bruce himself resulting in our classic Batman never existing and numerous other tragic event’s that completely changed the course of history for Thomas and Martha Wayne.
The mantle of Batman was taken over by Thomas Wayne and well, the mantle of Joker went to Martha Wayne, crazed by the grief of losing her son.

In the movie, the actor Jack Nicholson is magnetic as the charismatic, psychotic and farcical Clown Prince of Crime. Even worse, it made the Joker into the one thing he should never be: predictable.

RELATED: Harley Quinn Finally Gets Back at Joker for His Years of Abuse

That being said, works like Brian Azarello and Lee Bermejo's The Joker does a far better job at this type of Joker/Harley story; using his attachment to her to humanize rather than romanticize him, the latter of which is always problematic, given his history of domestic violence.

This isn't to say that ambiguity means a character can't be explicitly ambiguous, though.

After the book’s publication, there was a second movie,  Joker: Folie à Deux (2024) by the same director. As expected, the character keeps changing with new iterations. His sexuality has never been discussed in a canonical sense and most of his relationships have been extremely one-sided and self-serving- and with women. An excerpt of the essay can be read at 13^th Dimension.    

[2] An excellent analysis of the film was done by Abraham Josephine Riesman for Rolling Stone.

[3] Part of episode 47 of Justice League Action – Watchtower Toursis available here.

and the full episde 6 of DC Super Friends  – A visit from Superman, can be watched at this link.

[4] The idea of the Joker as a Trickster figure is developed in the essay Toward a Short Comparison and Contrast of the Joker with Trickster Characters of African Folklore by LaMarrison Fortel featured in The Man Who Laughs (2023) published by Crazy 8 Press.

[5] Bugs Bunny has appeared in drag in a large number of animated shorts.

His most iconic love interest was Harley Quinn with whom he had a kid even. In the notable second story of issue four, the exasperated magician Zatanna apparently curses the Clown Prince of Crime, and makes it appear that he is pregnant. I took the occasion to revisit, augment and correct my original essay. This depiction is also greatly inspired by Alan Moore and Brian Bolland’s Batman: The Killing Joke (1988); in particular how the man who will become the Joker loses his last shred of sanity when seeing his hideous and deformed visage – in a puddle in the comic, in a mirror in the film.

Not all people can relate to heroes, many of them love villains."

There's also a case to be made for ambiguity. Or at least, so I am told it continues to be, as I must confess I couldn’t make it past the first forty minutes. Originally Harley Quinn appeared in Batman: The Animated Series. He is also very flamboyant the obvious hints being his makeup routine and extravagant clothes.

The only exception is – his madness and chaos.

Was Joker ever canonically gay?

Joker was never explicitly referred to as “gay” but still mounting evidence shows that at one point in time he was envisioned to be gay. In my opinion, his representation is a nineties update of the one of the sixties TV series: darker, but with the same sensibility.

Recently, I was asked to translate my essay into Spanish for the comic site Zona Negativa, which I did with the generous permission of editors Rich Handley and Lou Tambone.