Birds of Gay

Meta
Title:	Birds of Gay
Creator:	Julian shipyrds
Date(s):	February 2024
Medium:	Print, online
Fandom:	Birds of Prey
Topic:	Babs/Dinah
External Links:	In Yaoi Zine Vol. 3 Archived version (PDF)
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Birds of Gay is a Babs/Dinah meta essay written by Julian shipyrds for the third volume of Yaoi Zine, which was themed "Yuri Zine." In it, the author discusses Babs/Dinah from their perspective as a latecomer to the fandom, having first read Birds of Prey in 2023. As their first footnote says:

Birds of Prey debuted during the days of the “old internet,” making it fairly challenging to find contemporary fan responses (more on this later.) So there was a great temptation to say this, the archival gap, too is yuri. But while I love to talk about research methods I think an essay about my attempts to get into comics DC++ servers is not actually that interesting, and also oh my god I want to talk about Dinah Lance and Barbara Gordon and their nightmare relationship

Some Topics Discussed

• Canon overview for those unfamiliar
• Information imbalance in Babs and Dinah's relationship
• Disability, identity, and Barbara Gordon's refusal to let herself be known
• Barbara as a very messy person
• Chuck Dixon: Notorious Homophobe Who Accidentally Made Characters Gay
• Babs and Dinah as deeply codependent <3
• Digital decay, queer archives, and the ephemeral nature of comics
• Obsession with a nearly 30-year-old comic? This, too, is yuri

Excerpts

Birds of Prey (1995-2009) is a comic about power, control, physicality, the internet, and convincing your girlfriend to set aside her moral principles. Well, not quite.

Critically, Barbara keeps her identity-- not just her superhero and civilian identities, but also her identity as a disabled woman-- secret. She has nearly unlimited access to information about Dinah, as well as the rest of the world; and she will not allow herself to be known. Her anonymity and her remove are her power and control. This makes the little worms in my brain do a sort of unhinged samba. If yuri is about absence, as the tumblr memes go, about reaching out and trying to grasp something you can never quite have, well!

Barbara’s weaponization of societal ableism and sexism leads to some very girl power rah-rah moments. But Barbara isn’t just someone who (depending on the writer) either overcomes or reclaims her disability; she’s also kind of a hot mess.

[Barbara's] past history with Power Girl is hinted at so darkly that every time Power Girl appears on screen I hear “No Children” start to play. I love this for Babs, in part because it positions her as Birds of Prey’s Batman, despite how often she butts heads with him, and in part because it creates a nightmare codependency between her and Dinah that is just catnip for my little brain.

This is the part where I would love to talk about the fan reaction to Dinah and Babs. There were clearly enough shippers that Dixon was both aware of and bothered by them (although I think Dixon would probably have been bothered if there was one person who thought his characters were gay, so that’s not a sure-fire barometer.) Unfortunately, Birds of Prey came out in the late 90s and early 2000s, and digital decay has not been kind to fan writing. The Wayback Machine’s coverage of forums tends to be spotty. The letters pages, where DC published fan letters and which often serve as a barometer for fan response, aren’t collected in the trade paperbacks that (unless I want to spend $300 on a full issue collection on eBay) are all I have access to. I can find fans looking back on Birds of Prey, but for contemporary reactions I’m left to fill in the gaps by reading forum post titles and clicking around defunct Geocities archives.

But comics themselves aren’t intended to last. As objects, individual issues are fragile, usually printed on cheap paper and referred to as “floppies.” The way they make us feel isn’t meant to last either; the industry is notorious for the way it churns through storylines, characters, and creators. That was last month’s issue. On to the next! And yet comics fans are often as obsessive as we are opinionated, cataloging every appearance of characters across 70 years of comics history, writing exhaustive wiki pages for one-off villains, reading a thousand pages of comics for a character who appears in maybe 30% of that runtime.

That’s the lot of a comics fan: you wind up longing for deeply flawed versions of characters who haven’t existed in 15 years. And if longing for the impossible is yuri, well!