Director Joel Schumacher, known for helming the two Batman films Batman Forever and Batman & Robin insists Batman was never meant to be gay in either film.
In a new interview, in which Schumacher also numbers his sexual partners at about 20,000, the Flatliners filmmaker has slammed rumors that as an out-gay man he intended his Batman films to have some kind of gay subtext.
Related: Gay director Joel Schumacher has schtupped 10,000 or 20,000 dudes
“If I wasn’t gay, they would never say those things,” Schumacher said in an interview with Vulture. He also notes that critics had attacked Batman as a gay character as early as the 1950s. “This all started way before me. Long before I came along, someone wrote a whole thing about what the real message of fairy tales and children’s stories are. Snow White was all about having bad stepmothers. And Batman and Robin are two homosexual men living in a cave, living together. There’s always been this thing about Batman and Robin being gay.”
Schumacher has endured the criticism since he redesigned the Batman and Robin costumes for Batman Forever, adding nipples to their armor.
Despite the success of Batman Forever, which had the biggest opening of all time for a movie, Batman & Robin proved an enormous flop, effectively crashing the franchise that began in 1989 with Tim Burton’s Batman. Schumacher has said on numerous occasions that he takes full responsibility for the quality of the film, and apologized to fans as well.
