The principal of a Georgia elementary school last week apologized to parents after a guest author discussing his investigation into a Batman co-creator told a group of fifth graders that the co-creator’s son was gay.
The author, Marc Tyler Nobleman, said the principals of two other elementary schools in the district where he spoke had asked him to stick to “appropriate” material and leave that detail out of his research. When he declined, his remaining presentations were cancelled.
mr. Nobleman is the author of “Bill the Boy Wonder: The Secret Co-Creator of Batman,” a biography defending the role comic book writer Bill Finger played in the creation of the superhero, for which cartoonist Bob Kane long received some credit.
Mr. Nobleman was invited to the Forsyth County school district north of Atlanta last week to tell students how his research helped reveal and gain recognition for Mr. Finger’s contributions to Batman’s development, including the direct recognizable pointy hood of the character and names like ‘Bruce Wayne’ and ‘Gotham City’.
Mr. Nobleman said that in his presentations to the students, he noted that Mr. Finger’s only child, Fred, was homosexual, as this fact played a key role in Mr. Finger’s legacy. After he died virtually penniless in 1974, many fans believed that getting official recognition for his work on Batman for Mr. Finger would be impossible without a living heir, said Mr. Nobleman. Some had assumed, he added, that no heir existed because Fred was gay and died in 1992.
But in the course of Mr. Nobleman’s investigation, he discovered that Fred Finger did indeed have a daughter, Athena Finger. She helped secure an official honor for her grandfather as the creator of DC Entertainment’s Batman in 2015.
Mr Nobleman said that after he mentioned that Fred was gay during his first interview with fifth-grade students at Sharon Elementary School on Aug. 21, the principal of the school gave him a note during his second presentation, asking him to “just the appropriate parts of the story.”
Later that day, the principal, Brian Nelson, sent an email to the families of the fifth grade students to apologize for what their children had heard. “This is not a topic that we knew he included, nor content that we approved for our students,” he wrote, adding that “action was taken to ensure that this was not included in subsequent speeches by the Lord Nobleman.”
The next day, Mr. Nobleman said, he had agreed to a request from the principal of a second elementary school in the district not to use the word “gay,” saying he had felt “trapped.”
The decision went against his conscience in part, he said, because “the point” of hosting a guest author is “to give kids something they might not get in their community.”
He did not omit the word “gay” during a presentation at a third school on Wednesday.
“For the sake of these kids, I can’t do that anymore,” he told the school’s principal and chief district spokeswoman Jennifer Caracciolo.
The remaining presentations at the school were canceled, Ms Caracciolo said, because “what Mr. Nobleman shared was a subject that was not appropriate to meet our state standards” and would have been more appropriate for older students.
“It would almost look like someone was giving a speech to preschoolers and they were talking about the Holocaust and the horrors of the Holocaust,” she said, adding that the district had used the episode to remind school principals that all learning resources, including guest lectures, , loudspeakers, should be “thoroughly vetted.”
Georgia Republicans have introduced bills to ban classroom teaching and discussion of sexual orientation and gender identity, similar to a Florida law that was recently expanded to ban discussion of these topics for all grade levels. Attempts to pass such a far-reaching law, which critics have dubbed the “Don’t say gay,” have so far been unsuccessful in Georgia.
Ms Caracciolo said the district had heard from parents who supported the apology. But other families were shocked, including members of the Forsyth Coalition for Education, a nonpartisan group of parents and educators who want to oppose conservative efforts to limit what can be taught in the district.
“Imagine opening an email and reading the message that your sexual orientation, your family, your child, your existence as a gay person warrants an apology and an assurance that no discussion of your existence will be allowed the coalition wrote in an email to district officials.
The controversy erupted months after the U.S. Department of Education concluded that the Republican-leaning school district may have violated student civil rights by removing certain books from its libraries, including Toni Morrison’s “The Bluest Eye” and “All Boys aren’. t Blue,” George M. Johnson’s memoir about growing up black and queer in America.
Dawn Anderson said her son, a fifth-grade student at Sharon Elementary, came home excited by Mr. Nobleman’s speech. She said she wasn’t surprised the school had felt the need to inform parents that the word “gay” was being said, given the county’s political affiliations.
But the mention of Mr. Nobleman about the fact that Mr. Finger was homosexual was “relevant to the story” and not a form of sex education, Ms Anderson said. In her response to the principal’s email, she wrote, “‘Gay’ is not a four-letter word.”
