Batman Researcher Told Not to Say ‘Gay’ at School Assemblies in Georgia

Batman says gay, and so should you!

Marc Tyler Nobleman is a Batman researcher (yes, that’s apparently a thing) who has written, amongst other works, a book called Bill the Boy Wonder: The Secret Co-Creator of Batman that tells the story of Bill Finger, the forgotten co-creator of the beloved superhero Batman.

According to the Associated Press, Nobleman was set to give a series of speeches at elementary schools in Forsyth County, a suburb in the Atlanta Metropolitan Area of Georgia, about Bill Finger with the aim of encouraging a love of researching and writing in elementary-age children. Unfortunately, the school district pushed back against Nobleman because his presentation mentioned, in passing, that Finger’s son was gay, which they feared would violate the recent wave of “Don’t Say Gay” laws sweeping the country. Nobleman, in the true spirit of Batman, refused.

Nobleman’s blog breaks down the timeline of the incidents, which started on August 21 at Sharon Elementary School. After his first presentation, the librarian expressed concern due to the intolerant nature of the school district. Nobleman told the librarian to invite the principal, Brian Nelson, but midway through the presentation that Nelson attended, the principal passed Nobleman a note stating, “Please only share the appropriate parts of the story for our elementary students.”

After debating it with the principal, Nobleman agreed, against his better judgement, to censor his next speech. Unfortunately, this led to the next school he was to speak at requesting he censor himself as well, and when he protested, they cited the fact that he had already acquiesced at Sharon Elementary. Nobleman went on to reluctantly censor himself, only to wake up days later to find that Sharon Elementary had issued an apology for his speech that had been picked up by local Fox and ABC affiliates, neither of which contacted Nobleman for comments.

“As Mr. Nobleman chronicled the tale, he included that Mr. Finger was ‘gay,’” the apology from Principal Nelson reads, giving an inaccurate description of Nobleman’s speech as it was Bill Finger’s son who was gay. “This is not subject matter that we were aware he was including nor content that we have approved for our students.”

“Imagine opening an email and reading the message that your sexual orientation, your family, your child, your very existence as a gay person warrants apology and an assurance that no discussion of your existence will be allowed,” says Forsyth Coalition for Education, a local progressive group, in an email to district officials as reported on in the New York Times.

According to Nobleman’s blog, the Forsyth superintendent, Jeff Bearden, then backed up the principal, saying, “Mr. Nelson did not state or imply that, ‘Your existence as a gay person warrants an apology.’ I would never approve of such a message. He was communicating to his 5th grade parents that sexuality, a topic that is not in our elementary standards, was broached by a guest author without our consent,” the superintendent explained in an example of completely tortured logic.

After this apology, Nobleman had a change of heart. “The Sharon principal apologized that I said ‘gay,’ as if I hurt people,” Nobleman recounts in his blog. “That was backwards. What hurt people was his apology.” From that point on, Nobleman refused to comply with demands that he remove the word “gay” from his presentation, and started pressing the point with anyone who tried to censor him. When he spoke at Settles Bridge Elementary, he invited the superintendent and the school district’s Chief Communications Officer, Jennifer Caracciolo, to his speech, in whichh he refused to cut the word “gay.” Caracciolo agreed to attend.

After his speech, Nobleman was refused a Q&A session that the students requested. Afterwards, while debating with the school administrators, Nobleman says that Carracciolo compared being gay to the Holocaust, saying that neither are appropriate for kindergarteners. “I shut that down without mercy, asking her not to compare how one person loves another to genocide,” Nobleman recalls. After this conversation where Nobleman refused to budge, he told the administrator that he would not be giving any more talks if he was to be censored. The district then canceled his remaining speeches.

It’s important to note that Georgia doesn’t even technically have a “Don’t Say Gay” law yet. According to an article in the Georgia Recorder which was published on August 23, two days after Nobleman’s first speech, a bill that is being referred to as Georgia’s version of Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill was tabled earlier in the year and reintroduced on August 23 by Republican Senator Carden Summers, but was still being debated at that time. The Recorder reports that more than 40 people signed up to speak on the bill when it was introduced, nearly all of them in opposition to the proposed law.

According to the aforementioned AP article, Cindy Martin, chair of a local parents group called the Mama Bears, claims that a 2022 Georgia law bans any discussions of sexuality because it grants parents “the right to direct the upbringing and the moral or religious training” of their children. That would be a rather loose interpretation of HB 1084, a law that specifically bans decisive discussions around the topic of race in schools, and doesn’t mention sexuality anywhere in the text of the bill. (It should be noted, however, that a bill banning decisive discussions around race is still fundamentally backwards and bigoted.)

“No one had imploded,” Nobleman says in an opinion piece he penned on the incident for Newsweek. “The ground hadn’t split. Locusts hadn’t swarmed. Yet the principal … was there in service not to those kids but rather a loud minority of intolerant parents.” Indeed, by all accounts, the children who attended the lectures had nothing but positive experiences, and found themselves encouraged to pursue careers related to writing and research. It’s the administrators at these schools, and the “concerned” parents groups, who should be ashamed of themselves, not Nobleman.

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