Detective Comics #859

[caivu]

It's Friday, August 20, 2010. Ring Weekend at the United States Military Academy. For Katherine Rebecca Kane, things are going aces.

She's the Brigade Executive Officer of the Corps of Cadets, making her third in the cadet command structure. She's in the top 5% of her class across the three areas of academics, military skills, and physical education. She's an Academy boxing champ and Airborne-, Air Assault-, and RECONDO-qualified. And she, secretly, has a loving girlfriend in the form of Sophie Moore, her roommate and one rank below her in the Brigade Staff. With only a few months to go before graduation and commissioning, life is good.



The following Monday she's summoned to the Brigade Tactical Officer's office.



We never find out who made this allegation, nor what exactly it even was. Those answers don't matter.

What matters is that Kate, despite being among the very best of what West Point can produce, now has an otherwise bright military future put in jeopardy for no other reason than she's a lesbian.

What matters is that Kate now has a choice to make.



She can be demoted but continue on in the Army and have a fulfilling career in, quite literally, the only thing she has ever wanted to do... but in so doing expose other closeted cadets to the risk of being outed during a full investigation. Including Sophie.

Or she can admit the truth, lose her entire future... but protect her fellow cadets.

It's an easy choice.

Comments

[broblawsky]

Don't Ask Don't Tell has been gone for nearly a decade at this point. Eventually, they're going to have to update Batwoman's backstory, or she risks being as dated as the Punisher.

[caivu]

They don't actually have to do that.

They can just have it be that DADT was repealed later in the DCU than in real life. That's essentially what was done with the Punisher, they just updated what war he was in, yeah? Real history isn't followed there 1:1 anyway, even accounting for the fictional parts, since the current pandemic was never a thing in the DCU.

Or they could keep it the same but have Kate be older than Bruce. But getting rid of it outright is unacceptable because of how unique and historically relevant that is to her character. Not to mention that it's basically the only thing keeping DADT in the public consciousness even a little bit; I sure don't know of anything else. When the Rebirth series was starting, I ran across multiple people who had no idea DADT had been a real thing, and even one who thought is was just some "SJW" thing created for the book.

That doesn't mean I want people learning history from comic books, but when historical literacy about fairly recent events like that is so poor already... I think being "dated" is more than a fair trade-off for taking such things away entirely.

[blackmassvillain]

Also, I was still in the military in 2010. And while some people didn't hide it like they did before, you still really weren't allowed to be out then, DADT wasn't repealed until 2011. So the timeline matches up, I'm sure whomever wrote that issue looked it up. But you are correct they are going to have to find some way around that.

[themajesticmoose]

One of the scenes that made me love Kate Kane so much