As usual I am surfing either YouTube or Wikipedia, this time in Wikipedia I stumbled upon some villians Wonder Woman fought when she lost her powers in the seventies and was a strange feminist icon. Comics had a strange rule that no character could be gay or lesbian but they sure did lean to it without flat out saying it. There was a trio known simly as 'Them!' headed by a woman in a top hat known appropriately as Top Hat, a hulk of a woman named fittingly as Moose Mama and Pinto, a cowboy-garbed woman.
Wikipedia article about Them!
Anyway, their shitck was to terrorize pretty young women by tying them up and parading them around town. It has been debated if the creators meant them to be lesbians but many do say that was what they were meant. Obviously they were blatant negative stereotypes of lesbians. Negative or not, their mere existence and prescence in the comic is a true statement of the feelings of women at the time. One thing, feminism was coming through and was a tough battle and still is a constant and GLBT was barely growing but feminist trialblazers didn't want to be known as 'lesbians'. So there was a divide between straight feminists and lesbian feminists.Their name is very poignant too and the cover artwork of their debut... the artists say they did it so the characters wouldn't appear on the cover and it would be too obvious they were gay but I think it brings a bigger statement. That Lesbians were something to be afraid of.
