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Sinestro Will Sleep With Men, Women In Times Square For Victory

We've been wondering for a while about Sinestro's sexuality. The fascistic alien conqueror, from DC Comics' Green Lantern series, sports a neat little mustache and a costume that's skin-tight and unusually heavy on the gold lamé, even by superhero/supervillain standards. And then we discovered a page from an old Green Lantern comic that made our sex questions even more pressing — and so we decided to talk to the comic's writer and shed some light on what makes Sinestro happy.

Here's the page that started us questioning Sinestro's orientation. It comes from Green Lantern #221, part of the Millennium cross-over. In a nutshell, the Green Lanterns (a space police force with magic wishing rings) are protecting a group of humans who are supposed to develop into the next stage of human evolution. It all goes horribly wrong, as you can read here. Those humans are supposed to evolve into quasi-gods and save the universe, or something.

One of those humans, Extraño, is very, very gay. He wears a pink shirt unbuttoned to his waist, huge earrings and chains. And he says things like, "I'd like to see some men in uniform!" (Sadly, he later gets AIDS.) In this scene from Green Lantern #211, the Green Lanterns have captured Sinestro, the would-be ruler of everything, and they're keeping him tightly bound. But Sinestro decides to flirt with Extraño. Is it a ploy? Or just a genuine moment of attraction? You be the judge:

So I had to ask Steve Englehart, the writer of that comic (and Millennium in general) what was going on here. Was Sinestro really gay? Or just pretending? Since another member of Sinestro's race, Katma Tui, married an Earthman (John Stewart), he definitely could have something akin to human sexuality. Here's what Engelhart says:

I haven't thought about Sinestro for a while, obviously, but here's my take:

He has an powerful, intense, crafty mind. He's the equal or better of most GLs, because he was one, and he's set himself against all 3600 of them. It's the life-choice of a man with an immense ego and grandiose imagination, who has no respect for conventional boundaries. His one overriding, single-minded goal is winning, and he will do anything to accomplish it. So - I don't see him thinking about sex much. At least to my time, we never saw him with another person, let alone another male or female. But since, in effect, he doesn't care, he would certainly seduce Extaño if that would help him, and he would certainly sleep with him in Times Square of that would help him. In other words, he's neither gay, straight, nor metro, he's just sociopathic.

So there you have it.

3:42 PM on Fri Apr 11 2008
By Charlie Jane Anders
8,986 views
28 comments

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