There are a great number of people who will insist, usually based on little to no textual evidence, that "No, come on, admit it. Batman and Robin are totally gay!" I have no objection to that reading, per se, and the 'Dynamic Duo' have certainly come to be used by the gay community as a kind of ironic icon (as opposed to Wonder Woman, who is usually a very sincerely employed icon), but the actual textual evidence for a gay relationship there is pretty damn slim.
What there is is a set of ambiguous circumstances that a few generations of gay kids have read as a homosexual relationship, and have taken solace in. That, in itself, is remarkable and interesting and deserves further thought, but that complex and interesting starting point is often dumbed down to "If you can't admit that they're gay, then you're a homophobe."
As for Sam and Frodo, well... Tolkien's narration lets a few things slip that provide the opportunity for a very homoerotic reading of the characters. Four things jump to mind (this was a missing section from my honours paper on Rings by the way). First, there's a long description of when Sam and Frodo are travelling through the dark tombs where Shelob lives of how much Sam loves Frodo, how dedicated he is, et cetera. After a typically long and wordy Tokienesque description (beautiful, but not brief!), it breaks and says [paraphrasing], "Sam would never say it like that, though. If asked, he would simply say, 'I love him!'" It's been pretty well established that Tolkien didn't intend for that to mean romantic love, but the implication is open to interpretation. That's the weakest of the evidence.
Second, there's the fight with Shelob. It is easily, far and away, the most touching and heroic moment of the entire 1,000-word story. I get tears every time I read it. This tiny fat little hobbit picks up what, to anyone else, would be a dagger, and to him is merely a pointy little short sword, and he takes on veritable goddess of blood-sucking spiders. But notice how he does it. He ends up underneath her "hairy and wrinkled" belly [paraphrasing, again], thrusts his little sword straight up, and then she sits down on him. The visual implications here would seem to be clear. He defeats Shelob using a phallic symbol that's thrust into (arguably) a villified vagina. I realize that's a very strong statement, and it's a little ambiguous, but still... holy crap.
Third, when Sam and Frodo arrive back in the Shire, there's a small bit of narrative description about Sam marrying Rosy, but then agonizing over whether to move in with her because he wants to stay with Frodo. He doesn't want to let go of his relationship with Sam specifically to enter a heterosexual marriage union. He's caught. The solution: Rosy and Sam move into Bag End. Yes, that's right. They all live in Frodo's hole.
Finally, the evidence that really convinces me, even before the fight with Shelob, there's a bit of narration (that of course doesn't appear in the film!) that describes Sam rising up [paraphrasing again], "Like some tiny furry animal, with it's tiny teeth bared defending its mate." The narration does not say "defending a member of its pack" (brotherhood), nor does it say "defending its young" (parenthood). It specifically likens their relationship to paired sex partners.
What I think is that, whether intentionally or not, the text makes Sam out to be in love with Frodo, and that love seems to be as intimate and as intense as any romantic love you could name. It is, however, characterized within the narration as sexual love and the discourse of romantic love is employed and implied in several places. The whole thing is very ambiguous, but it's a hell of a lot more warrented by the evidence the Batman/Robin pairing. Batman comics are an open set of narrative details with decades and decades worth of evidence produced by dozens of writers and artists. It's easy to cherry-pick, and very difficult to make a solid case about anything, therefore also easy to make a weak case about everything.
That's a question I've thought about a lot, actually. There are very few social categories that I will put myself in without a caveat or a reservation of some kind. If you were to talk to me for any length of time, you'd probably feel confident classifying me as (variously and in no particular order), a feminist, an environmentalist, a socialist, a geek, and an intellectual. That's fine. I have no problem with other people thinking of me that way. However, there's only one word that I self-identify with in that sentence (geek). All the others are extremely complicated ideological positions that I cannot say I either wholly agree or disagree with.
For example, feminism, on the whole, has been an extremely positive movement in the world, but properly speaking, there are all kinds of feminisms, not just one. Therefore, to categorically call myself "a feminist" would imply that I agree with all forms of feminism, which I don't. There are some that are totally out to lunch, like the ones that claim that men can't be feminists, or that only lesbians can be (counter-productive hogwash, thank you very much). I feel the same way about socialism, environmentalism, and intellectualism. I like those things, on the whole, but I don't identify as an unequivocal member of those categories because my beliefs are more complicated than that, and a lot more selective.
On the opposite end of the scale, you'd never think, after talking to me, that I'd be a conservative (party or ideology) or a capitalist, for example, but there are, on rare occasions, things in those ideologies that I either like, or just don't disagree with. A hard-core socialist would object to the very idea of selling labour for money, but I don't think it's inherently destructive. It's merely an economic practise that ought to happen within the context of a series of laws designed to protect labourers (i.e., fucking people), and not corporations (which are not people, even though they have been fucking people for over a century now).
The thing that I think is inherently destructive is identifying categorically with a ideological or a social group with such blindness that you feel the need to agree with or even defend anything said by anybody who also self-identifies with that group. Even worse, if you self-identify in that way, other people can manoeuvre you into a position where you're veritably forced to defend anything said by anybody who identifies as a member of the same category, and if the person you're arguing with is particularly ignorant and/or sleazy, they can make you argue with their version of that ideology (commonly called a "strawman").
All that being said, I do identify as a "geek" because 99% percent of the time, things that you might say about a geek, as the word is generally defined, can accurately be said of me, and I very much find that geeky social circles are the ones I'm most comfortable circulating in.
And if you really want to read an essay, ask me about gender...
I just realized that for the last couple of weeks, I've been telling people I was putting together "an RPG manual." It's a set of rules to play superhero characters with the d20 role-playing game system. However, I totally forgot that "RPG" also stands for "rocket-propelled grenade." Oops.
For the sake of discussion, in my own work I've broken this down to two things.
Self-reflexivity is when a story seems to, time and time again, refer back to itself, or to other stories, or to use the ideas of storytelling or performance a lot. For example, both Batman Begins and Casino Royale used performance, the construction of a persona, as justifications for Batman and James Bond's characters, respectively. Comics, by this definition, have been self-reflexive since the first moment someone said, "Say... how about we have the star of your comic book come and do a guest appearance in my comic book?" That's the original intertextual gesture, or intercomical if you like.
Metatextuality in comics, "metacomics," is when the fourth wall is broken, either explicitly or implicitly (though the latter is harder to pull off), and when that breakage is left in pieces on the floor, instead of being fixed either after the fact or at the end of the narrative. As I said before, Promethea and Sandman don't let reality be. It's constantly mixed with fiction in ways that just don't add up, and that's the point of metatextuality and metacomics. It's what they do, and it has deep implications in terms of both the power of media (mediation between the thing and the thing that represents the thing), and how much "reality" is always mediated (by icons, language, cultural assumption, even the functioning of our own sensory apparatus, to steal N. Katherine Hayles' phrasing).
The interesting thing is that, in comics, genuinely metacomical moments are almost always followed by self-reflexive "fixes." The first time Barry Allen travelled to Earth-Prime was a metacomical moment, but then Earth-Prime became just another element of the extended DC multiverse, and it reverted to an intercomical element. Earth-Prime became just another setting for superheroes. The What If? and Imaginary/Elseworlds stories were extra-diagetic narratives; they existed outside of the main story but used elements of it. However, the moment those stories were made to exist within the main narrative (i.e., their "universes" actually exist within the DC or Marvel multiverses), they revert back to being intercomical. For example, the Tangent characters, originally conceived as a way to fill in skip weeks back in the 90s, have just shown up in Ion: Guardian of the Universe as refugees of Infinite Crisis.
The point here is not to set up some kind of hierarchy in which the metacomical is inherently superior or more sophisticated than the intercomical/self-reflexive, but to show that comics have been sliding from the purely self-reflexive to the more and more metacomical since the late 60s (depending on how you recon it), and if that slide has finished (which I don't think it has), then we live in a time that has experienced the breach of fiction into reality, and we're trying to pick up the pieces, but this time in a way that betrays that we realize that the pieces will never actually fit back together, and indeed never did fit.