Exactly how merry were those Merry Men? That is the question. We like the answer Italian artist Valeriano Elfodiluce came up with for his homo-hot comic Robin Hoog, available online in both Italian and English.

In the adventures of this cock Robin, we enter a Sherwood Forest that is cum-drenched to its very roots. Panels are jammed with balls-to-butt sexcapades and the guys rarely come up for air, having to advance the plot between “mhhs”, “ahhs” and “omygods.” (Elfodiluce makes a valiant but happily futile effort to actually tell the story of Robin Hood.) Maid Marian is but nowhere to be found and in her place we meet such burlesque punchlines as “Robert of Cocksley,” “Sir Guy Dickmore” and — of course — “Friar Fuck.”

Even Sherwood Forest is here renamed — somewhat perplexingly — as “Shamewood Forest.” (Hey, Valeriano, didn’t you get the memo? We’re modern queers now. We left shame at Stonewall.) It’s a total homo retrofit and the storyline bares not even an idiot cousin’s resemblance to anything Errol Flynn ever attempted in the classic Warner Brothers version of the legend. (Correction, ever attempted onscreen. Flynn was the Colin Farrel of his day, in both Black Irish good looks and bad-boy pluck.)

Working under the nom de porn Wally Rainbow, Elfodiluce, 25, says he was inspired by the underground comics that came out of the U.S. in the 1970’s, especially the gay ones, which were both “funny and a little bit malicious.”

Well, we think he’s got that 70’s underground bite down cold. You can forget about stealing from the rich and giving to the poor. This Robin Hood’s idea of altruism comes at the end of a big dick: At one point, he says in deathless bubble dialog “I LOATHE injustice and ABUSES OF POWER … and that lad is about to suffer both. So if I get the chance, I want to stop it. Well, EXECUTIONER, what do you say? Do you accept my offer to SCREW ME IN HIS PLACE??? Or aren’t you in my CLASS?”

On his Robin Hoog website (as in Hog, get it?), Elfodiluce says he was inspired by the recent work of the professor Stephen Knight who has re-examined the Robin Hood legend with a modern eye.

Knight, the head of the English Literature department at Cardiff University in Wales, has speculated that the real Robin — Sir Robin of Locksley — may have chosen to live a double life — that is, as both outlaw and count — due to the power politics of his time, which saw male homosexuality as a congenital weakness, despite the contemporary example of such blood-soaked warrior-homos as Richard the Lionhearted.

In the shadows of Sherwood Forest, then, a nobleman could meet up with a band of very merry — in modern parlance, gay – men of like mind. In this reading, Maid Marian is no more than Robin’s beard, while his true love is a strapping fellow outlaw, known to us now as Little John.

Knight, it should be noted, has no particular affinity with “Queer Studies,” being both married and an expert in English ballads (not cultural studies.) His specialty is the Robin Hood cycle and he has written many books on the subject, including the recent Robin Hood — a Mythic Biography.

Though considered one of the foremost experts on Robin Hood, he had no wider recognition outside of academic circles. It was only when he speculated on Robin’s sexual orientation — “the paragraph,” he says, “heard round the world” — that he found himself the center of an international uproar in 1999. He writes about that time, as well as the “gendering of Robin Hood,” in an entertaining essay that appears on the scholarly site Interviews in Sherwood.

Recalls Knight:

It started with a paper I was writing for the second international Robin Hood conference in, naturally, Nottingham. I have become interested in how the Victorians transmitted the outlaw tradition with their characteristic cocktail of sanctity and sado-masochism … I have been working on some long forgotten Robin Hood novels. I decided to talk about one of the shorter and more interesting ones, Maid Marian: the Forest Queen (1849) …

I commented that as Maid Marian did almost nothing in the novel … perhaps [the] sub-title was tongue-in-cheek and made reference to the fact that the Robin Hood legend is certainly homosocial and, through all the male bonding, fighting, feasting and intermasculine emotion, can be taken as a saga of homosexual values.

The remarks were soon picked up by a rapid succession of newspapers:

The Sunday Times story boiled [this conjecture] down to Was Robin Hood Gay? There was a fine color pic of ultra-handsome Errol Flynn (right) and an astutely selected illustration … showing Robin and Friar Tuck playing horsey in the water. The text focused on the sharp shock of the gay charge, but also, as suits a serious Sunday paper, had research on show: The distinguished Barrie Dobson, Professor at Cambridge, said that homosexuality in the medieval period was not necessarily as repressed as you might think, and there was a nice round-up from the present Earl of Huntingdon saying goodness gracious me…

In the next few days at work the phones were hot … I did a startling number of radio interviews, probably 30 in the week. Memorable were a couple of debates with the folks from Nottingham, more put out than usual, and feeling very threatened by the whole idea of unnatural forest practices … Getting silly, I suggested they should chase the pink dollar like Sydney with its Gay Mardi Gras.

As you might expect, the professor got a ton of emails, phone calls and letters from the “tooled-up members of the nutter community”:

The opposition fell into two camps (if I may use that term). One was standard anti-academic: `What do we pay these people for? Why doesn’t he get on with finding a cure for cancer?’ … But most, and most interesting, were those which revealed, by projection, the anxieties of the authors. Most of them referred to children — this really deserves researching, but I think it’s Neurosis Studies, not Robin Hood Research. They accused me of spoiling the Robin Hood story for children — who presumably were in their own special and warm care …

One guy from Nottingham said that after calling Robin Hood gay, what’s next, calling Father Christmas a pedophile? A view that bears some thinking about. The projection of anxiety about sexuality seemed the dominant cause of outrage, not any explicit form of gay-bashing …

Was it, in fact, not the homosexual gendering of Robin Hood that was the problem for these people, but simply the gendering of Robin Hood? Has he not — like Peter Pan, Adam and Eve … George Bush, Queen Victoria — been someone who you could identify with without having to involve yourself in the bogs and fens of sexuality?

Yet at the same time [Robin Hood] is beset — or empowered — by symbols. Deep forest, dark caverns, towers to be climbed, tunnels to be penetrated; and all that done with bows, arrows, swords, spears and quarter-staffs, and in tight green tights at that.

The tradition is seething with a strongly coded sexuality, that is curiously uncoupled from conventional morality because of its coding. And so [it] is, in the contemporary American critical language, `queer’, resistant to authority, like any outlaw … That’s my conclusion at present …

The remarkable international response to the idea that Robin was gay has been in my view only the pain of recognition of a deep-seated element in the myth that has always been there … Like a dream. Robin has been represented in film as a conspicuously handsome man, Fairbanks, Flynn … to name the obvious cases — and in each case also a distinctly androgynous beauty. I suspect the reason many people find Kevin Costner uninteresting in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves is because he has neither the trickster spirit nor the double-gendered beauty of those other heroes…

And one of the amusing things about the Robin Hood myth is that the covert nature of its sexuality was a major reason for its enormous growth in popularity in the early 20th century. As the education system expanded, seeking texts that could imbue Englishness, decency, masculine values, but were not — like the Arthur legend — stained with adultery, many school curriculum authorities settled on retellings of the Robin Hood story in plain prose…

So the kiddies play-acted in this hygienised environment the man who fought with arrow and sword and quarter staff, and inter-phallicised endlessly with his masculine coevals, while Maid Marian drooped about waiting for the token final kiss, or perhaps just hand-holding. The combination of powerfully coded sexuality, and overtly asexual text seems central to the dynamic of the Robin Hood story — all happening in the natural depths of the richly green productive forest — and it may be that to suggest that sexuality is in there … is to break the taboo on which the coded dynamics of the heroic saga have depended.

I’ve spoiled it for adults, not children.

Cartoons by Valeriano Elfodiluce (right)
Available at the Robin Hoog website.

The Gendering of Robin Hood
© 2005 Stephen Knight
Professor Knight’s latest book is
Robin Hood — a Mythic Biography

©2005 Nightcharm
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