Joel Schumacher -- director of 1995's Batman Forever and 1997's Batman & Robin -- has addressed the latter film's perceived homosexual subtext. Schumacher, who himself is openly gay, has long been accused of projecting his sexuality onto the film (through such things as the infamous costume redesigns.) The director denies this, however, explaining it was never his intention and that perceived gay undertones had been a part of the Batman franchise well before he entered the fray.

In an interview with Vulture, Schumacher was asked about audience perception that his two Batman films, Batman & Robin in particular, made the titular character "gayer." He simply replied, "If I wasn’t gay, they would never say those things."

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Schumacher was then asked if he believed this mindset came from a place of either homophobia or laziness. "You know what I think? I shouldn’t have made a sequel, and that’s all there is to it," he answered. "I learned that sequels are only made for one reason. I’m sure that Batman Forever was the cheapest Batman movie ever made because Val [Kilmer] didn’t get a lot of money, Nicole [Kidman] didn’t, Chris O’Donnell didn’t and I didn’t. Tommy [Lee Jones] got a bit of a payday because he’d just won the Oscar for The Fugitive and Jim Carrey had already done Ace Ventura."

From there, the director was asked about the theory he portrayed protagonist Bruce Wayne as a closeted gay man, as well as the theory he redesigned the Batmobile to be more phallic. In response, he pointed out that the idea of Batman being subtextually gay had been present among commentators long before Batman & Robin was ever released.

"This all started way before me," Schumacher said. "Long before I came along, someone wrote a whole thing about what the real message of fairy tales and children's stories are. Snow White was all about having bad stepmothers. And Batman and Robin are two homosexual men living in a cave, living together. There’s always been this thing about Batman and Robin being gay."

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The director refers to psychiatrist Fredric Wertham's 1954 book Seduction of the Innocent, which claimed comic books were corrupting young readers. Wertham argued that the characters of Batman and Robin offered a "wish dream of two homosexuals living together." However, a 2012 article in Information & Culture: A Journal of History revealed Wertham had mischaracterized much of research, and that his two gay subjects actually confessed to fantasizing more about such characters as Tarzan and Namor the Sub-Mariner, rather than DC's Dynamic Duo.

Finally, Schumacher was asked if his portrayal of Batman & Robin's titular characters was, in any way, a tongue-in-cheek nod to the perceptions of the past. "No," he said. "Nor do I ever think Batman and Robin are gay. There were a lot of people who I would say, in one particular community, wanted George Clooney to be gay so badly."