'Batman & Robin' Director Says the Duo Totally Aren't Gay Lovers

Director Joel Schumacher has laid longstanding rumors to rest — no, he did not intentionally put gay subtext in his 1997 flop Batman & Robin. And he doesn’t think Batman and Robin have ever been gay.

Schumacher dished about basically his entire career in a recent profile by Vulture, and naturally the Batman franchise (he also directed Batman Forever) came up a few times.

“This all started way before me,” he said, referring to fans reading the caped crusader and his sidekick as gay lovers.

“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.”

While that is totally true and valid, Schumacher’s Batman & Robin really took things to a whole new homoerotic level, from the nipples added to George Clooney’s batsuit to the general campiness of the whole thing. 

Oh, and the part where Clooney actually admitted in a 2006 interview that he purposely played Batman as gay in the film.

Still, Schumacher insists that was never his intention, and thinks the media at the time only jumped on the idea that he purposely added gay subtext because he’s openly gay himself.

“If I wasn’t gay, they would never say those things,” he said.

Things have certainly changed a lot since the ‘90s, where plenty of films that are read as queer-coded today flew under the gay radar when it came to professional reviews. So Schumacher very likely has a point.

But whether he intended it or not, Batman & Robin is still, without a doubt, the gayest Batman film to date.