In retrospect, Harley Quinn’s greatest joke might have been persuading anyone she was straight in the first place.
The fan-favorite Batman villain has come a very, very long way since audiences first met her as a bit character on Batman: The Animated Series (B:TAS) in 1992, with subsequent appearances in more Bat-media than you can shake a comically oversized mallet at. When Todd Phillips’ Joker: Folie à Deux hits theaters this Friday, Lady Gaga will once again reintroduce us to Ms. Harleen Quinzel, a woman fixated on the homicidal “Joker” (Joaquin Phoenix), who embarks on a macabre romance/crime spree with Gotham City’s most dangerous man. Gaga’s Harley, whom she affectionately calls “Lee,” is also the subject of her tie-in concept album Harlequin. Speaking to Vogue, Gaga described “Lee” as “the embodiment of everything I believe women deserve to have in terms of freedom,” a feminist icon complicated by her defining characteristic: being “obsessed with a man.”
To hear Gaga tell it, the Harley of Folie à Deux is a fresh vision for the character, “something completely new” that defies audiences’ prior expectations. But to anyone who has been following Harley’s journey, Gaga’s description feels less like a brand-new direction and more like a throwback. The tension of Harley’s schoolgirl devotion to the Joker and what he represents — despite knowing how truly dangerous he is to her and others — was a theme explored in most licensed Harley stories for years after her breakout success. Since then, Harley’s journey has taken her far from her gun moll roots and thrust her into a niche we find much more compelling: the ultimate embodiment of “be gay, do crime.”
Famously created as a criminal sidekick for the award-winning Batman: The Animated Series, Harley Quinn was never supposed to be seen more than once. The brainchild of story editor Paul Dini, Harley was grudgingly accepted into the series by co-creator Bruce Timm, who later told Vulture he found Dini’s original concept “not very good.” Timm redesigned her as a harlequin-costumed yes-girl specifically to provide comic relief in the episode “Joker’s Favor.”
Harley was slated to be a one-off weirdo — until Dini and Timm finally saw her animated and joined with the voice of Arleen Sorkin, a regular on Days of Our Lives and an old friend of Dini. Sorkin, following Dini’s direction that Harley was Jewish, lended Harley her own voice and added “a little Yiddish sound.”
“I don’t want to pretend that I am this woman with great range, so I picked the one that I could do easily, and it worked,” Sorkin told Vulture, joking, “At least we know the Joker isn’t an anti-Semite. It’s his only good quality.”
Her September 1992 debut in “Joker’s Favor” offered little in the way of characterization for Harley, but she did display a chaotic streak of her own, rapping sleazy Gotham cop Harvey Bullock across the shins after he comes on to her at a police gala. Fans wouldn’t learn Harley’s origin story until December 1993, when the special standalone B:TAS comic book Mad Love hit shelves, revealing Harley as Harleen Quinzel, a psychiatrist who abandoned her old self to become Joker’s adoring — and heavily abused — jester. The one-shot comic won both the Eisner and Harvey Awards for Best Single Issue or Story in 1994, and was later adapted for TV. It would become the bedrock foundation of Harley stories for years to come.
But even before we knew Harleen Quinzel, LGBTQ+ fans knew something else about Quinn: she was definitely not just into dudes. Airing in January 1993, “Harley and Ivy” — Harley’s third appearance on B:TAS — saw her already on the outs with her beloved “Mistah J,” who blames her for his own incompetence during a high-speed chase with Batman and kicks her out of his gang. During her first solo burglary, Harley auspiciously crosses paths with Poison Ivy, the plant-themed ecoterrorist and literal thorn in Batman’s side since the 1960s. Characterized as an ardent man-hating radical feminist in B:TAS, Ivy encourages Harley to forget the Joker and become her own woman, and the duo swiftly make Gotham headlines as the new “Queens of Crime.”
The Dini-scripted “Harley and Ivy” reads on the surface like so many other “girl power” episodes of ’90s TV, as Ivy struggles to make Harley realize she doesn’t need a man to be happy. But amid gags like the iconic scene where Harley blows up a car full of catcalling men with a rocket launcher, there’s an undercurrent of sapphism in Harley and Ivy’s hijinks. Back at their hideout, the two women hang out not just without costumes, but without pants, and like all the best shipping fanfiction, there’s Only One Bed. It’s frankly hard to watch the episode and not come away assuming they slept together, especially after Ivy gives Harley a shot that will protect her from all toxins — including Ivy’s own poisonous kiss.
Of course, the status quo demanded that Harley return to the Joker’s side at the close of the episode, but that chance meeting would change Harley’s direction as a character forever. In a series full of fan-favorite characters who would later be officially folded into DC Comics lore, like Bullock and fellow Gotham cop Renee Montoya — who herself was later revealed to be a lesbian, in the pages of the police procedural Gotham Central — Harley Quinn was a true runaway sensation. She appeared in more comic book tie-ins to the animated series, including a 1993 Batgirl story penned by writer Kelley Puckett, who directly referenced the possible Harley-Ivy romance just one year after she was introduced. In a quiet moment during the story, Batgirl, reluctantly teaming up with Quinn, cautiously asks whether she and Ivy are, well, “you know.” “What, like everyone says about you and Supergirl?” Harley rejoins, prompting Batgirl to hurriedly drop the topic.
Harley made her canon DC Comics debut in 1999 with the special Batman: Harley Quinn, written once again by Dini and penciled by artist Yvel Guichet. In superhero comics, the determination of “canon” events,or what “really happened,” is largely based on a publisher’s primary fictional universe. This typically ignores stories in other media like animated series, movies, and live action TV, as well as comics that are said to happen in another universe — but Harley (along with Bullock, Montoya, and a handful of other B:TAS creations) would not be denied. The story reworked Harley’s animated origin to place her within the “No Man’s Land” crossover storyline, casting her as the Joker’s abandoned accomplice rather than a member of his gang in good standing. This version of Harley helped orchestrate Joker’s many escapes from Arkham Asylum, only to find that he barely remembered her after escaping herself. Amid the fallout of a devastating earthquake, Harley is rescued from the Joker’s own attempt to murder her by none other than Poison Ivy, who again provides Harley with a poison-nullifying serum that also imbues her with superhuman agility.
But while sapphic “Harlivy” shippers everywhere were already begging these two criminal cuties to U-Haul already, Harley would remain tethered to the Joker for years to come, and to other men after that. Her comics appearances of the 2000s saw Harley leave the Joker and return to her “puddin’” time and again; one of her longest stints sans Joker came when writer A.J. Lieberman and penciller Mike Huddleston took over her series in late 2002, switching directions from lighthearted superhero comedy plotlines to a noir-ish, bloody crime series. Happily unmoored from the Joker, Harley returned to psychiatry under an assumed name while dealing with a shadowy conspiracy and attempts on her life, all of which threw her together romantically with gruff, traumatized cop John Bishop. The close of that series found Harley choosing to permanently blind a young girl in order to finish a job, then turning herself back in at Arkham, believing she deserved to be imprisoned.
In 2009, Harley briefly reunited with Ivy in the pages of the all-female Gotham City Sirens series, which was soon canceled to make room for DC’s controversial reboot of all their series with brand-new fictional continuity, overwriting years of previous stories in a bid to pull in new readers. Dubbed the “New 52,” DC Comics’ new normal radically changed many characters’ designs and backstories: in Harley’s case, her hair was dyed pink and blue, her harlequin outfit became a ripped-up shirt and booty shorts, and she was shuffled off to join the Suicide Squad — and to enter another romance with masked (male) assassin Deadshot. (If this sounds suspiciously like the Harley of 2016’s box office disaster Suicide Squad, it should.)
Then things abruptly took a turn for the gayer. In 2013, Harley got another series of her own, this one helmed by husband and wife creative duo Jimmy Palmiotti and Amanda Conner. While the Joker cast a prominent shadow over her world, Harley also had a rich independent life of her own — one that involved plenty of flirting with Poison Ivy, albeit with a thin veneer of plausible “gal pal” deniability. During a Twitter Q&A in 2015, Palmiotti and Conner confirmed that Harley and Ivy were “girlfriends without the jealousy of monogamy,” setting the comics-reading internet ablaze (though many readers replied with affirmations they’d known this to be true since 1993).
Despite that revelation, DC editors seemed ambivalent about letting the Harlivy ship set sail on the actual page — at least, in their main fictional universe’s canon. Harley and Ivy could shower together on-panel in Palmiotti and Conner’s mainline DC Universe series, but not outright declare they were in love. DC’s digital-first series DC Bombshells, and its alternate-history World War II comic populated by the company’s most popular female characters, was another story. In an installment by creators Marguerite Bennett and Marguerite Sauvage, Harley and Ivy finally shared an impassioned, romantic kiss in 2016, more than 20 years after they first met. Bombshells was already known to fans as The Series Where Everyone Is Lesbians, and the catharsis of a true, textual Harlivy story only inspired more affection among queer fans. Harley and Ivy then found each other in another alternate universe, as DC’s Injustice tie-in comics from 2017 to 2020 provided another venue to give readers what they really wanted (i.e., Harley and Ivy eventually getting full-on married) without making it a part of either character’s “real,” canon characterization.
By the late 2010s, however, the writing was on the wall, and DC’s decision makers could no longer hold back the tide of fandom demands. Palmiotti and Conner broke the ice with a Harlivy kiss near the end of their series in 2017, though it looked more like a cheek peck than a proper smooch. (This was a last-minute editorial alteration from what would have been a mutual kiss, artist Chad Hardin later stated. That detail was seemingly confirmed in one DC.com blog, the only time the company has semi-officially commented on the matter). A few years later, Harley and Ivy became co-stars in HBO’s Harley Quinn adult animated series, leading to even greater fan interest in both characters; the show’s second season in 2020 followed each woman as she grappled with her feelings for the other, eventually leading both of them to admit their love and — in a Valentine's Day special — finally sleep together.
The dam had broken, and canon couldn’t stand up to the flood of sapphism for long. In March 2021, Batman: Urban Legends #1 hit shelves, bearing with it a Harlivy kiss for the ages drawn by artist Laura Braga. That June, DC Pride 2021 also carried a short Harlivy story by Mariko Tamaki and Amy Reeder, in which Harley declares Ivy to be “the sweetie for me.” With all pretense of heterosexuality between these two in tatters, DC had embraced what to many fans was always true: Harley and Ivy were hopelessly, even criminally, in love.
In the three years since, Harley and Ivy’s relationship has become the new normal for Harley’s character; apart from the HBO series, where the two can openly talk about sleeping together, Harlivy stories are now a staple of the annual DC Pride anthologies, and they’ve made romantic appearances in several other characters’ ongoing series, as well as Harley’s own. And lest one think Harley merely traded an unhealthy heterosexual obsession to an unhealthy bisexual one, the girl knows she has options should things go south. Another reimagined version of her character, this time in the new animated series Batman: Caped Crusader, has a new, more sinister affect and her eyes set on a different dance partner: Gotham cop Renee Montoya, her fellow traveler from all the way back in the days of B:TAS.
Folie à Deux, according to Lady Gaga, is a very personal project, and ostensibly contains some of the pop icon’s most confessional work. That’s laudable and worth analyzing on its own, but when it comes to Harleen Quinzel, “obsessed with a murderous clown boy” is literally so 1990s. Thankfully for her LGBTQ+ fans, Harley Quinn is closeted no more, and her brand of madcap queer villainy has only just begun to wave its flag.
The flag is rainbow-striped, and it’s sticking out of the barrel of a gun, by the way. Some jokes never get old.
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