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welcome to the cotkey ride home for wednesday, August 11th, 2021. I'm Jackson Bird. Today, Robin has officially come out of the closet. No statement from Batman yet, but I do have the other details and a brief history of LGBTQ plus superheroes.

Plus, SpaceX is planning to put billboards in space, and plastic pollution is confusing the hermit crabs in Yorkshire.

Here are some of the cool things from the news today.

I've heard from a lot of people that one of the worst things about coming out can be when everybody else already knows.

When you've been made fun of relentlessly for being gay, even before you were sure that you

were, it can make it that much tougher to accept it yourself and to publicly admit it to others.

As filmmaker Savre Rogers says in his TED talk about representation on screen, quote,

it sucks when other people know you're queer before you do, because then you don't have anything

to protect yourself with, end quote. Fortunately, the subject of today's story is unaware of the fact that he's been the

butt of homophobic jokes for the better part of the last century because those jokes don't exist

in the comic book world in which he resides. But I bring it up to underscore how important this

story is. That, yes, it's kind of funny, but it also means a lot to a lot of people,

and will inevitably mean a lot to young people in the future, and do some good towards

continuing to normalize queer people and queer relationships. I am, of course, as teased in today's

intro, talking about the fact that Batman's sidekick Robin has officially come out.

Now, we're not talking about a new Robin character in the DC Extended Universe films, or the

original Dick Grayson Robin, who first appeared in the Batman comics in 1940, or even the

...