Anyone who has seen the Doom Patrol television series will be familiar with the character/setting Danny the Street, a sentient genderqueer, teleporting street that welcomes misfits and loners.
The character first appeared in issue #35 of the second volume of the Doom Patrol comic book in 1990. It should come as no surprise that the writer that created Danny the Street, Grant Morrison, has just come out.
In the Scottish writer’s recent interview with Mondo 2000, Morrison explains:
“when I was a kid there were no words to describe certain aspects of my own experience. I’ve been non-binary, cross-dressing, ‘gender queer’ since I was 10 years old, but the available terms for what I was doing and how I felt were few and far between. We had ‘transsexual’ and ‘transvestite’ both of which sounded like DSM classifications rather than lifestyle choices! I didn’t want to be labelled as a medical aberration because that’s not how it felt, nor was it something cut-and-dried and done. I didn’t want to ‘transition’ or embody my ‘female’ side exclusively, so I had no idea where I fit in.
Terms like ‘genderqueer’ and ‘non-binary’ only came into vogue in the mid-90s. So kids like me had very limited ways of describing our attraction to drag and sexual ambiguity. Nowadays there’s this whole new vocabulary, allowing kids to figure out exactly where they sit on the ‘color wheel’ of gender and sexuality, so I think it’s OK to lose a few contentious words when you are creating new ones that offer a more finely-grained approach to experience.”
Morrison has most recently served as writer, executive producer, and series creator for the NBCUniversal’s Peacock series Brave New World, based on the book of the same name by Aldous Huxley.
It is unknown at this time what Morrison’s preferred pronouns are.
Sources: Mondo 2000, DC Universe
