Covering LGBT Pride

It's time to take a break from world war and assassination, so Steppinback Saturday puts down the guns and digs up the cover illustrations I made for In Step's coverage of PrideFest in Milwaukee.

In Step Newsmagazine cover, May 29, 1997

In Step was a biweekly newspaper published in Milwaukee from 1984 to 2003, originally in a 5.5” x 8.5” newsprint booklet format. By the time I started drawing for them in 1995, it had expanded to an 8.5” x 11” magazine size.

With the 64-page May 29, 1997 PrideFest issue, In Step launched its 11” x 17” tabloid size newspaper format, splurging occasionally on a full-color cover. (More often in those days, In Step printed two-color covers — a black-and-white photo or drawing with the flag and headline in an accent color.)

The crowd scene includes a few of the acts scheduled to appear, and a couple of my friends from Milwaukee who were certain to see themselves below the fold. Knowing the design of the official PrideFest t-shirt, I included one in the foreground, although the colors are wrong. (I can't remember whether I had any hand in colorizing the drawing or not, but I think I would have colored in the triangle in my signature if I had.)

In Step cover, August 20, 1998

Milwaukee's PrideFest moved to August in 1998; the warm weather proved a welcome change from the generally cool temperatures at the lakefront on the first weekend of June. Folding its attempted monthly arts magazine, Q Voice, back into itself, In Step inaugurated full-color covers as standard fare with that year's PrideFest issue. I'm fairly certain I did not colorize this drawing, which, to Arts Editor Jorge Cabal's probable relief, was not of a crowd scene.

I still wanted to demonstrate inclusivity, but didn't include any real people this time. The drawing with the martini glass was a nod to the other on-staff cartoonist at the paper, Bob Arnold, whose single-panel "Life's a Drag" featured monologues by characters reduced to geometric shapes.

In Step cover, July 29, 1999

The following year, I went back to depicting a crowd scene, this time from a photograph I'd taken at the 1998 festival. I took some liberties in the name of diversity, and filled in the area above the fold with drawings from publicity photos of the featured visiting performers Kathy Sledge, Les Lokey and Men Out Loud.

Jorge didn't bother to color in each individual in the crowd, opting instead for abstract swaths of yellow, pink and blue. He, or whoever was in charge of layout for the issue, added the "Pride 99" headline and the "15th Year" logo.

I missed out on the next couple of PrideFest covers. When I was asked to draw a cover illustration for the 2002 issue, I eschewed inclusivity in favor of parody.

Wisconsin In Step, May 30, 2002

I believe I did the colorizing of the foreground characters in this one. Since I didn't have any CMYK capability at the time, I'm surprised that it came out as well as it did. (Standard photo-editing software saves color graphics in RGB format — that is, Red, Green, and Blue, the color of the light pixels on your screen — which is fine for photographs. It can be disappointing for cartoons, however, because RGB has no black. The colors of CMYK correspond to the four basic printer ink colors, Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and Black.)

In Step would produce one last PrideFest issue in 2003 (two, if you count the cover story in the following issue about the festival's fiscal mismanagement that year, exacerbated by a weekend of rain). But the 2002 cover was my last for them.

Publisher George Attewell abruptly shut In Step down after the November 20, 2003 issue. According to the Milwaukee LGBT History Project,

Contributing staff had even been preparing articles for the next issue that never came about. The publisher is reported to have lost interest in the paper and it became more of a chore than a pleasure or passion. Although a last "wrap up" issue was promised, none ever appeared.

Wisconsin still had a "bar rag" published out of Green Bay at the time, but its focus was and is on the bar scene, not hard news. There were a few attempts by others to start another LGBT newspaper over the next couple of years, but nothing lasted until some disgruntled staffers from Chicago Free Press fled north of the border and launched Wisconsin Gazette in 2009.

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Well, if you were hoping for insights into important historical events, I'm sorry to have disappointed you. But if you're jonesing for some World War I, I can point you to an insightful article comparing Kaiser Wilhelm II to King Donald of Orange in The New Yorker this week.