Q Toon: Drawing the Line

Trigger warning: there's some mature subject matter in today's post.

After Donald Joffrey Trump's disgraceful press conference alongside his Russian handler a couple weeks ago, there was a flurry of editorial cartoons, Twitter memes, late-night comedian gags, and picket signs depicting or at least implying homosexual relations between the two. Kissing. Spooning in bed. Trump, er, servicing Putin one way or the other.

Complaints quickly followed that the metaphor is homophobic.

These signs and these “jokes” don’t hurt Trump and Putin. They do hurt people, especially young people, who are actually gay or queer. Because you cannot deride homosexuality without deriding gay people, even if the jokes are meant to be at the expense of someone’s ego. They still reinforce the idea that there is something funny about same-sex attraction.

Despite my reflex tendency to err on the side of free speech, I have to agree.

I had initially disagreed with the charge of homophobia against somebody's tweet to the effect of "The same people who impeached Bill Clinton for a blow job in private are defending Trump for giving a blow job in public." The same sexual relation (sorry, Bill, it is) whether straight or gay, right? But after some consideration, I had to ask whether a cartoonist, comedian, memer, or picketer who bought into Trump's criticism at the G-7 summit of Germany's oil pipeline out of Russia could then make the same sort of fellatio remark about Angela Merkel and Putin. Would that be sexist?

Yes, it definitely would. 

On the other hand, the cliché that shows up in cartoons a lot, "Politics makes strange bedfellows," did not originally imply copulative behavior. (If you doubt that, try calling your romantic partner a "bedfellow" to his/her face sometime.) Once upon a time, there might be any number of reasons why two people might be obliged to spend the night in the same bed; it did require mutual trust, and it did keep both people warm. Sometimes, a bed is just for sleep.

For example, I was not implying an orgy in this 1986 cartoon.

As a faithful follower of this blog, you are aware that I have already drawn my cartoon on the topic of the Putin-Trump meeting in Helsinki, and there was no homophobic, bdsmphobic, or furryphobic subtext implied in it.

That particular idea came to me without the sort of anguished brainstorming depicted in today's cartoon. Also, my drawing board has never been that uncluttered since the day I took it out of the box. (But as anyone who knows me can tell you, talking to myself is an indispensable part of my creative process. And just about every other cogitative process.)

I guess I've obliged myself to "draw about something else" next week, which will please at least one of my Facebook friends. If only Mr. Trump could refrain from outrageous behavior that long.

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P.S.: In a similar vein, Jerusalem Report has severed its ties with Avi Katz, an Israeli cartoonist who drew a cartoon depicting Likud politicians as pigs with a quotation from Orwell's Animal Farm. The cartoon, posted on Facebook, was in response to the religious nation-state law passed this month. Report publishers decided that the swine imagery was anti-Semitic.