Pride Goeth Before a Summer

I made reference to the Stonewall riots in this week's cartoon, and since LGBTQ Pride festivals, like just about everything else that is fun, have been cancelled this year, my Sapphoback Saturday post for this week rehashes a fistful of my Stonewall and Pride cartoons.

June, 1999

Actually, I've drawn very few cartoons about the Stonewall riots themselves. This one from their 30th anniversary featured one of the most virulently antigay Senators of the time, Jesse Helms (R-NC). No doubt he was in favor of cutting funding for the National Register of Historic Places even without their having adding the Stonewall Inn to their jurisdiction.

The hand in the framed picture behind the senator refers to an infamous campaign ad of his.

May, 2019

I couldn't let last year's 50th anniversary of the riots go unremarked. The cops were probably not as gentle as this one, but at least nobody died from a knee to the neck over the five days of rioting.

July, 2009

If we've seen tremendous progress in 51 years, much of it has been quite recent. Forty years after Stonewall, a police raid on the Rainbow Lounge in Fort Worth on June 28, 2009, was a brutal throwback to the bad old days:

...six Fort Worth officers and two Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission agents hauled 20 people from the [Rainbow Lounge] and arrested six of them for public intoxication; one was treated in intensive care with a severe head injury, the result of police tactics that gay rights activists would label brutality. The incident was followed by a blitz of media accounts, thousands of angry e-mails and a gay rights outcry that uncomfortably thrust Fort Worth into a national and even international spotlight.

Police Chief Jeff Halstead was vilified for his handling of the incident. Three officers were suspended. And the Texas LGBTQ community stood up for themselves and marched on city hall.

"A couple of weeks ago I never would have been in the street, let alone talking to a reporter," said Benjamin Guttery, a 24-year-old Army veteran who manages a jewelry store and who was detained in the raid. "This has lit such a fire in me. I have to defend myself." So he is toting a placard through Sundance Square that reads, "I WAS HOG TIED BY THE FWPD." In the oversized O he has drawn a pig's face and colored it a porky pink. It's the color of the day.

Five years later, the Fort Worth Star Telegram reported that much had changed because of the raid and the LGBTQ community's reaction.

Todd Camp, a gay activist, said Fort Worth has grown much friendlier toward the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community in five years. Now, maybe an eyebrow or two are raised when two men are seen embracing in public, but gone are the angry fist pumps.
“It’s mind-boggling to think what we would be without it,” said Camp, one of the founders of QCinema, the annual LGBT film festival in Fort Worth. “We would have a much worse Fort Worth for LGBT people. I don’t think we would have made as much progress as we did had it not been for the Rainbow Lounge. It helped the city on a national scale.”

August, 2015

When a film about Stonewall came out in 2015, the trailers showed that its central character was a white male with conventional Hollywood good looks. Activists pointed out — rather strongly — that the central figures in starting the riot were people of color, lesbians, and drag queens whose role ought not to be whitewashed.

June, 2001

So I have generally tried to depict a varied cross-section of our community in my Pride Month cartoons — in most of my cartoons, in fact. Although one can get complaints if the butt of the cartoon is anything other than a white cis male.

May, 1998, In Step Magazine, Milwaukee, WI

And running through the checklist of inclusiveness can be a challenge.

June, 2006

In recent years, at least until COVID-19 came along to spoil the party, the origins of Pride Month often have gotten obscured by the party atmosphere of festivals and parades. But we've thrived in spite of the AIDS crisis and the hounding of religious puritans who, to paraphrase Mencken, can't stand the idea that anyone anywhere might be having a good time.

June, 2004

When I started going to Pride festivals, I had to trek all the way to Milwaukee or Chicago. Not long after that, however, even small cities started having their own LGBTQ festivals.

June, 2011

These festivals allow folks to bust loose and be themselves ... providing it meets with Dad and Papa's approval. Many LGBTQ couples have children of their own, and there are PFLAG parents of elementary-school-age children as well. It is no more unusual to see families enjoying Pride festivals than any other summer festival. (Yes, "PFLAG parents" is redundant, but how else would you know who I was talking about?)

June, 2008

But there's still no escaping the outside world, so I have often used cartoons set at Pride festivals to comment on other issues of the day, whether it was some presidential policy, gays in the military, or in this case, the price of gasoline. Those high gas prices of the summer of 2008 were about to go into freefall, although it came at the price of the rest of the economy tanking.