Expanding a bit on yesterday's talk of drawing hands, here's an excerpt from Cartooning the Head and Figure by Jack Hamm.
There are five pages entirely devoted to drawing hands; this is only one of them.
I don't know who, outside of Sci Fi toonists, or the polydactyly community perhaps, would be interested in drawing hands with extra fingers (figures 2.27, 2.29 and 2.30). It's more tempting, and common, to draw fewer fingers, not more.
Live long and prosper.
Um, well, no.
To be honest and up front, this ain't from this week's syndicate cartoon. I swiped this from The Brand New Monty Python Papperbok ("Triffic" — I. Nastase). But it does illustrate my frustration trying to draw one of the hands in this week's oeuvre.
I was up drawing very late last night; the topic I originally intended to draw about hadn't gelled into any original cartoon, so I gave up and started thinking about a completely different topic sometime around 9:00 p.m. or so. It took at least another hour before I had anything worth putting pencil to bristol board, and another half hour fine tuning the faces of the two persons in the cartoon (one of whom had to appear in three separate panels).
A four-panel cartoon doesn't leave much space for drawing bodies, but including hands in the frame goes a long way toward depicting someone's expressions. Most people, not just Italians, talk with their hands as much as their mouths. So I drew five hands in the cartoon.
But one of them just wouldn't come out right.
So this morning, I spread white-out over the offending hand, looked for something helpful in Cartooning the Head & Figure, went back and forth between mirror and drawing board, penciled something better in the margin of the cartoon, and did my best to copy it in ink on top of the white-out.
And ended up photoshopping it out of the finished cartoon anyway.
Having reviewed labor strikes with "Ding" Darling and the Texas run-off with John Knott, let's catch up on some of the other issues catching cartoonists' attention in August, 1922:
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| "Just When We Need Amusement, Too" by Bill Sykes in Philadelphia Evening Ledger, Aug. 23, 1922 |
Election season wasn't limited to Texas, of course. In addition to the strikes by railroad workers and coal miners, a top issue in Washington was congressional wrangling over a tariff bill. Manufacturing interests pushed for raising tariffs on imported goods, while agricultural concerns worried that high tariffs would be answered in kind on their exports.
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| "More Callers" by Wm. Donahey in Cleveland Plain Dealer, Aug./Sept. 1922 |
There were plenty of other pressing issues, besides.
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| "Behind the Political Scenes" by Elmer Bushnell for Central Press Assn., ca. Aug. 28, 1922 |
Nor had beer and wine interests given up on salvaging a domestic market for their goods in spite of Prohibition. Some proposed legalizing the sale of "light wine" and "near beer" (2.75% alcohol content).
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| "It Looks As If It's Gonna Be Kinda Crowded" by Dorman H. Smith for Newspaper Enterprise Assn., ca. Aug. 19, 1922 |
Dorman Smith's "Aunty Prohibition" looks suspiciously like "Miss Democracy," whose origin and fate we attempted to discern two years ago. The "Drys" and "Wets" did not, however, divide neatly along party lines.
The same was true of several other issues, including the tariff situation, and a proposal to issue bonus payments to veterans of World War I.
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| "For Political Purposes" by Daniel Fitzpatrick in St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Aug. 31, 1922 |
The Senate passed a bonus bill in August, authorizing payment of a dollar per day spent in the military, plus an additional quarter per day spent overseas. The argument in favor of the bonus was that the nation owed its veterans a debt of more than just gratitude, particularly in light of the debilitating injuries suffered by some of them.
The argument against it, naturally, was that the country could not afford its $4 billion price tag. I suppose there may have been people who felt it was unfair to the veterans of the Civil and Spanish-American Wars, but I haven't run across any editorial cartoonists saying so.
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| "He Gets His Bonus" by Winsor McCay for Star Company, ca. Aug. 26, 1922 |
The Hearst newspaper empire was a vocal proponent of the bonus, presenting a truckload of petitions for it to Senators Hiram Johnson (R-CA) and Lester Volk (R-NY) on the capitol steps.
Given the opposition by Hearst and his newspapers to American entry into the War, his showy support of the bonus was unwelcome, even by its proponents.
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| "On the Outside" by Orville P. Williams in New York Evening Journal, ca. Aug. 30, 2022 |
Perhaps Mr. Hearst found more support in the political prisoner community.
A school district in Florida could not accept a donation of dictionaries amid a new state law aimed at combating "wokeness" in classrooms.
The Venice Suncoast Rotary Club was prepared to give its annual donation of dictionaries to the Sarasota County Schools ahead of the new school year. But the district stopped all donations and purchases of books for school libraries until at least next year.
This came after HB 1467 took effect in July. The law requires school districts to have all reading and instructional materials reviewed by a district employee with a "valid educational media specialist certificate." ...
The Venice Suncoast Rotary Club told the Sarasota Herald-Tribune that they have donated about 300 dictionaries a year. After donating a total of 4,000 dictionaries to date, this is the first time they were denied.
I'm sure that Gubbner DeSantis will call this an overreaction; but since this anti-wokeness purge is an overreaction in the first place, surely an abundance of caution is called for.
After all, Florida and Texas have rejected math textbooks for not adhering to right-wing orthodoxy. If Johnny has seven apples and gives Susie two, that sounds too much like socialism.
Meanwhile, North Carolina's ignoramus Lieutenant Governor thinks that teaching history and science in elementary schools is dangerous, so they're verboten, too.
(Don't even let's get started on foreign language education...)
And in Oklahoma, an English teacher was disciplined for displaying a QR code for the Brooklyn Library to their class – not assigning any subversive literature or putting actual books on the shelf, just letting their class know how to find books for themselves. Initial reports said they were fired, although the school district later said it was expecting them to return to class the next day pending a review of the incident. Instead, they quit.
For all the right-wing blather about leftist thought police demanding "political correctness" and coddling liberal snowflakes, it turns out that it's those right-wing thought police imposing their own political correctness by force of law.
Who's the snowflakes now?
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Although my original intention had always been to draw the stars of this week's cartoon in puritan outfits, I toyed with the idea of continuing a reference from a couple weeks ago by drawing Ron DeSantis in Spanish Inquisition garb.
I rejected that idea for two reasons. First, I didn't think that a cardinal's hat and cassock would be recognizable in grayscale. There is only one newspaper that I know of that still prints my cartoons that way, but it's worth taking it into account.
Second, it would mean having to clothe the third speaker in the uniform of a third rigidly intolerant stereotype. The most obvious would be an Iranian mullah or Afghan Taliban; but as Patrick Chappatte and others have found, some people interpret such depictions as a slam against Islam as a whole.
As a gay man and a feminist, I find antigay, misogynist Islamic fundamentalism reprehensible. And certainly, the targets of my cartoon would be more annoyed by being compared to the Taliban than to the Pilgrims. Yet anti-Asian hate is a real thing, and one does have to take care not to feed into that.
Editorial cartooning often involves drawing how This is like That, even though This and That are completely separate things. In the end, however, I decided that there was no need to draw our home-grown christofascisti as non-Christians. I may well revisit the DeSantis Inquisition someday. But for now, I think I'll stick to drawing imams and the Taliban when I'm actually criticizing imams and the Taliban.
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Oh, by the way, dear reader, since you've read this far, I won't make you look it up:
It's a good thing I don't have to draw Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and former Wisconsin Governor Tommy Thompson together in a cartoon.
This week's Graphical History Tour again focuses on one month, one issue, and one cartoonist: John Knott and the Texas's August 26, 1922 run-off election for the Democratic Party's nominee for U.S. Senator. The election would be won by the Ku Klux Klan's candidate, Earle Mayfield.
I have to start off by admitting that I probably don't have all the cartoons that Knott drew for the anti-Klan Dallas Morning News. My contemporary source for Knott's cartoons I posted in July had identified his work as having been originally published in the Galveston Daily News, which did indeed run Knott's cartoons on its front pages. But according to a Dallas Morning News article last October, Knott was their cartoonist from 1906 to 1957, save for his three semesters studying at the Royal Academy of Art in Munich, Germany (1910-11).
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| "A Sad Case" by John F. Knott in Galveston Daily News, August 19, 1922 |
So it's a pity that, as Knott himself perhaps argues here, these cartoons all hail from the Galveston paper rather than the Dallas one. (I'm dating them according to when they appeared in the Galveston Daily News.) If the Dallas Morning News campaigned against the Klan, there doesn't appear to be any such advocacy on the cartoons by Knott in the Galveston Daily News.
"A Sad Case" should, however, be appreciated by every editorial cartoonist who has had to deal with editors, publishers, and readers who think that editorial cartoons are supposed to be, first and foremost, funny. And fair and impartial. And appeal to everybody.
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| "Who's Going to Win" by John Knott in Galveston Daily News, August 20, 1922 |
As far as I've been able to determine, Knott was the only editorial cartoonist in the employ of any newspaper in Texas at the time, and was printed exclusively in the Dallas and Galveston Newses. A few papers ran the syndicated cartoons of William C. Morris, Elmer Bushnell, Terry Gilkison, and the occasionally political Magnus Kettner; many newspapers around the state printed those of the NEA's Dorman H. Smith. Meanwhile, the Houston Post wasn't publishing editorial cartoons at all.
None of those syndicated cartoonists had anything to say that summer about Klan-supported candidates running for office in Texas or anywhere else, so Knott had the topic all to himself. By all accounts, the run-off contest between Mayfield and impeached former Gov. James "Pa" Ferguson was a lively one, with brawls breaking out in the crowds as the candidates accused each other of perjury, drunkenness, and sexual impropriety.
Now, to be fair, Dallas Morning News editor Will Pry assures us that John Knott's cartoons were not all as milquetoast as the ones on this page:
He also had considerable influence over his audience, a byproduct of being the illustrative voice of the paper of record in the era before TV, let alone Twitter. James Ferguson, former governor of Texas, once said that a Knott cartoon cost him an election. Another, drawn when the Ku Klux Klan was making headlines in Dallas, was said to have swung a school board election.
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| "Relief Promised for Today" by John Knott in Galveston Daily News, August 26, 1922 |
Knott and his "Old Man Texas" (uncharacteristically hatless in this cartoon) could count themselves lucky that the Mayfield-Ferguson run-off wasn't conducted in an age of independent attack ads punctuating every television program. One had to go out of one's way to be subjected to the candidates' heated oratory; in the newspaper, one could easily turn the page and read the baseball scores.
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| "Thank Heaven, I'm Out of It" by John Knott in Galveston Daily News, August 27, 1922 |
In an ordinary election campaign of those days, Mayfield's victory in the August 26 run-off election for the Democratic nomination would have meant Old Man Texas was effectively "out of it." The Texas Republican Party was not a factor to be reckoned with at this point in history.
But Republicans and anti-Klan "Independent Democrats" would make one last effort to stop Mayfield by mounting a write-in campaign for George Peddy, a Democratic member of the Texas House of Representatives, in November. Would John Knott have anything to say about it?
Stay tuned, but don't get your hopes up.
We are told that Amazon Prime's adaptation of "A League of Their Own" into a television series will not shy away from the presence of lesbians in the teams of the wartime All-American Girls Professional League (AAGPL).
There was no acknowledgment of that in the 1992 movie. In fact, director Penny Marshall specifically instructed actor Rosie O'Donnell not to portray her character, Doris Murphy, as lesbian. (O'Donnell shows up in Amazon Prime's version as the proprietor of a drinking establishment catering to customers who, in the parlance of the day, "played for the other team.")
The new version also addresses issues of race that you might have missed in the original. DeLisa Chinn-Tyler played an unnamed spectator who returns an overthrown ball to Geena Davis's character with impeccable speed and accuracy, a scene Marshall had written into her movie to point out that there were no Black players in the AAGPL. But you won't find Chinn-Tyler in imdb.com's list of the cast, either.
In a twofer role in the 2022 series, Chanté Adams plays "Max" Chapman, a Black lesbian pitcher who is barred from trying out for the league on account of the color of her skin. Her story line in Season One never merges with those of the characters who do make the Rockford Peaches' roster, but if the series ends up lasting longer than the AAGPL ever did, perhaps we'll see some historical revisionism.
Heck, CBS's "M*A*S*H" outlasted the Korean War long enough for Major "Hot Lips" Houlihan to become a women's libber and Captain "Hawkeye" Pierce to develop what we would now call "wokeness."
All of the Amazon "League of Their Own" characters are fictional, so I suppose their careers can go in any direction the writers fancy. If Max Chapman doesn't end up in the AAGPL, perhaps she will join Mamie Johnson, Connie Morgan, and Toni Stone, three real-life women who played in the Negro Leagues during WWII. As long as she doesn't marry her girlfriend at St. Mary Oratory, pilot the Enola Gay, and get elected Governor of Illinois, I'm willing to grant the writers some poetic license.
CBS, by the way, attempted a series based on "A League of Their Own" back in the 1990's, recasting all but two of the roles. It lasted for only three episodes, so it never had a chance to introduce any lesbian or Black story lines — as if that were particularly likely.
Getting back to today's cartoon: as longtime readers have probably figured out by now, I try to include diversity, racial and otherwise, in my cartoons whenever possible. Given attitudes of the 1940's, including a non-White person in this week's scenario didn't seem realistic, even for a cartoon. And even considering that the blonde in the pink dress is clearly not a ballplayer.
In hindsight, however, perhaps a will-they-won't-they romantic relationship with one of the Rockford Peaches is how the writers will eventually integrate Max into the series.
Assuming it lasts more than three episodes this time.
I hope I have brightened the day of some seminary frosh somewhere.
Especially if I've now added the image at the top of this post to what will show up on Google in the future.
(Google's link is actually to the cartoon at PrideSource.com, not on my blog, so it's a mystery to me why the result shows up in this blog's stats. Like the miracle of Holy Communion, I'll have to accept that it's just something we are not meant to understand.)
(or, Whose Side Are You On?)
This week's Graphical History Tour focuses on one issue and one cartoonist in August of 1922.
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| "Great Game! Who's Ahead" by J.N. "Ding" Darling in Des Moines Register, Aug. 5, 1922 |
The strikes by railroad and coal mine unions, now several months old, dominated the news in the summer of 1922, so it only makes sense that Darling would return to the topic again and again. In several of these cartoons, he seems to hold both management and the unions equally culpable in their inability to reach a settlement.
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| "Someday Maybe When Sam Gets to Be a Big Boy..." by Darling in Des Moines Register, Aug. 9, 1922 |
In one cartoon after another, it's Uncle Sam and/or John Q. Public who are ruthlessly victimized by labor and management.
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| "A Lot They Care for Fairness" by Darling in Des Moines Register, August 11, 1922 |
Darling, it must be noted, was primarily sympathetic to the Republican party, so it is remarkable that he would return over and over to holding labor and management both accountable for the protracted labor dispute.
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| "New Method" by Darling in Des Moines Register, Aug. 13, 1922 |
This series of cartoons escalates the brutality of labor and management.
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| "They'll Save a Lot of Time..." by Darling in New York Tribune, Aug. 6, 1922 |
Here Darling proposes that the federal government step in to operate the coal mines. Can you imagine Republicans of today proposing that the government run the coal (or any other major) industry?
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| "A Point Which Some Folks Are Inclined to Overlook" by Darling in Des Moines Register, Aug. 15, 1922 |
The federal government had taken over running of the railroads during World War I, and returning control to private industry had been a prominent issue for Republicans once armistice had been declared. Darling had been among them, but here he seems to suggest that Uncle Sam might need to step back in, setting rates, wages and service "by authority of the United States government."
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| "And Still Boys Will Grow Up..." by Darling in Des Moines Register, Aug. 14, 1922 |
Although Darling hadn't been a fan of Candidate Warren Harding during the 1920 presidential campaign, he approved of President Harding's "polite invitation to settle the strike for the good of the country." Darling offered his full support should Harding pick up the presidential Big Stick, as Teddy Roosevelt had done, to force labor and management to come to an agreement.
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| "A Case for Careful Deliberation" by Darling in Des Moines Register, Aug. 19, 1922 |
By the same token, Darling displayed his disappointment in the president as normalcy-minded Mr. Harding spoke softly, turning the problem of the railroad strike over to the vacationing Congress.
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| "We Still Can't See Anything the Matter with It" by Darling in New York Tribune, Aug. 12, 1922 |
Darling may have faulted both labor and management at the start of the mine and railway worker strikes, but he was, after all, a Republican at heart. Eventually, he found the unions more to blame than the mine and railway owners. In this cartoon, United Mine Workers of America President John L. Lewis shuns President Harding's offer of a splendid repast, "six months of everything they asked for," to the escalating bewilderment of John Q. Public.
What? You mean Lewis wasn't happy to postpone those drastic wage cuts until February? Some people are just impossible to please.
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| "When the Eight-Hour Day Representative..." by Darling in New York Tribune, Aug. 22, 1922 |
In the case of the railway workers, their issue wasn't only the wage cuts, but they also wanted to limit their workday to eight hours. The idea of an eight-hour workday was hardly new in 1922, but Iowan Darling mocked the concept in a cartoon sure to please his readers in farm country.
But Darling was not quite finished pointing the finger of blame.
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| "The Secretary Has Another Think Coming" by Darling in Des Moines Register, Aug. 31, 1922 |
In case the print in Uncle Sam's newspaper is too tiny for your eyeballs, he's showing Labor Secretary James Davis a list of men arrested or under investigation for recent violent actions by labor activists, and others taken into custody in a "raid on Red headquarters." All of them have non-Anglo-Saxon names, e.g., Popovich, Aleesio, Pzopowlosky, Martinez, Nebolskowitz, Kilsudsky, Heldieblower, Swartztrauber, and Nickleo.
Darling may not have been aware that Davis was an immigrant himself (from Wales, when he was 8 years old). As Secretary of Labor, however, he was in charge of the federal department overseeing immigration policy. The Border Patrol was established under his watch, and whatever his thoughts on the subject in August of 1922, his legacy would be further limits on immigration.
The Russian trial of Brittney Griner is now in the sentencing stage. The Olympian and WNBA star faces a possible ten years in prison for having arrived at Sheremetyevo airport in January with a cannabis vape cartridge in her luggage. She pleaded guilty to the charge and delivered an abject apology in court.
In the first days after Griner's arrest, the Biden administration was largely silent on her plight, and her wife publicly urged everyone to keep quiet in order to let the State Department work behind the scenes. Since then, Cherelle Griner, the WNBA, and the LGBTQ+ community have begun to speak out, more and more forcibly.
The State Department is publicly advocating for Griner's return to the U.S., proposing a prisoner swap of Brittney Griner and a retired marine convicted of spying, Paul Whelan, for Viktor Bout, a Russian arms dealer currently serving time in a U.S. prison.
Born in 1967 in Dushanbe, Tajikistan, to a bookkeeper and a car mechanic, Bout went on to train as an interpreter at Moscow’s Soviet Military Institute of Foreign Languages.
Rumoured to speak six languages, Bout developed a decades-long career by acquiring Soviet military transport planes and filling them with various weapons that were left behind after the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991. Since then, Bout has supplied weapons to conflicts around the world including Afghanistan, Angola, Congo, Lebanon, Somalia and Yemen.
For decades, governments and rebels fought each other with weapons that Bout sold to either side.
In 2008, Bout was arrested in Bangkok after he was caught on camera trying to sell weapons for use against Americans by undercover US Drug Enforcement Administration agents. He was convicted in a New York court in 2011 and was sentenced to 25 years at a federal prison in Marion, Illinois.
A third American, history teacher Marc Fogel, sentenced in Russia last year for having half an
ounce of marijuana on him, has not so far been
mentioned as part of any prisoner swap. If only we had another Russian "Merchant of Death" in Leavenworth or Florence ADMAX to sweeten the deal...
Putin's foreign ministry (and his foreign minions) have so far shown no interest in the Biden administration's proposal. Either Putin is waiting until the trial is officially over, or, following the example of the Iran hostage crisis, until the next administration is sworn into office.
Or wearing aviator sunglasses.
For today's wallow in history, let me take you back forty Augusts ago, when I was editorial cartoonist for a little start-up newspaper, the Kenosha Tribune. The Tribune was edited by Ken Meyer, my editor at the University of Wisconsin at Parkside Ranger in the 1981-82 school year. Initially offered for sale for 25 cents, by August, the paper was free.
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| in Kenosha Tribune, August 5, 1982 |
Most of my initial cartoons for the Tribune dealt with national topics, but by August, I was making a concentrated effort to focus on state and local issues. Thus the above cartoon concerned the problem of drunk driving, exacerbated by Wisconsin having, at the time, a lower legal drinking age than just over the state line in Illinois.
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| in Kenosha Tribune, August 19, 1982 |
Another cross-border issue was Commonwealth Edison's nuclear power plant in Zion, Illinois, and concern that communication to Wisconsin communities in the event of an accident at the plant was lacking. This was three years after the meltdown at Three Mile Island, and four years before that at Chernobyl, Ukraine.
A less severe accident at the Zion plant led to its being retired in 1998. A year earlier, someone incorrectly inserted and then removed some control rods in a reactor while it was shut down; ComEd ultimately decided that the reactor was no longer economically feasible, and it has been inactive ever since. It is scheduled for complete closure in December, 2026.
For the above cartoon, I sat outside the Kenosha Municipal Building in the heat of summer to sketch the place. Kenosha city government just moved out of the building this year.
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| for Madison Independent, July, 1982 |
But I vaguely recall that the Tribune's publisher, Al Holzman, had dreams of establishing a publishing empire in the area. Whether he had hoped to entice the management of Madison Independent into a deal with cartoons as part of the package, or whether the newspaper ever existed in the first place, I have no idea — except that I do remember that I mimicked the font of its flag for the credit line next to my signature.
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| for Kenosha Tribune, July/Aug. 1982 |
In addition to editorial cartooning, I drew illustrations for a number of news and feature stories, such as the above one for a article about drunk driving...
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| in Kenosha Tribune, July 8, 1982 |
...this one for a front-page article about competition for the cable TV monopoly in Kenosha...
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| in Kenosha Tribune, August 19, 1982 |
... and this one to accompany Ken's obituary for Henry Fonda. The editorial board also asked me to draw sketches of the regular columnists, on account of one who didn't photograph well; we were pleased with the resulting portraits. And I wrote a way-too-long-even-after-brutal-editing feature article about GenCon XV. (It's just as well that I wrote it under a pseudonym.)
Meanwhile, all was not running smoothly at the Trib. The publisher, owner of 51% of the paper, was at odds with the other seven members of the board, who owned equal shares of the remaining 49%. Somewhere along the line, Holzman's name was removed from the masthead, but he remained in control as majority owner.
One thing the seven other members of the board were able to do without Holzman's approval was to secure a lease on a second-story office suite in downtown Kenosha. They moved necessary equipment out of the shabby little storefront on 43rd Street, and didn't give the publisher keys to the new office.
Needless to say, this didn't sit well with Mr. Holzman. Lawsuits and injunctions were threatened and filed, advertisers withdrew their support, and the first issue published out of the Haugaard-Isermann building would be the Tribune's last.
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| in Kenosha Tribune, August 26, 1982 |
Good thing the economy was picking up. This was my editorial cartoon in that final issue, mocking one of the Republican candidates for Wisconsin's Governor — Wisconsin's fall primary being held in September in those days.
To wrap this all up, I have gotten back in touch with a few Tribune people through Facebook as we've gone our separate ways — and run into one or two around town whose ways have brought them back or didn't take them very far. Ken drowned in a swimming accident in Marble Falls, Texas in 1985. Al Holzman never became the Charles Foster Kane of the Midwest; I have no clue what ultimately became of him.
And Lowell Jackson didn't get the GOP gubernatorial nomination, but did serve as Transportation Secretary in Tony Earl's administration.
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis continues his holy war against female impersonators. Somebody posted video on line of a child at a Miami establishment where the waitstaff and entertainers are in drag, so DeSantis and Florida Republicans are hot to protect innocent children from seeing a dude in a dress.
They can't come up with any ideas on how to protect children from AK-15-wielding homicidal maniacs, but I guess they find drag queens armed with trays of mimosas to be, if you'll pardon the expression, an easier target.
Apparently, there's this organization called Drag Queen Story Hour, and it has right-wingers' panties all in a wad. Men continuing the tradition of Milton Berle, the Pythons, Barry Humphries, and the Kids in the Hall dress up in drag and sit down with children to read them stories. It was started in 2015 in San Francisco (but of course!), now with chapters in 27 states, Puerto Rico, and the District of Columbia.
Have no doubt about it: the Not-So-Hidden Agenda of Drag Queen Storytime is to show genderqueer youth that if they don't fit into the rigid dichotomy of Macho Males and Dainty Females, it's okay to be who they are. And to foster tolerance of those non-conforming children among the kids who are comfortable fitting into that dichotomy.
The Not-So-Hidden Agenda of DeSantis and his Inquisition, however, is to promote intolerance and conformity. Joe Kort, writing in Psychology Today, notes:
Outrage over these Drag Queen Storytime sessions reveals other dark underbellies of our society—misogyny and homophobia. Think about it: If women dressed as men were reading the stories, there might be no problem. But men dressed as women? Such an assault on the nation’s ideal of masculinity is intolerable to many.
Well, the Sexuality Inquisition will no doubt get around to the scourge of women dressed as men in short order.
