Q Toon: The Eternal Sunshine of the Smoochless Screen

Because the director of the Marvel superheroes flick Eternals would not cut a scene of Phastos kissing his husband, authorities in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, Oman, and Bahrain have banned the movie from being shown.

Apparently Director Chloe Zhao wasn't able to stop that scene — and others depicting heterosexual intimacy as well — from being cut from versions shown in the United Arab Emirates, Jordan, Lebanon and Egypt. The film had been scheduled for release in the Middle East today.

Phastos is played by Brian Tyree Henry; his husband, Ben, is played by Haaz Sleiman, a Lebanese immigrant to the U.S. who came out as gay in 2017.

At the “Eternals” world premiere last month, Sleiman spoke passionately about how much representation and visibility matter. “Beyond a dream come true, it’s lifesaving,” he told me. “I wish I had that when I was a kid, to see this. My god. I wish! Can you imagine how many lives this is going to be saving — kids, young queer folk, who are being bullied, committing suicide and not seeing themselves being represented? And now they get to see this — it’s above and beyond.”

Henry has apparently been less involved in the promotion of the film, at least as far as discussing his character is concerned, but he did offer this during a press conference last month:

“I remember when I was coming to this project that I, Brian, had kind of lost faith in humanity, just looking at all the things that we’ve been through and just what the images of Black men were and how we’re being portrayed and how the power was taken from us, the lack of power or feeling powerful,” Henry said. “What I really loved the most about Phastos is that through all of that — him being eternal, him never being able to die — he still chose love. He still decided to have a family, even though he may have to watch them perish. He still tried to find a way to bring heart and love to everything he did, even though his genius was used against him. It just really resonated a lot with how I felt my place in society was. How we can be kings and queens, and at the same time, they’ll take our pedestal and take our superpowers from us like that. So what I love the most about ‘Eternals’ is that Chloe and [producer] Nate [Moore] just re-instilled that power back in me again.”

The film has received tepid reviews from professional critics, and was "review-bombed" by garden-variety trolls on imdb.com so heavily prior to its release that site had to deactivate its reviews section. I haven't been watching the Marvel superhero films (or the recent DC Comics ones either, for that matter), so I'm afraid I wouldn't know whether this is a worthy addition to the franchise or not.

All I know is, we've been seeing heterosexual superheroes, even the ones from distant planets, locking lips with earthlings of the opposite sex for decades now, and nobody seems to have complained that it was a distraction from the plot.

Except, I guess, the Egyptians, Jordanians, Lebanese, and Emiratis. 

Riders on Desert Storm

Awe shucks, it's Shockback Saturday again; and I read this week that it's the 25th anniversary of the end of Gulf War I. 25 years ago today, Saddam Hussein ordered the withdrawal of Iraqi forces from Kuwait, although combat continued at the Kuwait City airport for four more days, and the retreating army set fire to hundreds of oil wells as they fled.

I was drawing for two college newspapers and the Racine Journal Times in those days, so here are only a few of the cartoons I drew about that war. You may look to other sources for the factors that led up to the war, but as far as most Americans were concerned, it all started in August, 1990, when Saddam Hussein invaded the sheikdom of Kuwait.

The Bush administration (Pappy, not Dubya) had, through Ambassador April Glaspie, earlier told the Saddam Hussein regime that "we have no opinion on the Arab-Arab conflicts, like your border disagreement with Kuwait," but that an actual invasion would be cause "for me to be concerned." Now that the invasion was a fait accompli, President Bush had some serious decisions to make.

Throughout the remainder of the summer and fall, both sides engaged in a great deal of saber rattling and bellicose talk. Bush swore that the invasion of Kuwait would not be allowed to stand, and Hussein promised "the mother of all battles" if the U.S. and the coalition of allies Bush was gathering tried to do anything about it.

For civilians stateside, it was an opportunity to fight the Vietnam War Protests all over again.

If the U.S. military had learned one lesson from Vietnam, it was that having TV news cameras out filming the troops and civilians and broadcasting whatever they witnessed back home the next day allowed the American public to form their own opinions about how the war was going. This time, the press had to be largely satisfied with military briefings showing successful missile strikes on guaranteed military targets.

This time, once the U.S.-led coalition entered the ground war in mid-January, the actual fighting was surprisingly short. Hussein quickly evacuated his forces from Kuwait all the way back to Baghdad. The ceasefire agreement was signed shortly afterward.

Q Toon: Q Wait

Kuwait has announced that it and other gulf emirates will institute medical test procedures to stop gays from entering their countries.

"Health centers conduct the routine medical check to assess the health of the expatriates when they come into the GCC [Gulf Cooperation Council] countries; however, we will take stricter measures that will help us detect gays who will be then barred from entering Kuwait or any of the GCC member states." -- Yousouf Mindkar, Director of Public Health at the Kuwaiti Health Ministry

Aside from Kuwait, the GCC member states are Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Oman, Bahrain, and 2022 World Cup host Qatar. There is already pressure to move the World Cup over this issue.

Meanwhile, how exactly the Kuwaitis intend to screen for The Gay has yet to be revealed. Those intrepid animators at Taiwanese News depict these medical test procedures as being even more invasive than I dared to.