Q Toon: Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow

Few of us editorial cartoonists are known for drawing cartoons that second what a politician has said, but given the distressing events of the past week, I decided to go ahead and give it a try.

Former President Joe Biden gave a brief speech, from which today’s cartoon is excerpted, to the annual International LGBTQ+ Leadership Conference last week. The LGBTQ+ Victory Institute, an organization of elected LGBTQ+ officials, had invited Mr. Biden to attend, the first former president to do so, to present him with their Chris Abele Impact Award for his contributions to the LGBTQ+ community.

The Victory Institute emphasized that Biden’s administration set records for LGBTQ+ inclusion. Nearly 15 percent of Biden’s appointees identified as LGBTQ+, far surpassing any prior administration. They include former White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, Human Rights Campaign Senior Vice President for Campaigns and Communications Jonathan Lovitz, who was a Biden appointee in the Department of Commerce, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, Admiral Rachel Levine, and Ambassador Chantale Wong. Beyond representation, the administration reinstated and expanded federal civil rights protections, reversed the ban on transgender military service that Trump has now reinstated, strengthened antidiscrimination rules in employment and health care, and expanded protections for LGBTQ+ youth and families.

In his speech, Mr. Biden noted that as Vice President, he had gotten out in front of the Obama administration in publicly advocating for marriage equality. “I just couldn’t remain silent anymore,” he said. “I expressed my support for gay marriage a little earlier than some folks had been expecting.”

“America is the only country founded on an idea,” he told his audience. “We hold these truths to be self-evident … all are created equal, all deserve to be treated with dignity throughout their lives.” Though the country has not always met that ideal, he said, “we’ve never walked away from it.”

His remarks stand in stark contrast to the wildly offensive, divisive, and disgraceful ravings that are the stock in trade of the current occupant of the Oval Office.

“Folks, Donald Trump and his Republicans are trying to derail and distort our fight for equality. They’re trying to turn it into something scary, something sinister. But folks, it’s not really about anything that’s all that complicated. At its core, it’s about giving every American an opportunity to be treated with the basic decency, dignity and respect they all deserve.”

Biden closed his speech by audience members currently serving in elected office to stand up (that's one way to get oneself a standing ovation). “We just have to get up. Remember who in the hell we are. We’re the United States of America … and there is nothing beyond our capacity when we act together.” 

I'm not quite ready to draw a "Miss Him Yet?" cartoon, but I sure do miss an administration that embodies everything — dammit, anything — Mr. Biden said.

Q Toon: MAGA for Pay

I drew the original Village People in this week's cartoon, but they must be rolling over in whatever they have to roll over in if they've seen what the present iteration of the band has done to forsake its LGBTQ+ fanbase.

It all started when Donald Berzelius Trump insisted upon playing their "Y.M.C.A." at his MAGA rallies, especially at the one that degenerated into a half-hour-plus concert of his personal playlist while he, his Republican hosts, and a stand of hand-selected Trump l'oeilists stood and waited awkwardly for Trump to get tired of swaying and pumping his fists back and forth.

By the way, if you've ever been to any political rally, you know that the hand-selected loyalists who get to stand up on stage have been standing up on stage listening to that same music for two hours before the candidate ever arrived in town. The hoi polloi in the audience have been listening to it for just as long, if not longer.

Anyway, liberals mocked Trump for being such a fan of a Big Gay Anthem in spite of his antiLGBTQ+ rhetoric and threats.

The Village People, who had once upon a time joined with other artists calling on Trump to cease and desist playing their music at his rallies (organizations are supposed to pay royalties on that kind of thing, and surely Trump never has), apparently decided that if you can't beat 'em, join 'em (along with Snoop Dogg, Nelly, Soulja Boy, Rick Ross and the more standard cast of Trumpster musicians). The group sang "Y.M.C.A." at Trump's "Make America Great Again Rally" and the Turning Point USA Inaugural Ball on January 19.

Front man Victor Willis announced in a Facebook post that "Y.M.C.A.," in spite of its obvious gay references, isn't about gay stuff after all. I guess that has been a well-kept secret for almost half a century.

“There’s been a lot of talk, especially of late, that Y.M.C.A. is somehow a gay anthem. As I’ve said numerous times in the past, that is a false assumption based on the fact that my writing partner was gay, and some (not all) of Village People were gay, and that the first Village People album was totally about gay life. 

“This assumption is also based on the fact that the YMCA was apparently being used as some sort of gay hangout and since one of the writers was gay and some of the Village People are gay, the song must be a message to gay people. To that I say once again, get your minds out of the gutter. It is not. ...

“As I stated on numerous occasions, I knew nothing about the Y being a hang out for gays when I wrote the lyrics to Y.M.C.A. and Jacques Morali (who was gay) never once stated such to me.”

Out heterosexual Willis, who variously portrays the cop or the admiral in the band, is the only current Village Person from the original group. He dropped out of the band from 1980 to 2017, rejoining after an out-of-court settlement 

Willis gave his logic for helping Trump celebrate his return to Washington: “We believe it’s now time to bring the country back together with music, which is why VILLAGE PEOPLE will be performing at various events as part of the 2025 inauguration of Donald J. Trump.” 

Under normal circumstances, “bringing the country back together” would be a laudable goal. But bringing the country together behind a lying, corrupt, vindictive, impulsive, dull-witted, petulant, bigoted, boorish, solipsistic, venal, felonious, overgrown brat who tried to violently overthrow the previous duly elected President of the United States is not.

Q Toon: Reveal Rethought

Or, What To Deflect When You're Expecting.

Gender reveal displays for newborns have become increasingly extravagant —and dangerous — as expectant parents seek to outdo every expectant couple that has gone before. Gender reveals have shaken the earth for miles around, or have sparked deadly wildfires and burnt tens of thousands of acres, or have killed guests or the father-to-would-have been.

Which must weigh awfully heavily on those kids as they grow up.

Especially if their birth gender isn't the one they want to stick with.

Imagine the scene: "You can't undergo gender correction surgery! Your father killed himself telling our friends you were a boy!" "We burned down an entire city to tell everyone you're a girl!"

Maybe it's past time to tone down the whole gender reveal game. Maybe even put it off a little while until everyone is on the same page. Just sayin'.

Q Toon: Lgbt And Found

While the Senate is busy deciding whether anyone gets to hold a president accountable for inciting a riot in a desperate attempt to overturn an election, I have chosen instead to wrap up another story thread from the previous administration.

Back in 2017, when that previous administration abruptly erased the White House's LGBT web page, I created the character of a guy in charge of the office of that administration's LGBt Liaison.

Drawing his cramped closet-cum-office was easy in four-panel format; a later single-panel episode presented me with the challenge of filling the space with all sorts of props: chemical buckets, a hand-cart, a roll of insulation, and so on and so forth. Separated from the boiler room only by a beaded curtain, the nameless liaison had by then taken to working in his underwear, and even the janitor was surprised to find he hadn't left.

As the then Ambassador to Germany adopted the role of the administration's LGBt Liaison as one of his many side jobs, Basement Dude quietly disappeared from my cartoons. Which was unfortunate. Surely he could have helped explain that administration's sustained assault on transgender Americans. Or its various antigay judicial appointments. Or opening loopholes in LGBTQ non-discrimination policies you could drive a church bus through.

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Politico editorial cartoonist Matt Wuerker hosted an on-line discussion about how to draw Joe Biden, titled "For Cartoonists, It's All About the Smile." In a Facebook thread, I noted that it was the same with Jimmy Carter — until he got into office, everything got serious, and we all had to learn how to draw him not smiling.

As you can see, I've ducked the issue of how to draw Joe Biden not smiling. For now.

For Whom the Toon Toles

by Tom Toles in Buffalo News, September 27, 1984

Washington Post editorial cartoonist Tom Toles is closing up shop after tomorrow, so today's Sankaback Saturday is devoted largely to my personal favorites of his cartoons from before he was hired by the Post. And I have to give the Post credit for hiring a cartoonist who was so very different from his predecessor there, a Washington institution in his own right, the undisputed dean of the profession, Herbert Block.

I was instantly taken with his simplistic style and craftily pointed humor when he burst onto the scene in the early 1980's. It would be interesting to see his pre-syndication cartoons for the Buffalo Courier-Express, which folded in 1982, to get some idea of how his artistic style — so unlike the Oliphant and MacNelly clones of the day — evolved.* I assume that his style of humor, which often comes at you from unexpected directions, was evident from the beginning.

in Buffalo News, June 21, 1984

His colleagues were equally impressed. The late Jeff MacNelly wrote that he was crazy about Toles's "masterful timing and comic staging" and "graphic goofiness." Mike Peters admired his "satire in the Jonathan Swift tradition of satire." Jules Feiffer blurbed, "There exists a school of thought, led by me, that wonders why Tom Toles has not yet wan a Pulitzer Prize"; so in 1990, to nobody's surprise, he won one.

in Buffalo News, March, 1983

If I can wax pedantic for a moment, "Hunting the Hazardous Substances" illustrates the Toles approach to an idea. Many cartoonists, if they came up with this idea for the Reagan administration's attitude toward environmental protection, would have drawn the third panel as a stand-alone cartoon. The pacing established by the four-panel format sells the idea so much better than the third panel alone would. (The reference in the lower right corner to burnt EPA documents is a bonus.)

in Washington Post, November 14, 2002

Sticking with the topic of the environment, I include this one Washington Post cartoon to demonstrate how masterfully Toles tied together two separate news stories in a way that made readers wonder why they hadn't connected the two items themselves.

in Buffalo News, July, 1990

I would be remiss if I didn't include a couple cartoons about American presidents. This one about George H.W. Bush's nomination of David Souter to the Supreme Court is an excellent example of Toles carefully setting up a pay-off that comes from a completely unexpected direction. It plays off the unfair characterization of Bush being a wimp without playing into it, while still using it to make the cartoon's point.

in Buffalo News, May 14, 1993

Toles's minimalist caricatures have been instantly recognizable even when they diverge wildly from portraiture. His George W. Bush, for example, had ears sticking way up from the top of the man's head like no animal you have ever seen; but Toles drew him that way consistently and readers always knew who that figure was. He drew Obama with big ears, too, but then, so did everybody else. His Trump is appropriately grotesque.

in Buffalo News, ca. June, 1986

Since this here blog skews gay, here's Toles being gay-friendly back in 1986, when the Supreme Court ruled that Georgia's anti-sodomy laws were constitutional in Bowers v. Hardwick, a case involving the arrest of one Michael Hardwick for having consensual homosexual sex in the privacy of his own bedroom. Other cartoonists may well have had the same idea in this cartoon, I suppose, but if so, probably only drew the police officer intruding in the couple's bed. Or the judge. Or a legislator character. Toles takes the idea and keeps spinning it out well past absurdum, and the result is worthy of standing next to Justices Blackmun's and Stevens's dissents.

Finally, a Tom Toles "I Told You So" from the early days of the technology enabling you and me to have this conversation, and others to share their insights about liberals drinking children's blood in a network of tunnels linking pizza parlors around the country:

in Buffalo News, September 8, 1994

________________

* Update: D.D. Degg at Daily Cartoonist has dug up one of Toles's Courier-Express cartoons, and even some juvenalia.

Q Toon: Wreck-It Wrath

There is a class of religious authority whose shtick is blaming teh gayz for every series of unfortunate events. Their god doesn't approve of LGBTQ+ people, so he sends hurricanes, fires, earthquakes, pollen, and Please Continue To Hold music.

So it's hardly surprising that someone would come along saying that the coronavirus appeared because LGBTQ+ rights have God's panties in a wad. In the days when LGBTQ+ people were still treated as pariahs, of course, disasters were completely unheard of.

God's wrath would have nothing to do with so many of his loudest preachers claiming to be his messengers on earth while devoting themselves to the ideals of Ayn Rand and Donald Trump, who are about as far apart from the teachings of Christ as you can possibly get.

Now, it does appear that Patient Zero of the second wave of the virus that hit South Korea may have been a gay man who went barhopping as soon as the country reopened the bars. On the other hand, a second wave of the virus in China has been traced to a laundry worker for the city of Shulan, and I don't hear anyone advocating against clean clothing.

Here in the U.S., we'll see South Korea's one irresponsible party boi and raise them a couple thousand gun-waving, mask-eschewing MAGAlomaniacs.

Q Toon: Dey, Dem, Deir

I finally got around to recognizing Merriam Webster's Word of the Year for 2019: "They," used as a third person singular pronoun to refer to someone who doesn't feel themself to be "He" or "She."

Well, to be honest, I have drawn about this already, but it was well before the year "They" was the Word of.

I can be a stickler for traditional language — don't you dare use "literally" figuratively around me — but I'm with the modernists on this one. "They, Them, Their" are already commonly used to refer to any person whose sex is unknown or whose existence is purely hypothetical, replacing the awkward "He/She, Him/Her, His/Her." What is new is using those pronouns to refer to a specified person whose identity, if not their sex, is known.

I'm not sure why or when Gino expects Tex to talk about dem in the third person anyway. Maybe dey is networking. Or dey are. Pronoun-verb agreement rules may still need to be worked out. The point is that it's just as well to announce one's pronouns at the outset and avoid embarrassing corrections later.

If Tex is fine with that, it's just something the rest of us will have to get yoused to.

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I'll bet Glenn Miller and the Dorsey Brothers never had to deal wit' dis:

I got word that one of my newspaper editors was puzzled by this week's cartoon, on account of "dey, dem, deir" being the way Jamaicans and Nigerians pronounce "they, them, their."

I had hoped that the New York Jets tattoo on Gino's shoulder would be ample indication that dey hails from Brooklyn, the Bronx, or Queens.

While checking whether residents of those New York boroughs are more likely to be Jets fans or Giants fans, I came across reporting that the "th" (as in "thin") and "dh" (as in "the") sounds are among the last that English-speaking children master. They are completely absent from many languages around the world, not just in Jamaica and Nigeria; many foreigners have as much difficulty pronouncing them as English speakers have with Spanish "ll," German "ch," Khoisan clicks, or the capital of Ukraine.

Non-English speakers often substitute "t" and "d," or "s" and "z," in English "th" words, and I have to wonder whether that means that they are unable to imitate people who lisp. I can't believe that lisping is a strictly Anglophone phenomenon.

At any rate, setting aside the Nigerian question for the moment, the issue of whether Gino might perhaps be Jamaican raises another question: what is the gender-neutral substitute for the Jamaican "mon"?

Q Toon: Phoning It In

In a surprise move last week, the Corrupt Trump Administration announced a campaign to decriminalize homosexuality worldwide.

The announcement was particularly curious, given Trump's cozy relationship with some especially bad actors on LGBTQ rights around the world (the U.S. voted with them last year against a U.N. resolution against capital punishment for consensual same-sex activity), and with the antigay right in this country.

True, he did promise at the 2016 Republican National Convention to "do everything in my power to protect our LGBTQ citizens" — he even included the Q in the acronym. But he also included the T, yet has singled out transgender Americans for sustained hostility and discrimination.

Trump's promise then was a swipe at Islam, and, according to former Trump flack Sean Spicer, a bone thrown to persuade one convention delegate to withdraw his name from a "Never Trump" petition:

The final name that needed to be scrubbed from the petition, Spicer writes [in The Briefing: Politics, The Press, and The President], was that of Washington, D.C., delegate Robert Sinners. The book describes an alleged deal between Sinners, who Spicer says told the Manafort team “he wanted Donald Trump to support gay rights,” and senior Trump communications advisor Jason Miller.
“Jason assured Sinners that Trump would be the most ‘inclusive’ candidate the Republican Party ever had,” Spicer writes....
Sinners then reportedly signed “a form that officially removed his name from the petition,” and the deal was done.

The new campaign appears to be the pet project of Richard Grenell, Trump's Ambassador to Germany (who is also in the running to be named Ambassador to the United Nations). Grenell is a disciple of National Security Adviser John Bolton; his name showed up in my blog in 2012 when Mitt Romney dropped him as a foreign policy adviser as a sop to religious right-wingers alarmed that Grenell is openly gay.

Grenell cites the recent execution in Iran of a man accused of being gay as the impetus for the campaign:

Grenell called the hanging “a wake-up call for anyone who supports basic human rights,” in Bild, a leading German newspaper, this month.

“This is not the first time the Iranian regime has put a gay man to death with the usual outrageous claims of prostitution, kidnapping, or even pedophilia. And it sadly won’t be the last time,” Grenell wrote. “Barbaric public executions are all too common in a country where consensual homosexual relationships are criminalized and punishable by flogging and death.”

As much as it is heartening to see our government standing up for LGBTQ rights in Iran, it is hard to imagine the Corrupt Trump Administration doing the same for LGBTQ rights in Saudi Arabia, where LGBTQ relationships are also "criminalized and punishable by flogging and death." After all, Trump could barely scrape up any trace of disappoval of the Saudis' murder of openly heterosexual journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

Nor have we heard much from him about antigay repression in Russia, especially the disappearance, torture and murder of hundreds of LGBTQ Chechens.

As with virtually everything else about life in North Korea, we know precious little about the plight of its LGBTQ citizens; a gay defector last year painted a picture of oppression and forced denial. Homosexuality isn't technically illegal there; but as in any totalitarian country, the government can label anything "contrary to a socialist lifestyle," "obscene," or "decadent" as an excuse to prosecute whomever it wants.

It's a safe bet that safeguarding the rights of LGBTQ Koreans did not come up in conversations between Kim and Trump in Vietnam this week. Rather, the Corrupt Trump Administration's sole concern in LGBTQ rights anywhere is their usefulness as a wedge between western European liberalism and the Iranian theocracy.

Trump has not been able to persuade other signatories to the 2015 Iran nuclear deal to join him in abrogating the agreement, in which Iran promised to limit its nuclear activities and to allow the International Atomic Energy Agency to monitor their compliance, in exchange for the lifting of economic sanctions. Without European cooperation, Trump has no leverage to force some presumably more punitive deal on Iran.

So is he just being clever, calculating that liberal western politicians would rather go back to Square One on Iran's nuclear ambitions (even as nuclear powers India and Pakistan have begun shooting at each other) than to appear antigay? Maybe.

Or maybe not.

News reports this week suggest that, contrary to my cartoon, Vice President Mike Pence is more aware of the administration's brand new policy than President Trump himself is.

A reporter asked Trump about the global initiative, which is being spearheaded by U.S. ambassador to Germany Richard Grenell, the highest ranking openly gay person in the Trump administration.
At first, Trump seemed not to understand the question, asking the reporter to repeat it.
“Say it?” Trump said.
When the reporter referenced the push to decriminalize homosexuality across the globe, Trump professed unawareness and said something about reports in his administration.
“I don’t know which report you’re talking about,” Trump said. “We have many reports.”

Q Toon: Kyrie Liaison

Last week, Donald Joffrey Trump signed an executive order formalizing the creation of what he is calling a Faith And Opportunity Initiative. In essence, the initiative legalizes — and gives federal blessing to — discriminatory actions by anyone who claims to act in keeping with "deeply held beliefs".

But if those last three words—“deeply held beliefs”—sound familiar, it’s because they are often used to justify anti-LGBT legislation in the name of “religious freedom.” Indeed, LGBT advocates say that the executive order is yet another federal action that could potentially encourage discrimination against LGBT people in the name of religion.
“We’re very concerned because this administration has a pattern of inviting discrimination in the name of religion,” Camilla Taylor, director of Constitutional Litigation for the LGBT legal advocacy group Lambda Legal, told The Daily Beast shortly before the Rose Garden event.
Based on its reported description, Taylor said that the new “faith initiative” seems to be “actively seeking out opportunities to facilitate discrimination.” (As details of the order were officially announced minutes later, Lambda Legal tweeted, “Yikes, y’all.”)

Now, I'm sure there's some Log Cabin Trump Loyalist out there who is saying, "Oh, you're just getting worked up about nothing. Didn't he promise 'I will fight for you while Hillary brings in more people who will threaten your freedoms and beliefs'? Didn't he say, 'I will do everything in my power to protect our LGBTQ citizens'? Didn't he wave a big ol' rainbow flag?"

Yes, yes he did. As usual, he was lying, and he held the flag upside-down.

Obsessive students of my cartoons (or at least the four or five of you who've seen the Bergetoons Facebook page lately) might possibly recognize the office of the White House LGBT Liaison from a cartoon I drew last year. There was concern at the time that Trump had not named a White House LGBTQ Liaison to replace the Obama administration's WHLGBTQL Raffi Freedman-Gurspan, and the WHLGBTQL web page had gone blank.

“Part of my job was to talk to community leaders who were bereaved and ultimately be the voice of the president,” [Raffi Freedman-Gurspan] recalled in an interview with BuzzFeed News during her last week on the job, “passing along word that the president [Obama] was very, very, very concerned.”
...

Marsha Scott, a straight woman, was the first White House liaison to gays and lesbians, named to the role by President Clinton in 1995. But the position disappeared when George W. Bush took office and later returned under Obama. Aditi Hardikar held the position until leaving to join Hillary Clinton’s campaign.

There is still no WHLGBTQL, and still no web page.

But lest you think for a moment that the Corrupt Trump Administration policy toward LGBTQ citizens has been one of benign neglect, its record has been one of active hostility.

Take the Department of Health and Human Services (please):

The nation's health department is taking steps to dismantle LGBT health initiatives, as political appointees have halted or rolled back regulations intended to protect LGBT workers and patients, removed LGBT-friendly language from documents and reassigned the senior adviser dedicated to LGBT health.
...
The Trump administration soon after taking office also moved to change the agency's LGBT-related health data collection, a window into health status and discrimination. [In January] it established a new religious liberty division to defend health workers who have religious objections to treating LGBT patients.

The religious right-wing is not just demanding special rights for florists and wedding photographers to discriminate against us. If there are health care workers who have religious objections to treating any of their patients, I think their employer should have every right to remove them from the possibility entirely. I don't want my EMT or emergency room doctor deciding I should wait for a better Samaritan to happen by.

P.S.: Homophobia is the Corrupt Trump Administration policy at the Small Business Administration, too.

Q Toon: Devil's Advocates

Buzz and Killer return this week with a question for our times.

The answer, of course, is that it would take an amendment to the Constitution, because Mr. Yiannopoulos was not born an American citizen.

Yiannopoulos, for those of you who have forgotten his fifteen minutes of fame last year, is a British-born, racist, Breitbartian provocateur whose schtick was getting invited by college Republican groups to speak on their campuses (campi?), usually provoking protests that prompted college administrators to cancel his speech. He is also gay, which made him a darling of the far right — their Token Homosexual — until he expressed his approval of pedophilia.

Now they have Kanye West, so as far as the Sinclair-Fox-Breitbart crowd is concerned, Black is the New Gay.

His star having fallen, Yiannopoulos wasn't the best example of somebody right-wing evangelicals would rally around the way they have steadfastly defended the Prince President of Lies, Donald Joffrey Trump. I'm fully convinced that not only would they stick by him if he shot somebody on Fifth Avenue, they'd stick by him even if that somebody were Franklin Graham.

While performing an abortion. On his daughter. Of his incestuous love child. And bragging about it every step of the way.

Those right-wing evangelicals have already sold their souls to him.

The rest is merely haggling over the price.

Q Toon: The Gnashville Sound

With most Americans' attention fixed on the devastation of Hurricane Harvey down in the Houston area, a meeting of conservative evangelicals (including many members of Donald Trump's Evangelical Advisory Board) met in Nashville, Tennessee and published a statement condemning LGBTQs.

Article 10 of the "Nashville Statement" tells LGBTQ persons that they are not Christian, and neither is anyone who supports them:

WE AFFIRM that it is sinful to approve of homosexual immorality or transgenderism and that such approval constitutes an essential departure from Christian faithfulness and witness.
WE DENY that the approval of homosexual immorality or transgenderism is a matter of moral indifference about which otherwise faithful Christians should agree to disagree.

The Council for Biblical Manhood and Womanhood (CBMW), which produced the statement, was founded in 1987 to protect the "It's A Man's World, And By That We Mean A Straight Man" view of conservative Christianity. For them, a woman's place is in the home, standing by her man, because Father Knows Best. It's a doctrine called "complementarianism," as opposed to egalitarianism, in which men and women are viewed as equals.

Complementarians are Biblical literalists, and according to their interpretation of the Scriptures, women and men are to have distinct roles at home and in church. In essence and in practice, women are to submit to men, who are to be spiritual leaders.
Women cannot preach or hold any kind of spiritual authority over men. Men exercise “headship” over their wives, establishing a hierarchy whose basic mechanics differ from denomination to denomination.

As far as these people are concerned, lesbians, gays, bisexuals, and especially transgender people present a direct threat to their patriarchal worldview. One cannot reconcile complementarianism with any relationship that does not involve someone with a vagina submitting herself to someone with a penis; and the doctrine certainly cannot account for the possibility of someone born with one but feeling compelled to live as someone born with the other.

If this were strictly a matter of who is welcome in a CBMW church on Sunday morning and who isn't, this would be a tempest in an easily avoided teapot. But because these people have worked long and hard to establish a right-wing Christian Theocracy in this country, even to the point of banding together to give slavish support to a materialistic, hedonistic, unrepentant, biblical illiterate as President of the United States (but hey, at least he's got the male dominance thing down pat), their anti-LGBTQ dogma has consequences far outside their church doors.

[T]he type of theology underlying the Nashville Statement is used to defend the denial of goods and services to same-sex couples. The political power evangelicals hold in the United States allows them to codify their beliefs in law. Dozens of “religious freedom restoration acts,” primarily in the form of so-called bathroom bills, have focused on policing the lives of L.G.B.T. people. Since the 2014 decision by the Department of Education to include gender identity under Title IX protections, more than 60 Christian colleges have requested — and many have received — waivers to discriminate against L.G.B.T. students.

Even worse is their promotion of quack "reparative therapy" in which psychological torture is used to "cure" same-sex attraction or gender dysphoria. So too their active promotion of a culture in which LGBTQ lives are devalued to the point where some people still believe they have moral justification to murder us on sight.

So enjoy this week's cartoon. It's more light-hearted than I truly feel about this topic, but in parody, you have to go where the song takes you.

And in case there's some reader out there who has never been exposed to country 'n' western music, the song is "Mamas, Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up to be Cowboys" by Ed and Patsy Bruce (although if it's giving you an earworm for the rest of the day, you're probably hearing Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson's cover of the tune).

2017 Locher Award Winner: Damian Alexander

This year's AAEC/John Locher Award for best aspiring college-age cartoonist has been awarded to Damian Alexander, a graduate student at Boston's Simmons College. The award was founded in 1986 by members of the American Association of Editorial Cartoonists as a memorial to the late son of Dick and Mary Locher. (Dick Locher, an editorial cartoonist for the Chicago Tribune and cartoonist of Dick Tracy, died this last month.)

Alexander's illustrations highlight personal experiences with social equality, LGBTQ issues, and mental health. "Through compelling and brutally honest storytelling, Damian's entries successfully make the personal political. His comic about his teenage self thinking he had AIDS simply because he was gay speaks to the importance of media representation. His meditations on technology and suicide are also thoughtful and socially-relevant."

Excerpt from "I'm Gay. That Means I Have AIDS, Right?" by Damian Alexander in Narratively

See the rest of this comic at the Locher Award site or in scrollable format at Narrative.ly.

I hope he's seen "Jeffrey," "The Broken Hearts Club," or "To Wong Foo" by now.

Q Toon: I Contain Multitudes

In spite of yesterday's terror attack in London, this week's hearings on Neil Gorsuch, and today's scheduled vote on the Astronomical Health Cost Act, today's cartoon is inspired by the cover story in the latest issue of Time magazine.

"Beyond He or She: Infinite Identities" touched briefly on the discomfort some elder gay rights advocates may have with the idea that not everybody feels "born that way" about their gender or sexual identity. The concern is that such an attitude reopens the door to antigay relatives dismissing LGBT identity as merely a phase, or worse, validating the Clockwork Orange "conversion therapy" practiced by religious pseudopsychotherapists.

Personally, I've never bought into the idea that gender/sexual identity can only be nature, never nurture; the mind is an extremely complicated thing and one theory rarely fits all. I've known people who knew they were gay from the age of five or earlier, whereas I wouldn't have had any grasp of the concept back then. Heck, I actually had a crush on a girl in elementary school. I don't personally know anybody who figured out their own sexuality as late in life as Mark Slackmeyer or the central character in In & Out, but I suppose it must be a thing, too.

Children and teens today have more opportunity than previous generations to find their way to their true gender/sexual identity, and good for them. I can't say I understand the distinctions between all 54 genders on Facebook, and I don't know whether "neutrois" rhymes with "bois" in English or French. But adolescence is a tumultuous roller coaster ride of hormonal twists and turns for even the most cisgender kids, so I'm happy to cut them a little slack.

It's not as if there is only one lesbigay lifestyle, either; there must be at least 54 subgenres of sexual proclivity. For that matter, not every person who has sex with persons of the same sex identifies with the words "gay" or "lesbian." In minority and immigrant communities, some see those as White Culture boxes into which they do not fit, so they come up with other words. Or none at all.

I'm glad that being gay is not a choice. There are just too many options to choose from.

Q Toon: 404 File Not Found

Many in the LGBTQ community were concerned when the LGBTQ page disappeared from the official White House web site.

There have been conflicting signals from the Donald Joffrey Trump administration on LGBTQ issues: there has been a uniform hostility among Trump cabinet appointees to LGBTQ concerns; and we can probably assume that the fellow he has appointed to fill Merrick Garland's seat on the Supreme Court believes that if the Founding Fathers weren't prescient enough to include LGBTQ rights in the Constitution, those rights do not exist.

On the other hand, the administration assures us that it has no intention of revoking President Obama's executive order protecting LGBT government and government contractor employees. “President Donald J. Trump is determined to protect the rights of all Americans, including the LGBTQ community,” according to the White House statement.

Yet establishing a right to discriminate against LGBTQ citizens is one of the most important issues to Trump's supporters on the so-called religious right. It strains credulity to think that they are going to be content with leaving anything in place that protects the rights of the LGBTQ community in any way.

Meanwhile, the White House appears to have no plans to name a liaison to the LGBTQ community. Even the imagined office in my cartoon may be more than we could hope for.

2016 in Headlines

Since ’16back Saturday coincides with New Year's Eve this year, I'm going to post my annual photo of newspaper and magazine front pages here.

I offer my usual caveats: with only newspapers from the midwestern United States to choose from, I can't include many big international stories, such as the impeachment of Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff. The slow crushing of the rebellion in Syria lends itself more to photojournalism than a banner headline. And I might have included the death of Fidel Castro if he hadn't already turned the reins of power over to his brother years ago.

Meanwhile, I don't have a home paper publishing my stuff that would put together a 2016 in cartoons spread, so here are my own favorites from this crappy year:

Q Toon: Welcome Flaggin'

Until the Bidens move out of #1 Observatory Circle, Mike and Karen Pence are renting a home in Chevy Chase. A half dozen or so of the Vice President-elect's new, temporary neighbors there are flying rainbow flags in protest of his signing of Indiana's "Religious Freedom Restoration Act" blessing discrimination against LGBT citizens as long as there's a faith-based excuse for it. His record also includes support of "conversion therapy" and opposition to just about every LGBT civil rights measure, from marriage equality to respecting gender identity to repealing "Don't Ask, Don't Tell."

The flags are “a respectful message showing, in my case, my disagreement with some of [Pence's] thinking,” neighbor Ilse Heintzen told the Washington D.C. ABC affiliate. “I have no idea what he will think about, but I hope he will change his mind.”

Q Toon: The Protectionist

As it turns out, Donald Berzilius Trump spent much of this week trying to attract Black and Latino voters with his new slogan, "What Have You Got to Lose." (Considering the priorities of states controlled by Republicans, The Right to Vote comes to mind.)

But earlier this summer, Trump tried to use the Orlando massacre as the basis of an appeal to LGBTQ voters, awkwardly pausing partway through the five-letter acronym. Perhaps he was having difficulty remembering the whole thing. Perhaps he gets out of breath saying five-syllable words. Better page Dr. Harold Bornstein.

As a cartoonist, it's a daunting challenge to come up with things for Cartoon Trump to say that are more outrageous than the things that come out of Reality Trump's mouth. One imagines that Trump's spokesschmucks are taking Botox injections to avoid the inadvertent looks of terror when they contemplate having to explain what they are hearing.

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P.S.: This story broke this week.

Q Toon: Oscar Bait

Accepting his Oscar for Best Song on Sunday night, Sam Smith referred to a comment Sir Ian McKellen had made about no there having never been any out LGBT nominees. Smith didn't quite get it right -- McKellen was talking only about the Best Acting categories (Dustin Lance Black and Stephen Sondheim being two notable winners in off-camera categories).

But there is a reason why #OscarsSoStraight...

If I had several more panels to fill, there are a lot of other straight actors playing gay whom I would like to have included: Ving Rhames, John Leguizamo, Patrick Swayze, Wesley Snipes, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Will Smith, Tom Selleck, Andy Samberg and on and on...

It's a long list, and I couldn't even fit in all the ones who were up for Oscars for their bravery in playing gay (although, regrettably, the decision to use that criterion for whom to include kept the list very caucasian). On the other hand, the longer the list, the more likely that someone who is perhaps at the very least bisexual, just not "out," would be on it.

Q Toon: Quiet Cate

You'll have to pardon me for not drawing turkeys and pilgrims today. This week's cartoon concerns a curious statement by actress Cate Blanchett, which probably requires some explanation:

Discussing Carol, her new film based on Patricia Highsmith's novel The Price of Salt, which chronicles a love affair between two women in 1950s New York City, Blanchett told the press at Cannes that Carol’s “sexuality is a private affair,” adding with perceptible disdain: “What happens these days is if you are homosexual, you have to talk about it constantly; it has to be the only thing; you have to put it before your work, before any other aspect of your personality.” Perhaps Blanchett was decrying conservative culture’s obsessive focus on sexual identity over other meaningful aspects of personhood. Or perhaps not. In the Variety article, her words similarly smacked of scorn: “[Carol’s] sexuality isn't politicized. I think there are a lot of people that exist ... who don’t feel the need to shout it from the rafters.” 

I wouldn't suggest any particularly deep reading into this week's Q Syndicate cartoon, aside from the trivial fact that the name of my fictional late-night TV host is based on the Spanish and French words for "chat."

When I drew this cartoon, I had no idea that one Justin Bieber would be a no-show on Colbert's show, so that's neither here nor there, too.

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Have a happy Thanksgiving, and don't overdose on football or L Triptophan!

Q Toon: Kenya Matata

President Obama visited Eastern Africa during this past week, and during a press conference with Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta in Nairobi, he was asked about gay rights, which very few African countries respect. He answered:

"If somebody is a law abiding citizen who is going about their business and working in a job and obeying the traffic signs and doing all the other things that good citizens are supposed to do, and not harming anybody, the idea that they are going to be treated differently or abused because of who they love is wrong. Full stop. ... When you start treating people differently not because of any harm they're doing anybody but because they're different, that's the path whereby freedoms begin to erode and bad things happen."

Under Kenyan law, sexual activity between men is illegal and may result in a prison sentence of up to 14 years. Kenyatta, described by Politico as "clearly uncomfortable, fidgeting at the podium,"  dismissed the topic entirely: "The issue of gay rights is a non-issue."

Given recent events in marriage equality in the United States and the horrible record in many African countries on LGBT rights, that the topic would come up during President Obama's visit was widely anticipated. A planned naked protest against Obama for his pro-gay stand had been canceled hours before his visit. Organizers claimed that 3,600 had signed up to participate in the protest before some unidentified 2:00 in the morning caller persuaded them to cancel.

One shudders to imagine such a protest in this country. I don't want to see thousands of naked Kentucky county clerks, Alabama judges, Mississippi cake bakers, Arkansas florists, Texas legislators, Scott Lively, Franklin Graham and Maggie Gallagher flapping and flopping their way up Pennsylvania Avenue, do you?