In Memory of Dianne Feinstein

U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) passed away last weekend at the age of 90.

Hillary Rodham Clinton began her remembrance of Feinstein with this anecdote:

One day, on the floor of the Senate in 1993, Idaho Republican Larry Craig condescended to Dianne Feinstein, the Democratic sponsor of a proposed ban on assault weapons. “The gentle lady from California needs to become a little bit more familiar with firearms and their deadly characteristics,” he said. Craig, a board member of the National Rifle Association, had picked the wrong target.

“I am quite familiar with firearms,” Dianne responded, with fire in her eyes. “I became mayor as a product of assassination. I found my assassinated colleague and put a finger through a bullet hole trying to get a pulse. I was trained in the shooting of a firearm when I had terrorist attacks, with a bomb in my house, when my husband was dying, when I had windows shot out. Senator, I know something about what firearms can do.”

Feinstein's bill would be passed by Congress and signed into law by Hillary's husband — unfortunately, with a sunset provision that allowed it to expire during the George W. Bush administration, facilitating horrible nationwide carnage in the decades since.

Feinstein was never quite as liberal as some people wanted her to be. Randy Shilts's And the Band Played On recounts early in her tenure as Mayor of San Francisco, she alienated many in the LGBTQ+ community (we only used half of that acronym back then) by not supporting municipal employee benefits for same-sex couples. In return, as AIDS began spreading like wildfire among gay men, that factored in the fierce resistance she faced against shutting down the city's bathhouses to address the crisis.

More recently, liberal Democrats excoriated her for not asking Brett Kavanaugh about allegations of  against him that she knew about when he appeared before the Senate confirmation panel to be elevated to the Supreme Court. So did Republicans, for completely different reasons, once those allegations were made public.

And of course, there were all the calls from her fellow Democrats for her to step down from her seat this year, given her health and perceptions of mental deterioration. Clearly, however, she had every intention of serving out the remaining months of her sixth term in the Senate. Well, old age ain't for sissies.

(On the topic of age: It would have been easier to have caricatured Feinstein as she appeared recently. I intentionally chose to make a caricature of her as she appeared decades ago.)

Whatever anyone thinks about her mayoral record, she has been an ally on LGBTQ+ and women's issues ever since being elected to the Senate in the "Year of the Woman" 31 years ago. On "Don't Ask, Don't Tell," the "Defense of Marriage Act," women's reproductive health rights, and trans rights, her record has been virtually impeccable.

And now she has been succeeded by an out lesbian woman, Laphonza Butler, President of Emily's List and formerly an advisor to Kamala Harris's 2020 presidential campaign.

National Coming Out Days

Q Syndicate, October, 2013

Tomorrow being National Coming Out Day (NCOD), I thought I'd share a handful of the cartoons I've drawn over the years to mark the event. There are many years when I failed to publish an NCOD cartoon; it comes in the midst of election season every other year, so I often feel compelled to draw about more pressing matters. 

This year, I just couldn't keep up with the deluge of More Pressing Matters.

Q Syndicate, October, 1998

One of my early NCOD cartoons featured 18-year-old Dylan confiding in his gay Uncle Jim over coffee. Fourteen years later (although I miscounted and had Dylan say it was twelve), I revisited the pair. Well, it's not likely that any of my readers actually remembered the earlier cartoon, so let's just go along with Dylan's version of the time line; here's how I imagined 30-year-old Dylan and 50-something Jim had aged.

Q Syndicate, October, 2012

If the two ever make it back in a cartoon, I figure that Dylan has married and adopted a child. Uncle Jim, however, has commitment issues and is a swinging sexuagenarian single. He probably never did explicitly come out to his parents.

But let's not overlook some real people who have not come out.

Q Syndicate, October 2002

This wasn't exactly an NCOD cartoon, aside from its timing. Out magazine editor Brendan Lemon had written in his magazine in May, 2001, that he had been "having an affair with a pro baseball player from a major-league East Coast franchise, not his team’s biggest star but a very recognizable media figure" for a year and a half. A year and a half later, inquiring minds were still abuzz over who that very recognizable media figure might be, and New York Mets catcher Mike Piazza actually held a news conference to announce that it wasn't him.

Eighteen years later, we still don't know who Lemon's boyfriend was, but one has to assume that the stress Lemon wrote about, having to keep their relationship hush-hush while being very much an out public figure himself, eventually doomed the relationship. You can count Major League baseball players who have come out of the closet on one hand, and most of them did so after they retired from the sport.

As for the football player in panel four, he was just someone I made up for a punch line.

Q Syndicate, October, 2017

This odd little news item highlights the sort of thing that could get the vote of ordinary citizens like you or me thrown out. Overzealous election officials, and those pressured by Republican legislatures to suppress the vote, can disqualify you if your signature doesn't quite match what they have on record. Or if you've resumed using your maiden name. Or, certainly, if your gender doesn't present the same as it did when you first registered.

I hope not to have any reason to keep drawing more cartoons about this family very, very soon.

Q Syndicate, October, 2007

And I'm sure you remember Senator Larry Craig (R-ID), of wide stance in the men's room at the Minneapolis-St. Paul airport fame.

He's still not giving keynote speeches anywhere these days.

It's just as well if some people want to stay in the closet, anyway. Really. We're good.

Bathroom Humor

The other day, I made an off-hand reference to two conservatives who have been obsessed with our nation's toilets. It's Stickleback Saturday, so what better excuse to dredge up a couple of my old cartoons about them?

First was Phyllis Schlafly, spokesperson for the Eagle Forum and vociferous opponent of the Equal Rights Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The proposed amendment, which passed the House and Senate overwhelmingly in 1972, would have guaranteed women equal rights before the law with men. Schlafly is credited for derailing its ratification, predicting that the ERA would result in unisex bathrooms, same-sex marriage, and compulsory military service for women. The ERA fell three states short of ratification in 1982.

There was some talk of reviving the ERA after Democrats swept the 2006 elections. Only talk, apparently. Most public buildings still offer a choice of men's and women's rest rooms, and there hasn't been any military draft since the Vietnam War, As of this writing, we're still waiting for the Supreme Court's ruling on whether marriage equality should be the law of the land even without the ERA.

I drew the above cartoon for the Kenosha [Wisconsin] Tribune when the deadline for ratification had passed in July of 1982. I believe I've mentioned the Tribune before; it was a very short-lived newspaper that failed to survive that summer.

I have no idea whether Schlafly's husband, John Fred Schlafly Jr. bore any resemblance to the man in the cartoon. Or whether they had a dog.

✍ ✍ ✍

Senator Larry Craig (R-ID) had a very different interest in public rest rooms. The conservative Idahoer (yes, that's a word) had racked up a solidly antigay voting record in the House and Senate when, on June 11, 2007, he was arrested at the Minneapolis-St. Paul airport for soliciting sex from an undercover policeman in the men's room.

The nation learned how men supposedly invite sexual encounters by sticking a foot underneath the stall divider; Senator Craig protested that the officer had misinterpreted his habitual "wide stance." He later revised that to "I'm a wide guy," but ultimately pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge of disorderly conduct. Meanwhile, the second stall from the right in the men's room next to the lottery shop actually became a tourist attraction.

I drew a couple earlier cartoons about Craig, but my favorite is this one from June of 2008, when the retiring senator announced that he planned to write his memoirs.

Q Toon: P.E. Eww

If you're a public official, and you want to tell a joke, it had better be a good one. If the joke is even slightly off, we inkslingers may never let you hear the end of it.

Former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee was regaling guests at a religious broadcasters' conference with his God Guns Grits 'n' Gravy Elitist opinion of  Caitlyn Jenner, né Bruce.

"Now I wish that someone told me when I was in high school that I could have felt like a woman when it came time to take showers in P.E. I'm pretty sure that I would have found my feminine side and said, 'Coach, I think I'd rather shower with the girls today.'"

I'd say that at least Huckabee was finding some facility to fret over besides public rest rooms, the obsession of every conservative from Phyllis Schlafly to Larry Craig, except that he used "Omigosh There'll Be Trannies Flashing Kids In The Lavatory!" as the lead-in to his shower joke.

I'm just guessing, but I'd be willing to bet that Jenner has given more thought to what it means to be a man or a woman than Huckabee has. And to put it in language that even the former Governor might understand, I'm sure that Jenner didn't put herself through all this public notoriety just so she could enjoy the longer lines for the ladies' room.