Q Toon: Chaos at Kennedy Center

I introduced Max's mother into the Leo and Max series last winter as working in some undefined capacity at the John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts. Leo and Max are avatars for the divisions in the Ostensibly United States of America in general; Karen is just my opening for addressing a specific topic.

Open homocon Ric Grenell could have served as my excuse to draw cartoons about the JFK Center; I had drawn a few cartoons about him before Trump named him as his Trump’s chief lieutenant there. But he didn't last very long in that position; his career is in foreign policy after all, not performing arts.

So it turns out that having a recurring character remaining behind among Trump’s lickspittle Board of Misdirectors comes in handy. Leo, the liberal, seems to enjoy needling Karen about Donald Diva Trump’s mission of recreating it as a memorial to himself or razing it to the ground.

I took a risk in drawing this cartoon that the JFK Center would still be standing by the time my cartoon saw print. Trump's modus operandi has been to tear things down before anyone has a chance to stop him (e.g, the East Wing, trees of the East Potomac Golf Links, ethical standards, constitutional norms, and he's still just getting started).

Is it telling that the JFK Center board named a new Artistic Director, but as a contractor, not a hire? No, it's not Kimberly Guilfoyle; it's Rick Canny, who, I hear, has worked with ZZ Top and Tommy Lee, so at least he's not some random Trumpster. Since performers have cancelled in droves, and Executive Director Matthew Floca closed the Center's main building months ago on account of supposed life-safety concerns, however, I'm not clear on what art Mr. Canny has to direct.

The Center's current regime put an end to those rainbow ribbons that came with JFK Center awards, so perhaps Mr. Canny can work on a more Trumpy design for when Trump celebrates giving all the awards to himself. A Confederate flag motif, perhaps.

You can guess whose scowling face will be on the gold-plated marble award medal.

Well, if I keep this up, I'm gonna spoil any possibility of bringing Karen back in a future cartoon, so enough is enough. 

Unless she ends up working along with everybody else from the JFK Center at the Donald Commodius Trump Presidential White House Memorial Ballroom and Bunker for the Performing Arts.

This Week's Retro Peek

I'm reposting this panel from a Leo & Max cartoon back in January just as a reminder of Max's mother, Karen, and where she works. 

Leo's family background may get treatment someday. Somehow, they never showed up while Leo was abducted by ICE agents and flown to some s-hole country's civil war, so perhaps they're just not very close. 

Or maybe we just haven't seen them because they're terribly shy.

Q Toon: The Truth Will Out

Since I was going to be crunched in the middle seat of a Southwest airplane this past week when I would usually be at my drawing board, I had to draw this week's cartoon several days earlier. 

Happily, National Coming Out Day is next month, and I already had a recurring character who is not out to his mother. (At least, that was clearly implied when she came to visit last January.) 

But I have also established that Max's mom works at the John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts, in some capacity where she personally interacted with Richard Grenell, so she can't be completely oblivious to gay men. Max and Leo have probably been co-habitating for at least five years now in spite of their political differences; she ought to have some inkling that there must be some reason that neither one has kicked out the other.

The two of them own a dog together, for cryin' out loud.

On the other hand, perhaps Mom thinks National Coming Out Day is all about encouraging outdoor activities.

Q Toon: Devices to Their Own Left

Wisconsin failed — by a whisker — to follow Democrats in the rest of the country in the march to Democratic Socialism this Tuesday. Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley edged out Madison Statehouse Representative Francesca Hong in the race for the party's gubernatorial nomination.

In polls, Hong, a self-identified Democratic Socialist, had led a crowded field for months, and Republicans were eager to run against her. Not that their campaign against Crowley will be any different than their campaign against her; Tom Tiffany and his corporate backers will simply edit his face into their attack ads in place of hers.

The embarrassing tweets played up in Republican ads will be significantly older than the stuff they wanted to hang around Hong's neck (Crowley has semi-plausible deniability that he was responsible for them). We can make a drinking game for every time a commercial warns us that "David Crowley Is Too Liberal For Wisconsin." We're a heavy-drinking state, you know.

Well, anyway, Max and Leo hadn't heard the Wisconsin primary results before walking their dog in this week's cartoon. Zoran Mamdani's election as New York City Mayor heralded a string of high profile victories by young, left-wing Democrats over older, more "establishment" incumbents: Melat Kiros in Colorado; Abdul El-Sayed and William Lawrence in Michigan; Peggy Flanagan in Minnesota.

On the other hand, 

The winners in the Democrats’ moderate faction include Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez (Wash.), who fended off a leftist challenger; former Rep. Elaine Luria (Va.) and Richmond-area prosecutor Shannon Taylor, who won swing-district primaries; and Rep. Wesley Bell (Mo.), who prevailed in his rematch against democratic socialist former Rep. Cori Bush.

Republicans purged moderates (and anyone willing to stand up for constitutional democracy) from their number several election cycles ago, so as far as the GOP is concerned, there is no difference between moderate Democrats, liberal progressives, Democratic Socialists, Socialists, and Communists. Potayto, potahto. 

French fries, gnocchi, tater tot, lefse, spud.

This Week's Sneak Peek

Wisconsin's partisan primaries are tomorrow, and if the polls and the Republican-interest advertising are to be believed, the Democratic gubernatorial candidate who identifies as a Democratic Socialist is going to be victorious over three more mainstream Democrats.

Even without the endorsement of Bernie Sanders or Alexandria Ocaso-Cortez, Francesca Hong (D-Madison) has become the left-wing's darling here. Outside interests have been attacking Hong on television and in social media for weeks; one Republican-affiliated group, however, has been using language that won't scare off any Democrats, calling her "progressive" and "liberal" and accusing her of being opposed to Trump's immigration policy.

Like every Democrat who isn't named Fetterman.

Hong has given Republicans plenty of ammunition to use against her in the general election. Before announcing her campaign, she had called for "defunding the police" and shutting down all the state's prisons; she advocated cancelling Thanksgiving because it "celebrat[es] colonialism." Now she is busy backtracking all of that.

The early mainstream favorite, Lieutenant Governor Sara Rodriguez, was obliged to withdraw from the race due to a campaign accounting snafu; Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley had suspended his campaign because of lackluster poll numbers, but rejoined the race when Rodriguez dropped out. He immediately won the endorsement of retiring Governor Tony Evers in spite of Evers's promise to keep mum about his preferences.

The others still in the race are State Sen. Kelda Roys (D-Madison) and former Secretary of the Wisconsin Department of Administration Joel Brennan, neither of whom has been able to poll above the statistical margin of error in spite of their bona fides and worthy résumés. Also on the ballot are former Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes and Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation CEO Missy Hughes, who have also dropped out of the race.

Meanwhile, Republican Tom Tiffany faces only token opposition on his side of the ballot, and has flooded the airwaves with feel-good, folksy ads before whoever the Democratic nominee is will have a chance to characterize him as a right-wing Trumpster eager to return Wisconsin to the Scott Walker era of Ruthless One Party Rule.

This Week's Sneak Peek

A visitor here commented that he at first mistook the testosterone-overloaded soldier in last Thursday's cartoon for the "cop" in The Village People. 

For the record, I draw that cop character like the guy on the right:

The soldier in the foreground of Thursday's cartoon might have been part Cop Guy and part Biker Guy, but I get how not everyone in outside the gay porn clientele might not be familiar with Tom of Finland and the like. Even Tom of Finland didn't draw guys whose shirts conformed to their abs and nipples.

And by the way, thanks to Mike "Comic Strip of the Day" Peterson for highlighting Thursday's cartoon at The Daily Cartoonist on Friday!

Q Toon: What's In a Name

On the last day of Pride Month, Matthew Vines, evangelical author of God and the Gay Christian, published an op-ed in the New York Times headlined "I'm Gay, Not Queer. It Matters." In the essay, he complains that use of the “queer” label has contributed to a decrease in support for the LGBTQ+ community, not only among conservatives, but among the public at large.

The word queer “carries an adversarial charge that ‘gay’ does not,” Vines writes. Furthermore, “because the word ‘queer’ can describe any departure from social norms, it becomes an open door through which almost anyone can walk. Polyamorous? Queer. Vaguely uncomfortable with gender expectations? Possibly queer, too.” 

The word had been an antigay slur when activists chanted "We're here, we're queer, get over it" at 1970's Pride marches.  The point was originally to defang the word; later, as the word "lesbigay" proved inadequately inclusive, some advocated for "queer" as a more pronounceable name than "LGBTQIAA2S..." Easier to remember, too.

Vines, by the way, used “L.G.B.T.Q.,” periods and all, three times throughout his op-ed. I don't think that is a N.Y.T. stylebook thing. A.F.A.I.K.

Certainly, Vines is not the only gay man uncomfortable identifying as queer. But then, not every guy in the LGBTQ+ community identifies as gay, either. Or homosexual, on the down low, Two Spirit, M4M, a Friend of Dorothy, Uranian, malakoi, or any other particular sexual proclivity off to the right of the + sign.

But to disregard the most visible, provocative members of our community is to forget that we didn't come as far as we have by meekly accepting police raids of our gathering places and homes; by having to lie to family, friends, employers, and government; or by dying alone and quietly as a cruel disease cut hundreds of thousands of us down in the prime of life.

The queers of ACT-UP and the Stonewall Inn "carrie[d] an adversarial charge," because they had to in order to move society forward.

Without them, Matthew Vines might still identify as a gay evangelical author. But quite likely an unpublished and unemployed one. 

This Week's Sneak Peek

 Max and Leo are back already:

There was a chance that I wouldn't have a cartoon here today.

A powerful wind storm blew through here on Friday afternoon, knocking out the power to us and 720 other WE Energies customers. We had just taken delivery of the building materials for a gazebo, and barely had enough time to take our flag down when it hit.

At first, we were told that electricity would be restored around 10:00 p.m.; but by evening, WE Energies was telling us that the cause of the outage was unknown and not to expect the power back on until Monday.

Happily, we got power back on at 4:33 a.m. (we both happened to be awake); some nearby areas got their electricity back after 7:00 in the morning. I didn't have to draw by candle light, or send my cartoon in by carrier pigeon.

All in all, we were pretty lucky. The same storm capsized a boat on Lake Geneva, drowning three children. Homes around us lost trees and fences. I hear there was some flooding around the state.

I hope your Fourth was safe, sane, and enjoyable, leaving you nothing to clean up other than the usual firecracker debris, cake pans, grills, and beer cans.

Q Toon: Can You Take a Joke. Please

A witless baboon in the White House Octagon to celebrate Donald Commodius Trump's Octogenarian Birthday made a gratuitous swipe at former First Lady Michelle Obama, grabbing the mic to call her a man. 

I guess MAGArillas think that kind of thing is funny. At least until they start clinging to it as a core belief, like their tenacious insistence despite all evidence to the contrary that her husband was born in Kenya.

It's of the same joke book of pretending that James Talarico is a transgender vegan, or Al Gore claimed to have invented the internet.

To be fair, liberals do it, too. Sarah Palin never said she could see Russia from her house; J.D. Vance never wrote that he made passionate love to a sofa. And Donald Trump doesn't really have a pig snout. I do not, however, see liberals insisting that these things are, in fact, true.

Poking fun at politicians is fair game; questioning the gender identity of Mr. Talarico and Mrs. Obama, however, is intentionally mean. The present fascist regime is devoted to persecuting transgender and gender-non-conforming persons, so casting aspersions on someone's gender identity can hardly be innocent fun.

Of course, there are dimwitted, cranky trumpeters who imagine that coining the word Dumocrats or calling anyone who disagrees with him stupid is fiendishly clever, and any liberal who doesn't agree must not have a sense of humor.

Q Toon: Ric Rolls with the Punches

Since I had introduced Max's mother Karen during my vacation as someone working at the Donald J. Trump John Fitzgerald Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts (hereinafter referred to as the DJTJFKMC4PA), who better to interact with newly former President of the DJTJFKMC4PA, Ric Grenell?

Gay Republican Grenell has a track record of stirring up opposition wherever he goes. Republican Theocrats were up in arms when presidential candidate Mitt Romney took him on as a foreign policy surrogate; he later repeatedly offended his hosts as Ambassador to Germany in Donald Trump's First Corrupt Presidency.

With the recrudescence of Trump, Grenell came on board to oversee the bastardization of the JFK Center, sending artists and audiences streaming toward the exits. He and a new board of Trump lickspittles and right-wing ideologues rubber stamped Trump’s impetuous response to shut the DJTJFKMC4PA down for so-called renovations for the next two years.

Now, we don't know whether Grenell quit or was fired. Nor do we know what his plans for the future are; New York Times reporter Elizabeth Williamson attempted to ask him that quite reasonable question, only for him to throw a hissy fit back at her, huffing that she is a "left wing hack” manipulating the news.

Not the response of someone who left of her own accord, girl!

I drew my cartoon before Williamson and Grenell’s exchange became public. I suppose I would have had to draw a completely different cartoon otherwise, but Karen is not a New York Times reporter or a left wing hack. I wrote her as a rock-solid Republican. Whether she's a lickspittle or an ideologue — well, you'll have to wait and see.

At any rate, to have Grenell snap at Karen would require him to be even more of an unhinged sissy than I think he is.

But what do I know? I'm just a left-wing hack interested in attacking Republicans and manipulating the news for my own far left agenda.

Q Toon: Pillow Talk with Leo & Max

I introduce the characters of Leo and Max as a way of discussing issues that are not necessarily LGBTQ+centric for an LGBTQ+ readership, and also to represent the gulf separating Americans with liberal and MAGA world views.

Today —  or tonight as it happens — they are disagreeing over Trump and Netanyahu's war with Iran.

It's rather curious that after Pete Kegseth spent a year insisting that we return to calling the Department of Defense the Department of War, the Lawless Trump Regime™ doesn't want to call what the Department of War is sending war materiel and soldiers to a "war." Nah, it's a "special military operation," just like the one Russia has been sending war materiel and soldiers to in Ukraine for the past four years.

Whatever. The Department of Special Military Operations vows that unlike previous administrations' special military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, we're not in Iran to execute regime change (only to execute regime leaders). Although in the case of Afghanistan, we've seen Trump's idea of a successful end to a long, drawn out war: bring back the very same people our special military operation was supposed to have gotten rid of.

This time around, our special military operation assassinated Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khameini, and also, according to Trump himself, "most of the people we had in mind" to succeed him. Trump has expressed his pique at not having had a say in the selection of Iran's new Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Mojtaba "Dubya" Khameini, who is probably holed up in the safest place from the Trumpster special military operation machine in Tehran: the Russian embassy.

Hardly anyone outside of Iran will shed a tear for the elder Khameini — for the 176 schoolgirls blown to smithereens by an American cruise missile, certainly — but it remains to be seen how his murder will play out within Iran's borders. Tehran's young, urban protesters have been no fans of his; but the poorly educated, rural peasants in the rest of the country were his MIGA faithful. 

To put it in terms Americans might understand: some Liberal Leos might have, at best, mixed feelings were Iran — or North Korea, or Cuba, or Grand Fenwick — to eliminate Trump, Vance, Mike Johnson, and much of the remaining order of succession. But all Leos and Maxes would be united in condemnation of any attack that included wiping out a girls' school and setting Texas oil refineries ablaze.

Nor would any of us ever accept those countries appointing our next head of state.

Q Toon: Exit Stage Left

Here's Part Two of Mama's visit to Max and Leo's humble abode.

I've made an effort to by coy about where Max and Leo live — in what city, town, or village (someplace with a couples therapist and a coffee shop, however), what part of the country, and whether in a house or apartment. Hence the introduction of Max's mother, who, it can now be revealed is on or works for the board of directors for the so-called Donald J. Trump John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts.

It can also be revealed that I was away on vacation when the deadlines for last week's and this week's cartoons arrived, so these two cartoons were drawn well ahead of time. In fact, they were drawn before the Washington D.C. Opera withdrew from the DJTJFKMC4PA last month. (The Center's President Ric Grenell claims they were fired; perhaps the company wanted to present Emmett Till: the Opera by Clare Coss and Mary D. Watkins. Or had commissioned an opera about Jeffrey Epstein.)

So anyway, I've spent the last few weeks hoping that none of the real entertainers mentioned in this cartoon kick the bucket, or get arrested by ICE for protesting in Minneapolis, or denounce the renaming of the DJTJFKMC4PA. 

But then our pouty mercurial president went and brayed on Trump Social that now he is shutting the DJTJFKMC4PA down for two years in order to redesign it into the gilded Louis XIV whorehouse he’s always dreamed of.

The center’s staff learned of the imminent closure through Trump’s Truth Social post, which proposed “temporarily” closing the “Trump Kennedy Center” for “Construction, Revitalization, and Complete Rebuilding” starting July 4. Trump added the move is subject to approval by the center’s board, which he chairs. — https://wapo.st/3NRd901

Phuoc that gagh damask whole.

Ground Hog Day's Sneak Peek

January, 2025

Part 2 of the visit from Max's mom is coming up this week; and at this point it might be relevant to remind loyal readers that she perhaps lives in or around Washington, D.C.

P.S. FDT.

Q Toon: Mama Comes to Visit

Please enjoy a respite from the news of the day. I'll explain later.

MAGA Max and Liberal Leo are back this week, along with Max's mother and their Dog To Be Named Later. (Max's mom's name is Karen, by the way. Because of course it is.)

I guess Max has told Karen that he and Leo are part of the trend I've heard about of friends buying homes together because of the sky-high cost of mortgages these days. Young people were renting together before Friends was a thing, which they could work around when one of them took a job out of town or got married. Deciding what's fair when co-owners are confronted with one or the other of those inevitabilities could be just as thorny as if they were a married couple.

Well, I've never specified whether Max and Leo have a legal union; but I'm pretty sure that Max is insinuating to his mother a little white lie about where he sleeps.

To be continued...

The 2-Point Conversion of St. Paul's Sneak Peek

I'm introducing a new character into the Max & Leo series this week. It's a two-parter, and probably not a three-week series, since, as Benjamin Franklin once quoted Jonah's Nineveh hosts, "Guests, like fish, begin to smell after three days."

By the way, I've got to take care of a little editorial housekeeping here. In Saturday’s Graphical History post, I asserted that the first cartoon appearance of Uncle Sam was in 1832, and it behooves me to back up that claim in case some artificially intelligent future researcher ever credits me as an authority. 

My reference is The Ungentlemanly Art: The History of American Editorial Cartoons by Stephen Hess and David Kaplan (1968), which in turn cites The Rise and Fall of Cartoon Symbols by William Murrell in The American Scholar, Summer, 1935, pp. 310-311. The text of the Hess-Kaplan book (page 35) says that the cartoon below was published in 1832; the citation in the index (page 178) says it was in 1834.

"Uncle Sam in Danger," cartoonist unknown, 1832 or 1834

I think you'll agree that this is not an Uncle Sam readers today would recognize if he weren't named in the cutline.

The Year I Almost Broke Up Max and Leo

This week's Graphical History Tour looks back on the year 2025. You may have heard of it.

I was going to post enough of my cartoons to give a more-or-less thorough overview of the year; but, gosh, there was a lot of news these past twelve months ! Most of it bad. You know something? It's just too damn soon to relive the whole damned year.

Instead, I'm pulling together the story line that developed after I drew characters Max and Leo getting swept up into the Absolutely Corrupt Trump Administration's ethnic cleansing spree.

February

MAGA Max and Liberal Leo first appeared in 2024 as my way of commenting on the widening political divide in the U.S.: a same-sex couple with widely divergent opinions on issues not exclusively of LGBTQ+ concern.

I initially thought I could wrap this story line up after a few episodes, but I had no idea that the reality was going to be much worse than anything I had in mind.

March

Max's first step to try finding out what the thugs and goons at ICE had done with Leo was to contact the deep state a government agency, only to find that Elon Musk's Dogeketeers were busy destroying government's ability to function. I purposely left vague what government department this fellow worked in, save that it was apparently not Homeland Security.

April

I never specified where the prison holding Leo was; I called it Trumplinka in my blog, but not in the cartoons. Early reports were that the U.S. was flying detainees to remote locations in Columbia and releasing them with nothing more than the clothes on their backs. Originally, I thought Leo would end up being dumped with other prisoners somewhere in South America, then contacting Max to come bring him his passport.

Then we learned that the Absolutely Corrupt Trump Regime was sending its hapless victims to CECOT, a Dante-esque concentration camp in El Salvador, without even those clothes. 

April

I had no plan for breaking Leo out of that hell, so I had to think of something else.

Having him deported to the Heard and McDonald Islands wasn't going to work out, either.

I could have involved Leo with either of two LGBTQ whose kidnapping by ICE made news in 2025 (statistically, there must be others), but the Trumpsters have consistently lied or feigned ignorance of their status. One was Georgia barber Rodney Taylor, a double amputee seized because of a past juvenile offense for which he had been pardoned. Liberia-born Taylor was brought to the U.S. by his mother for medical treatment; his pending application for U.S. residence has been put on hold while he remains incarcerated.

May

The other was Angelo Hernandez, a gay Venezuelan stylist wrongly accused of gang affiliation due to tattoos and deported to CECOT.

Tattoos were the supposedly incriminating evidence against another man the Trumpsters sent to CECOT, Kilmar Abrego Garcia. While the State Department tried to prevent Democratic members of Congress from meeting with Abrego Garcia, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Cruella deNoem got herself a photo op with overcrowded CECOT prisoners behind bars as her backdrop, and the White House resorted to PhotoShopping tattoos onto Abrego Garcia's hands.

July

By summer, the Absolutely Corrupt Trump Regime was flying deportees off to foreign countries, to which the deportees seldom had any ties, including Guatemala, Honduras, Uganda, Belize, and Paraguay — with little or no notice, in order to stymie any legal effort to get them their day in court. So I decided that I had better get Leo out of the Trumpsters' clutches one way or another. 

August

You don't hear much about last summer's catch phrase, "Trump Always Chickens Out" (TACO) any more. He's been doubling down on riveting his name onto everything from the John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts to his latest fantasy of gold-plated coal-powered Trump Classy  battleships.

July

In a movie, TV series, or adventure comic strip, there would have been exciting scenes of the American plane attempting to escape the crossfire only to crash in a huge explosion. The deportees would have wrested the keys to their shackles from that stranded ICE agent. Then, during a ceasefire negotiated by the Canadians and the E.U. long enough to evacuate their embassy personnel — oh, I'll let Leo pick up the story from there:

August

I draw a weekly cartoon, however, which runs in some newspapers and magazines that publish biweekly or monthly. And some of them may have elected to run cartoons I had drawn on other topics during the seven months when this story line dragged on.

In any case, my Better Half and I were taking a road trip to an out-of-town wedding in August, meaning that I'd be away from my drawing board for a while. There was no better reason to wrap the story up in a cartoon I could draw ahead of time — provided Trump didn't declare war on Canada in the meantime. (Especially since our return trip took us through southern Ontario.)

August

So now I have to figure out where Max and Leo go from here.

Assuming Max continues his loyalty to the Trumpreich, how does Leo not end every argument with "Don't you remember, your fascist Trump bastards arrested me without charge, held me in prison for months without due process, and sent me to some third world hellhole in the middle of a civil war?"

Maybe, to borrow a phrase, the problems of two little people don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world. But if this couple can stick it out together in spite of everything around them, maybe there is still hope for the rest of us.