Q Toon: Sinema Viditée

 

Democrats rejoiced in 2018 when Arizona's Kyrsten Sinema narrowly won the Senate seat vacated by Republican Jeff Flake to become the first openly bisexual senator in the United States. 

Now Sinema is one of two nominally Democratic senators double-handedly blocking President Biden's Build Back Better Bill. The other 48 Democratic senators, the Biden administration, and everyone in the press are struggling to figure out exactly what it would take to get her and West Virginia's Joe Manchin on board. 

In Manchin's case, we've pretty much figured out that he wants a bill that some theoretical Republican might vote for; which is akin to finding a steakhouse a vegan might agree to eat at, or a classical opera your four-year-old would like to sit through.

If there is something that Kyrsten Sinema would like to see stricken from or added to the bill, she is being extremely coy about making everyone else guess what it might be. A reporter in the Capitol attempted to get her to explain her position:

Q: What do you say to progressives who are frustrated they don’t know where you are?

SINEMA: “I’m in the Senate.”

Q: There are progressives in the Senate that are also frustrated they don’t know where you are either.

SINEMA: “I’m clearly right in front of the elevator.”

It's dickishness like that that gets you harassed in the rest room by frustrated former supporters.

 

Q: No, I mean, what is your position on negotiations?

SINEMA: Sitting down, usually.

Q: What is your position now?

SINEMA: I'm standing, silly. 

Q: Is there anything you would like to see in the bill?

SINEMA: Words and numbers. Charts.

Q: Can't you be serious for a moment?

SINEMA: No, I'm Kyrsten Sinema.

Q: Hold on — I'm just getting word that Susan Collins has announced that she might be persuaded to vote for the bill. I'm gonna go talk to her.

SINEMA: Wait, what? No! She can't — she can't do that!

Q: Of course she didn't. Gotcha!

Q Toon: Signs of Fall

Mine may be the only cartoon on the AAEC web site today that is not about the federal government shutdown.

But it's fall! Time to enjoy the fall colors and off-color jokes! National Coming Out Day is just over a week away, so it's time to start getting into the spirit of the holiday, deck the halls, bake some pumpkin soufflé, dress up and prowl the neighborhood. Or am I thinking of the Folsom Street Fair?

By the way, check back for another cartoon here tomorrow!

Qtoon: 14, 12, or 11 Years Later

Q SyndicateΔOct 11, 2012

Today is National Coming Out Day, and to mark the occasion, I decided to follow up on a cartoon I drew way back in 1998. (See this week's "Sneak Peek.")

In the original cartoon, Uncle Jim did most of the talking to his 18-year-old nephew, Dylan. The cartoon implied that Uncle Jim was past his 38th birthday but still well short of his 48th. Twelve years later, Dylan would be 30, and Jim somewhere in his 50's. Uncle Jim has changed his appearance significantly over the years. He's put on a fair amount of weight and decided to compensate for his thinning hair by growing a heavy beard. Nephew Dylan now wears glasses and has exchanged his shaggy mane for something with more product in it.

Now, most of my readers don't have my life's work at their fingertips, so it's not like any of the following really matters. But if there are any obsessive fans reading this blog, there is one nagging little inconsistency about this week's cartoon that I might as well try to explain.

I added the copyright date in the second panel as I was nearly done inking the cartoon, and suddenly realized that 1998 was fourteen years ago, not twelve. I hadn't left myself enough room to change "twelve" to "fourteen," so we're left to suppose that perhaps Dylan didn't come out to his parents at 18 (after all, in the original cartoon, Jim advises him that there's no rush to do so) but two years later after another conversation at this diner.

Then, when I hunted up the digital file for Monday's Sneak Peek, I found that for reasons I cannot recall, its copyright date had been changed to 2001. This cartoon was originally drawn in August, 1998 as a "reserve" -- to be released at some later date when I might not have another cartoon at the ready, so my first thought was that we held onto that reserve cartoon for three years.

There is a note on the page the cartoon was drawn on, however, indicating that it appeared in the Phoenix Echo in October, 1998. (Back then, a few of the papers in which my cartoons appeared would mail me those issues.) So either I mistakenly included this cartoon for three years in the January ritual of updating the copyright dates of the unreleased reserves, or somebody wanted to re-release this cartoon in 2001.

I don't have any idea. All I know is that I've fallen woefully behind in keeping up a supply of reserves; I've been without one for months, if not years. I've learned that there's little point in drawing up reserves such as the original Dylan and Jim cartoon for release at specific dates on the calendar unless I have plans to be busy or on vacation at that time. It's more useful to have something totally generic in case of emergency, and I have less need for a reserve Christmas cartoon than I have for a cartoon to be released for publication immediately after Christmas.

By the way, if you have any confident predictions about what is going to be a happenin' topic for LGBT readers around December 27 of this year, I'm all ears.

National Coming Out Day

I didn't draw a National Coming Out Day cartoon this year, so here's a look back at the one I drew ten years ago. At the time, it felt a little too early to turn attention to such personal concerns, so my approach was to turn that feeling around.

Q Toon: That Wascally Weiner

Well, after all that talk last week about not jumping on the Weiner cartoon bandwagon, here I go anyway.

My syndicate editor responded in a strongly worded e-mail to my cartoon proposal by saying that it is the attacks on Anthony Weiner that are shameful. Perhaps this cartoon's protagonist (who is supposed to be another patient at the Picklethorp Institute, in case that isn't clear) isn't far off the mark for most gays' response to l'Affaire Weiner. Gay people nowadays tend to be more open about their sexuality than the purveyors of straight mores, which is, after all, what National Coming Out Day (October 11) and Gay Pride Month (you're soaking in it!) are all about.

I was a little surprised by the force of my editor's response, however, since she is a lesbian, and presumably even less impressed by photos of Weiner tenting his boxer shorts than the straight gals to whom the Congressman was tweeting them. By the way, I thought Kristen Schaal's Daily Show observation that women do not share men's fascination with what penises look like was spot on. Could it be that homophobia is a by-product of straight men's realization that what they always thought to be their best come-on approaches probably appeal more to gay men than to straight women?

So, this week's cartoon carries that thought a little further.

Now that I've drawn it, I'm glad I've got that Weiner business out of my system. It wasn't so bad after all. I only regret that I didn't populate the background with Schwarzenegger, Edwards, Vitter, Ensign, Woods, and the rest of the lot.