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.

This Week's Sneak Peek

Display along a stairway at the Citizen Hotel in Sacramento

I was at the last convention of the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists this past weekend, so I had to draw this week's upcoming cartoon before I left. Given the peripatetic nature of the attention-starved lunatic at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, it ain't easy coming up with political cartoons that are guaranteed to be relevant over a week in advance.

The annual National Coming Out Day is coming up on October 11, so I figured I might as well draw something about it in time for the monthlies that run my cartoons.

As for the convention, it was the AAEC's last.

In light of the impending Death of Print, heralded by the Death of the Editorial Page, we voted to change the organizational name to the Association of Political Artists. Young people these days have never even seen an editorial page, and certainly don't produce cartoons for them.

We had considerable discussion over whether "APA" is too broad, and whether something more specific is needed to disqualify, say, presidents of the United States who post videos of themselves dropping tons of shit from an Air Force bomber.

On the other hand, as anyone who has struggled to remember all the letters in LGBTQIAA2SDLNBKR2QKn4PXEIEIO+ could tell you, it is nearly impossible to find a functional balance between specificity and inclusivity.

Q Toon: Proof Through the Night

Something a little lighter this week:

I like to take note of National Coming Out Day when I can, even when it occurs during the most critical and fraught election season since 1860.

It's a holiday only a few decades old, offering an impetus, or at least an excuse, for LGBTQ+ people of any age who have been in the closet, or just realizing who they are, to celebrate themselves in public. To be honest with the people they love, they work with, or they meet. To be unashamed of the ones they love.

In some ways, there is less to lose by coming out now than there was on the first NCOD in 1988. Being out is not going to get you dishonorably discharged from military service. You can still be a big Hollywood star, or a highly paid athlete, or Senator, or cabinet secretary, or Ambassador to Luxembourg. Or pastor, doctor, nurse, school teacher, truck driver, or Tik Tok influencer.

Or parent.

True, there is still the possibility that coming out could leave you estranged from family, church, or friends. But it's a possibility that has become more remote for more and more of us, thanks to the brave men and women who have come out before you.

And your coming out will make that possibility even more remote for those who come after you, believe it or not.

If the fireworks surrounding your coming out experience are rough, take heart. I promise you that you will find new family, church, or friends. Your old family, church or friends might even come around someday. 

Or they might surprise you and keep loving you for who you are... just like they did before.

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.

Q Toon: The Family That Comes Out Together

Late last week, I had a cartoon idea about presidential debates all set to propose to my syndicate editors. But then came Donald Trump's midnight tweet that he has COVID-19, and I had to scrap that idea in case it was rendered obsolete or at least in bad taste by events this week. A subsequent idea I liked could have run into the same problem by today; I drew it anyway and posted it here on Sunday.

National Coming Out Day is October 11, and I'm pretty sure it's not going to be cancelled or anything, so this is what I sent off to Q Syndicate for this week.

So anyway: In olden days, people coming out to their families had to brace themselves for the possibility that their families would reject them.

 

Now you have to brace yourself for just about anything — from "Get the hell out of my house," to "Yeah, we know," to — well, this young man's parents.

Who might be sending a subtle message in case anybody was thinking about moving back home next summer.

Q Toon: Take Your Boyfriend to Work Day

I'm a little early for National Coming Out Day, which will really suck if I can't come up with something to draw about next week.

National Coming Out Day (NCOD) is October 11. Founded in 1988, the only significance of the date is that it was when the National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights was held the year before.

31 years of emboldening LGs and eventually BTQs to come out has changed the landscape. By now, everyone knows that they know at least one LGBTQ person, probably including a relative, and that makes it hard for the antigay community to sell antigay hysteria.

So come out. The water's fine. You don't need to drape yourself in a rainbow flag 24/7 if that's not your style, but come out. The little things do count.

Even having your beau's picture on the desk in your home office.

Q Toon: Truth Will Out

A peculiar little detail in the case of Jared and Ivanka Kushner using private e-mail for government business (gosh, where have I heard about that before, I wonder) is the revelation that Jared Kushner was somehow registered as a female voter in the state of New York.

It has since been revealed that the mistake was due to a clerical error rather than some subconscious desire on the part Kushner himself. It does lead one to wonder, however, whether any other such clerical errors will be cited by the Kris Kobach Kommission as proof of widespread voter fraud.

Q Toon: The Talk

I like to take note of National Coming Out Day when I can, because it's still not an easy thing for many LGBT people coming to grips with their identity to do — even though conditions have improved greatly over the last few years (under a Democratic President, oddly enough for those of you still having difficulty deciding how to vote next month).

It has become easier for friends and family of LGBT persons to deal with, also, but that's not to say that it's a breeze for everyone. Coming out is an act of will for friends and family also: to include the significant others in family and in conversation in the same way as those significant others of opposite-sex relationships; or to speak of one's transgender relative without exhibiting feats of jaw-dropping gymnastic pronoun skills.

National Coming Out Day

This week's Spitback Saturday feature celebrates National Coming Out Day, which comes around every October 11. The day was created in 1988 to mark the anniversary of the second National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights the previous year. It is meant, akin to making resolutions on the New Year, to provide that extra impetus to stop putting off coming "out of the closet" to one's family, friends, co-workers, or the world, as gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender. As more people have been made aware of their friends and loved ones who are LGBT, acceptance of what was once a castigated, persecuted minority has grown tremendously.

You might think that as a gay political cartoonist, I'd have drawn something for NCOD every October, in which case you'd be wrong. Congress is back from vacation, elections are just around the corner, the Supreme Court is announcing the cases it will take up for the session, and people are taking note of new television shows.

Tying NCOD in to current events usually turns out awkwardly, as with this 2001 effort:

This cartoon was drawn in September for October release, and if you remember the mood of the country at the time, many of us weren't sure we had permission to be funny yet. Nobody knew whether there would be another big terrorist attack, we were going to war in Afghanistan, and someone was mailing anthrax to NBC News and Democrats in Congress. I never particularly liked this cartoon; it just wasn't the right time for LGBT activists to push our issues. Nor was it the right time for homophobes to push theirs, so I quickly went back to criticizing them for trying.

Attempts like that cartoon to strike a serious note turn maudlin over time, and since that's not the mood I'd like to end this blog entry with, I'm going to skip ahead several years to a totally different approach to National Coming Out Day from 2010:

So have a very merry National Coming Out Day, all you last-minute shoppers! God bless us, every one.

Q Toon: Savings in the Costumes Budget

Occasionally, I like to draw something for National Coming Out Day, which is October 11. I haven't done an NCOD cartoon every year, because it's hard to avoid clichés after a while. But every so often, there's something new in the culture that seems like a good fit for the topic.

It's also an excuse this time around to draw some beefcake.

Every cartoon has to be set somewhere (unless there is so much dialogue that there is no room for background). I could have drawn these two at breakfast, or at a bar, or at work, on the subway, or bungee jumping off the Verrazano-Narrows bridge, and the basic idea of the cartoon would not have been greatly changed.

There used to be a cartoon strip in one of the local LGBT papers in which the characters were frequently at the beach, no matter what the topic of the week might be. I often got the impression that the cartoonist had a bunch of already-drawn strips of Guys In Speedos waiting for him to add dialogue once he had a humorous gag to add to one of them.

Some of this cartoonist's later strips appeared to have been drawn on napkins with felt tip pen, which suggested that either he was doodling at a bar somewhere, or that his strip really was not paying for itself.

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.

This Week's Sneak Peek. Sort of

Instead of the usual snippet from a corner of this week's Q Syndicate cartoon, this week's sneak peek is a cartoon I drew for the syndicate 14 years ago.

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.