Q Toon: Berlin

There was another topic I had planned to draw about this week, but the truck and knife attack that killed one and injured 29 at Berlin's annual LGBTQ Pride event over the weekend changed all that.

It was the terrorist act of an 21-year-old wannabe ISIS jihadi, whom German police later sent in search of those 72 virgins. Too bad he had to leave his body behind. Sorry not sorry.

His choice to murder innocent LGBTQ+ people celebrating and having fun cannot be happenstance. Nothing represents what Islamic fundamentalists hate about what they see as Western decadence more than LGBTQ+ pride and joy — it's even worse than string bikinis, the Reconquista, and cartoons of The Prophet.

The attack is sure to inflame Islamophobic passions in Germany, where the neo-Nazi Alternative für Deutschland party (AfD) was already polling distressingly well beforehand. The AfD are fascists — not a term I toss around lightly — who oppose both immigration and LGBTQ+ rights, and are surely taking advantage of this tragedy for their own ends.

Caught in the middle are LGBTQ+ Muslims in Germany such as Ali Darwich, an influencer on Instagram who was at the Christopher Street festival himself, ready to go to some afterparty when friends began calling to find out whether he was okay. He later told the Associated Press:

“Born a Muslim, living as a gay man, working as a police officer,” Darwich said, as he tried holding back the tears, “this terror attack touches so many aspects of who I am. ...

“I asked myself as a gay if we will have to live with more fear now even though we are already experiencing bullying and hatred. I asked myself as a Muslim if our community will be exposed to even more racism now.”

Here at home, there are some antigay Americans — and some LGBTQ right-wingers as well — who try to excuse Republican actions against our community by pointing to Islamic fundamentalists decreeing the death penalty for LGBTQ people. That argument overlooks countries, especially in Africa, passing draconian antigay penalties up to and including capital punishment, egged on by Christian fundamentalists in the U.S.

For the time being, the Absolutely Corrupt Trump Regime will be happy to cite the Christopher Street Festival attack as further justification for its ethnic cleansing program, even when it dumps refugees who fled persecution for being LGBTQ+ back to the countries that condemn them.

Persecuting white gays and lesbians here in the Homeland will have to wait until Republicans have finished eradicating the transgender menace.

Q Toon: Leering Eye for the Meme Guy

Hey, I'm not a fan of editorial cartoons based on internet memes, but sometimes you have to go where the readership is. The days when one could reference Shakespeare and Schiller are sadly gone.

LGBTQ+ Pride festivals this year are likely to be more modest than revelers may have become accustomed to.

Knuckling under to the Blatantly Corrupt Trump Regime's policy of Conformity, Inequity, and Exclusion, erstwhile sponsors such as Mastercard, Skyy Vodka, Target, and Pepsi have decided to cancel their support in 2025. Anheuser-Busch ended its 30-year relationship with hometown St. Louis's Pride festival and others'; Comcast sent its regrets to San Francisco, contributing to a $300,000 shortfall in corporate support there. 

“I find it very difficult to believe this is about the economic context,” Fabrice Houdart, executive director of the Association of LGBTQ+ Corporate Directors, told the New York Times. “One thing that is striking about the conversations I have had over the past few months is there are a lot of companies saying, ‘I won’t engage on anything LGBT-related because I don’t want to find myself being a target.’”

Some folks see this as an opportunity to get away from the over-commercialized, homogenized versions of what used to be a celebration of queerness and activism — although, like complaining about Memorial Day Weekend becoming devoted to grilling out and drinking beer, that ship may have sailed.

Q Toon: Spell Check

My biggest regret after drawing this cartoon is that I didn't include enough diversity in it.

I had already scrapped an initial sketch because I had started making the characters too large in the space — I probably wouldn't have been able to fit more than half a dozen people into the cartoon. Drawing characters too small, on the other hand, would have presented the problem of how to fill the space vertically (either by depicting the crowd from above, or positioned on, say, parade floats), as well as perhaps doubling how long it would take to grayscalify and colorize the versions sent to Q Syndicate. (In order to attend a family funeral Monday morning, I was up until 2:00 a.m. adding gray tones to the grayscale version, and back at it at 5:30 a.m. adding color to the CMYK/RGB versions.)

So if you are disappointed that my cartoon doesn't include any same-sex parents, twinks, bears, drag kings, Republicans, or left-handed Polynesian furries, well, so am I.

On the other hand, how do you know that none of the people in this cartoon is a Republican?

Our community is under attack, and not just in red states, but nationwide, from a hostile federal government. They are concentrating their fire right now on transgender persons, but make no mistake: they are coming for all of us.

Equity and inclusivity are more vital these days than ever. Now is no time to abandon any segment of our LGBTQ+ alphabet soup. We must hang together, as the saying goes, or hang separately. Only by cherishing, celebrating, and defending our diversity will we save ourselves.

After all, without DEI, PRIDE is just PR.

What Is So Rare As a Cartoon in June?

For Smatteringback Saturday today, I'm rehashing a handful of my own cartoons from Junes of ten, twenty, thirty, and omigod forty years ago.

June, 1980

Back in 1980, I didn't have cartoons published outside of the regular school year, so this cartoon never saw print; but I've run it twice on this here blog, so all its tedious shading hasn't been for naught. A college student's youthful idealism allowed me to imagine that independent presidential candidate John Anderson had any chance of being sworn into office on January 20.

In Racine, WI Journal Times, June 17, 1990

Ten years later, I was drawing local issue cartoons for the Racine Journal Times and cartoons on more general topics for a couple University of Wisconsin newspapers. The local issue above concerned Racine's major shopping center, Regency Mall, and its developers' insistence that there not be a bus stop at any of its doors. In their thinking, convenient bus stops would invite riff-raff from the inner city (oh but don't you dare think they were talking about persons of color); shoppers and employees complained of having to walk — especially in winter — from the roadway that circles the perimeter of the parking lot.

In those days, Regency Mall bustled year 'round, with shoe stores; specialty clothing shops for men, women, and children; half a dozen jewelry stores; a couple of bookstores and two music stores; and anchors J.C. Penney's, Sears, Boston Store, and Prange's.

Today, almost all of that is gone. The remaining jewelry stores, discount clothing shops, exercise gym, and fast food joints are widely separated by vacancies covered over with mural-sized historical photographs of Racine.

The failure of the mall had nothing to do with moving the bus stops to the inner ring drive.

In UW-M Post, Milwaukee, June 20, 1990

A huge issue for Republicans in 1990 was stopping protesters from burning the U.S. flag — which only made protesters want to do it more often. Upholding a similar decision the previous year, the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 in U.S. v. Eichmann on June 11, 1990 that flag-burning was protected by the First Amendment. "Punishing desecration of the flag dilutes the very freedom that makes this emblem so revered, and worth revering," wrote archliberal Justice William Brennan in opinion, joined by archconservative Justice Antonin Scalia. Republicans campaigned to amend the constitution to overturn the court's decision. Congress voted on the proposed amendment six times between 1995 and 2006, but it has always fallen short of the necessary 67 votes in the Senate.

Q Syndicate, June, 2000

Let us now jump ahead to 2000, by which time I had begun drawing LGBTQ-centric cartoons for Q Syndicate. I had a few particular members of the clergy in mind when I drew this June cartoon about the way certain liberal religious folk were trying to ride their camel through the eye of the needle between accepting same-sex marriage and being "welcoming." But this pastor does not physically resemble any of them.

Q Syndicate, June, 2000

Also in June, 2000, there was speculation that Reform Party presidential candidate Pat Buchanan might tap talk show host Dr. Laura Schlessinger to be his running mate. I'm not sure what "Dr. Laura," who called homosexuality "a biological error" and claimed that "a huge portion of the male homosexual populace is predatory on young boys," would have added to the ticket when Buchanan's antigay animus was already firmly established. In the end, she wasn't interested in running for Vice President anyway, but I certainly enjoyed drawing this cartoon.

If you can name Pat Buchanan's 2000 running mate without looking it up, congratulations. You are either the world's wonkiest politics geek, or you've been dead for two years.

Meanwhile, one of the other candidates that year decided that the United States just doesn't have enough federal Christian holidays.

I can't remember whether I drew that cartoon for Q Syndicate, or if it only ever appeared on my old GeoCities page. At this point, it's difficult to check which; although, since there isn't any explicitly L, G, B, T, or Q subject matter, it's probably the latter. It certainly wasn't in the Milwaukee Business Journal.

Q Syndicate, June, 2010

Finally, here's a cartoon from June of 2010 just for schitzengigels and because it didn't make the cut for my look back at Pride cartoons a couple weeks ago.

Q Toon: Death Be Not Pride

I return to syndication with a cartoon that won't work in all markets. Several communities around the world have already cancelled their Pride celebrations, while others are determined to go ahead with theirs.

In Europe, where the coronavirus took hold earlier than in the U.S., the effects are already being felt, with Bucharest Pride becoming the first Pride rally to postpone and Trans Pride Scotland canceling outright. And hardly without reason: while any public gatherings may prove risky over the next few months, the LGBTQ community is particularly vulnerable. As GLMA: Health Professionals Advocating LGBTQ Equality points out, the LGBTQ community experiences higher rates of HIV and cancer, both of which weaken the immune system; additionally, the community's increased rate of tobacco use means that COVID-19 — the coronavirus-caused disease that is particularly dangerous for those with respiratory issues — is statistically more troubling for those in the LGBTQ community.

Health and safety have to be prime considerations, but so does the fact that these festivals cost a lot of money up front. That money may be hard to come by this year — which may please those people who always complain about how Pride festivals have become so commercialized. (To whom Christmas says, "Hold my beer.")

Many Pride festivals are scheduled in June, to coincide with the anniversary of the Stonewall Riots. This being the 51st anniversary of the riots, it was to have been the 50th anniversary of several larger cities' first Pride Festivals, and special observances had been long in preparation.

If everyone can just resist the temptation to flock to Georgia's tattoo parlors, our country might be able to return to normal by June. It's impossible to know with certainty at this point, however; and we do seem to have an extremely vocal minority in the U.S. who are determined to reopen the floodgates before the rain subsides.

Some locales, where June weather can be prohibitively hot, schedule their Pride festivals earlier in the year. Those celebrations have almost certainly been cancelled, postponed, or moved to virtual reality by now. Phoenix's Pride Festival for example, would have been the first weekend in April, but has been pushed back to November. (I do wish I had thought to have the first dialogue balloon read "cancel or postpone"!)

New York's Pride events have been cancelled outright, as have Pride events in San Francisco, New Orleans, and Iowa City. Chicago's Pride Fest website promises an announcement coming soon.

I've been following festival scheduling changes in nearby Milwaukee, the "City of Festivals." Pridefest is not the only Milwaukee festival that won't be held in June this year (an alternative date has not been announced). Festa Italiana has been cancelled, and Polish Fest is up in the air. German Fest would have been in late July. Ethnic festivals scheduled in August are continuing with their planned events. Summerfest, "The Big Gig," has been postponed to September from its customary weeks at the end of June and the start of July.

Covering LGBT Pride

It's time to take a break from world war and assassination, so Steppinback Saturday puts down the guns and digs up the cover illustrations I made for In Step's coverage of PrideFest in Milwaukee.

In Step Newsmagazine cover, May 29, 1997

In Step was a biweekly newspaper published in Milwaukee from 1984 to 2003, originally in a 5.5” x 8.5” newsprint booklet format. By the time I started drawing for them in 1995, it had expanded to an 8.5” x 11” magazine size.

With the 64-page May 29, 1997 PrideFest issue, In Step launched its 11” x 17” tabloid size newspaper format, splurging occasionally on a full-color cover. (More often in those days, In Step printed two-color covers — a black-and-white photo or drawing with the flag and headline in an accent color.)

The crowd scene includes a few of the acts scheduled to appear, and a couple of my friends from Milwaukee who were certain to see themselves below the fold. Knowing the design of the official PrideFest t-shirt, I included one in the foreground, although the colors are wrong. (I can't remember whether I had any hand in colorizing the drawing or not, but I think I would have colored in the triangle in my signature if I had.)

In Step cover, August 20, 1998

Milwaukee's PrideFest moved to August in 1998; the warm weather proved a welcome change from the generally cool temperatures at the lakefront on the first weekend of June. Folding its attempted monthly arts magazine, Q Voice, back into itself, In Step inaugurated full-color covers as standard fare with that year's PrideFest issue. I'm fairly certain I did not colorize this drawing, which, to Arts Editor Jorge Cabal's probable relief, was not of a crowd scene.

I still wanted to demonstrate inclusivity, but didn't include any real people this time. The drawing with the martini glass was a nod to the other on-staff cartoonist at the paper, Bob Arnold, whose single-panel "Life's a Drag" featured monologues by characters reduced to geometric shapes.

In Step cover, July 29, 1999

The following year, I went back to depicting a crowd scene, this time from a photograph I'd taken at the 1998 festival. I took some liberties in the name of diversity, and filled in the area above the fold with drawings from publicity photos of the featured visiting performers Kathy Sledge, Les Lokey and Men Out Loud.

Jorge didn't bother to color in each individual in the crowd, opting instead for abstract swaths of yellow, pink and blue. He, or whoever was in charge of layout for the issue, added the "Pride 99" headline and the "15th Year" logo.

I missed out on the next couple of PrideFest covers. When I was asked to draw a cover illustration for the 2002 issue, I eschewed inclusivity in favor of parody.

Wisconsin In Step, May 30, 2002

I believe I did the colorizing of the foreground characters in this one. Since I didn't have any CMYK capability at the time, I'm surprised that it came out as well as it did. (Standard photo-editing software saves color graphics in RGB format — that is, Red, Green, and Blue, the color of the light pixels on your screen — which is fine for photographs. It can be disappointing for cartoons, however, because RGB has no black. The colors of CMYK correspond to the four basic printer ink colors, Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and Black.)

In Step would produce one last PrideFest issue in 2003 (two, if you count the cover story in the following issue about the festival's fiscal mismanagement that year, exacerbated by a weekend of rain). But the 2002 cover was my last for them.

Publisher George Attewell abruptly shut In Step down after the November 20, 2003 issue. According to the Milwaukee LGBT History Project,

Contributing staff had even been preparing articles for the next issue that never came about. The publisher is reported to have lost interest in the paper and it became more of a chore than a pleasure or passion. Although a last "wrap up" issue was promised, none ever appeared.

Wisconsin still had a "bar rag" published out of Green Bay at the time, but its focus was and is on the bar scene, not hard news. There were a few attempts by others to start another LGBT newspaper over the next couple of years, but nothing lasted until some disgruntled staffers from Chicago Free Press fled north of the border and launched Wisconsin Gazette in 2009.

🌈

Well, if you were hoping for insights into important historical events, I'm sorry to have disappointed you. But if you're jonesing for some World War I, I can point you to an insightful article comparing Kaiser Wilhelm II to King Donald of Orange in The New Yorker this week.

This Week's Sneak Peek

This was Pridefest Week in Milwaukee, so Chris and I spent a good portion of Saturday there. We had a good time, ran into a few people we knew, and enjoyed a day of very warm sunshine and people-watching.

There were a smattering of nearly naked fest-goers this year, who were either well-tanned all over, or barely tanned anywhere; the latter group are most certainly in a mess of pain by today. Then there were the four young people in furry animal costumes -- their suffering was in the moment, thanks to the near-90F temperatures. As for ourselves, we dressed in comfortable street clothing.

So did most of the folks we saw there, although I could without exaggeration have dressed some of the people in last week's cartoon more provocatively.

There was only one S hole with a bullhorn harassing people coming in and out of the festival this year. Some young people had about as much of a response to him as you can legally get away with.

None of which has anything in particular to do with the cartoon coming out later this week.

Qtoon: Uncle Sam Wants You

The recall is over. Wisconsin government has been bought and paid for. This is what plutocracy looks like, so let's move on...

Every June, I try to come up with some sort of cartoon to observe the LGBT Pride Festivals which many communities now have. I've been at this long enough that, frankly, there aren't many ideas left undrawn.

In trying to tease out something that might be new this year, I recalled (damn, there's that word again!) the Pride cartoon I drew in 2010. I would have liked to have updated that specific cartoon, but I can't expect my readers to remember it.

Paul Berge
Q Syndicate May 26, 2010

This Week's Toon: Pride Fest Time

It's June, which means it's time to crank out a cartoon about LGBT Pride. It's the month for Pride festivals in many areas of the country, where lesbians, gays, bisexuals, transsexuals, questionings, inbetweeners, and fetishists of every stripe show off what flaunting one's sexuality really looks like.

We have families, too, and our festivals reflect that as well. The kids' area of Milwaukee Pridefest seems to feature incredibly earnest folk guitar singers for the most part, entertaining a few tween-to-teenagers. The older kids hang out by the lake, the same as the older kids at all the other Summerfest grounds festivals (who are just as embarrassed to be seen with their parents).

1998 Pride cartoon

Since I didn't draw a Gay Pride cartoon this year, here's one from 1998.

A la recherche des Pridefests perdus

From Pride Month 2006

It's Pride Month!

This is a cover drawing i did for In Step magazine in 1997 -- back when Milwaukee had two competing LGBT news publications. Since then, In Step, Wisconsin Light, and, last December, the four-year-old Queer Life News have all folded.

On the other hand, since I first started attending them, Milwaukee Pride Fest has moved to the Summerfest grounds as its first summer festival. (It was moved to August one year to make way for Harley Davidson's centennial celebration, but I don't think many people minded the move; after the cold weather of the previous years, fest goers appreciated being able to leave their parkas at home.)