Q Toon: Red (or Pink) Carded

This is the week when I have to draw a cartoon before Election Day that won't get published until after Election Day, so its topic is far afield from the narrowly averted (or at least briefly postponed) fascist take-over of the U.S. government.

News reports last weekend warned that LGBTQ+ fans attending the World Cup in Qatar might risk arrest and prison if caught kissing in public. Homosexuality is still a crime there, and officials caution that one must be "respectful" of local mores.

I generally try to have inclusivity in mind when drawing these cartoons. Setting this cartoon at the World Cup certainly opened the drawing up to a multicultural cast of characters. I wasn't sure, however, if the Qataris would allow female fans to sit in the same section as male fans. And of course, there's the whole matter of how covered up any women in the stands would be required to dress in the desert heat.

So maybe the Swede in the back is a woman. Or not. Or possibly yes now, but not from birth. Go ahead and write your own back story for every character shown. Last time I checked, it's still a free country.

But you might want to confirm that for yourself.

Since drawing this cartoon, I've seen reports that Qatar is promising not to imprison same-sex soccer fans caught sharing a little peck, or holding hands, or even waving rainbow flags. 

Which still leaves open the risk from ticking off a bunch of Saudi hooligans, and you might want to steer clear of brick walls and piles of stones.

Q Toon: The Eternal Sunshine of the Smoochless Screen

Because the director of the Marvel superheroes flick Eternals would not cut a scene of Phastos kissing his husband, authorities in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, Oman, and Bahrain have banned the movie from being shown.

Apparently Director Chloe Zhao wasn't able to stop that scene — and others depicting heterosexual intimacy as well — from being cut from versions shown in the United Arab Emirates, Jordan, Lebanon and Egypt. The film had been scheduled for release in the Middle East today.

Phastos is played by Brian Tyree Henry; his husband, Ben, is played by Haaz Sleiman, a Lebanese immigrant to the U.S. who came out as gay in 2017.

At the “Eternals” world premiere last month, Sleiman spoke passionately about how much representation and visibility matter. “Beyond a dream come true, it’s lifesaving,” he told me. “I wish I had that when I was a kid, to see this. My god. I wish! Can you imagine how many lives this is going to be saving — kids, young queer folk, who are being bullied, committing suicide and not seeing themselves being represented? And now they get to see this — it’s above and beyond.”

Henry has apparently been less involved in the promotion of the film, at least as far as discussing his character is concerned, but he did offer this during a press conference last month:

“I remember when I was coming to this project that I, Brian, had kind of lost faith in humanity, just looking at all the things that we’ve been through and just what the images of Black men were and how we’re being portrayed and how the power was taken from us, the lack of power or feeling powerful,” Henry said. “What I really loved the most about Phastos is that through all of that — him being eternal, him never being able to die — he still chose love. He still decided to have a family, even though he may have to watch them perish. He still tried to find a way to bring heart and love to everything he did, even though his genius was used against him. It just really resonated a lot with how I felt my place in society was. How we can be kings and queens, and at the same time, they’ll take our pedestal and take our superpowers from us like that. So what I love the most about ‘Eternals’ is that Chloe and [producer] Nate [Moore] just re-instilled that power back in me again.”

The film has received tepid reviews from professional critics, and was "review-bombed" by garden-variety trolls on imdb.com so heavily prior to its release that site had to deactivate its reviews section. I haven't been watching the Marvel superhero films (or the recent DC Comics ones either, for that matter), so I'm afraid I wouldn't know whether this is a worthy addition to the franchise or not.

All I know is, we've been seeing heterosexual superheroes, even the ones from distant planets, locking lips with earthlings of the opposite sex for decades now, and nobody seems to have complained that it was a distraction from the plot.

Except, I guess, the Egyptians, Jordanians, Lebanese, and Emiratis. 

See If I Care

 You can shut down his twitter account, but you can't take away his stationery!

Seven and Seven

In belated honor of yesterday having been 7/7/17, Septback Saturday brings you a sampling of stuff I drew in July of 1987, 1997 and 2007.

In July of 1987, Congress was investigating the Iran-Contra scandal. In case that's ancient history to you, the Reagan administration was caught having sold arms to Iran, in violation of an embargo against that country since the hostage affair of 1979-81, and using the money from those sales to surreptitiously fund the right-wing militias fighting the government of Nicaragua.

This was America's introduction to Lt. Col. Oliver North, then an aide to the National Security Council, who was the guy who proposed the Iran-Contra link, and destroyed vital documents as the affair became exposed. Adopting an air of indignant moral impeccability, the future Fox News commentator insisted upon wearing his army uniform and medals when testifying before Congress, and pretty much whenever he appeared in public.

I was freelancing cartoons on local topics for the Racine Journal Times in those days. Cartoons involving court cases are usually unwelcome, but this one skirted the issue of prematurely convicting the accused. The particulars of the case hardly matter for the understanding of the cartoon thirty years later; in fact, I have no recollection whatsoever of how the case was adjudicated.

Ten years later, I was drawing for two Milwaukee newspapers. I illustrated the editorials of The Business Journal of Greater Milwaukee; here's one on one of the few topics that needs no explanation — although it might be useful to recall that in Bill Clinton's first term, he had put Vice President Al Gore in charge of a commission to review and streamline government regulation of business. You can pretty accurately imagine the Beej editorial on your own.

The other paper I drew for back then was a now-defunct biweekly, In Step, serving Wisconsin's LGBTQ community. Again, I doubt that this cartoon from July, 1997 requires any explanation.

Twenty years later, we're still waiting for Mickey Mouse to suffer an almighty smite.

Now, had I drawn this cartoon for the Journal Times, there would no doubt have been reader complaints that I was attacking religion. (Had I drawn it for the Business Journal, there would have been editor complaints that this wasn't what his editorial was about.) But at In Step, I was preaching to the choir — if you'll pardon the expression.

Finally, I'll circle back to another Fox News personality with this cartoon from July of 2007 featuring one Mr. Bill O'Reilly. We derisively called it Faux News back then — the precursor of Trumplestiltskin's "Fake News" epithet for all the other channels, newspapers and magazines.

Which brings up a topic having very little to do with this cartoon, but which has been bothering me lately. For all the media outrage at the .gif Mr. Trump tweeted showing him beating up a guy whose face is covered by a CNN logo, American media have been largely and curiously silent about the hamfisted efforts of Saudi Arabia, Egypt, United Arab Emirates and Bahrain to force Qatar to shut down the Al Jazeera news network.

While not all complaints against Al Jazeera are baseless (concerning an allegation that an Egyptian president was an Israeli agent, for example), freedom of the press has got to be respected. It's one thing to call the integrity of Fox's Bill O'Reilly on the one hand, or CBS's Dan Rather on the other; it's quite another for any government to insist that someone else's government shut down the entire network.

Q Toon: Q Wait

Kuwait has announced that it and other gulf emirates will institute medical test procedures to stop gays from entering their countries.

"Health centers conduct the routine medical check to assess the health of the expatriates when they come into the GCC [Gulf Cooperation Council] countries; however, we will take stricter measures that will help us detect gays who will be then barred from entering Kuwait or any of the GCC member states." -- Yousouf Mindkar, Director of Public Health at the Kuwaiti Health Ministry

Aside from Kuwait, the GCC member states are Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Oman, Bahrain, and 2022 World Cup host Qatar. There is already pressure to move the World Cup over this issue.

Meanwhile, how exactly the Kuwaitis intend to screen for The Gay has yet to be revealed. Those intrepid animators at Taiwanese News depict these medical test procedures as being even more invasive than I dared to.