Q Toon: Ad Insultiam

There's a month to go until Election Day, and Republicans have broken out the transphobia on TV.

The Trump campaign has begun running trans-bashing ads charging that Kamala Harris supports transgender therapy for children "without their parents' consent," as well as gender corrective surgery for prison inmates and undocumented immigrants. The ads include footage of Harris answering questions from a transgender interviewer (Wait — isn't the Republican knock on Harris that she won't sit down for interviews?) followed by still shots of her with drag performers — at least one of which doesn't look photoshopped together — and Health and Human Services Assistant Secretary Rachel Levine.

You may not recognize Levine’s name; but transphobes find her every bit as frightening as those of us on the other side found Roger Severino in Trump’s HHS. And rest assured that right-wing media are holding her up as a scary bugaboo every chance they can get.

Here in Wisconsin, Republican senatorial candidate Eric Hovde and the PACs supporting him have been running ads making the same accusations against Democratic incumbent Tammy Baldwin. One assumes that Republicans are running this as a one-size-fits-all ad against other Democrats in close races around the country; Baldwin just happens to be one of the most prominent LGBTQ+ candidates this year.

We creative types gripe about AI — Artificial Intelligence — infringing on our turf. Someone quipped something to the effect of AI allowing wealth access to creativity without allowing creativity access to wealth. Or something like that. I tried googling it, but Google just gave me inspirational quotations about attaining financial security.

Anyway, you'll miss us creative types when we're gone, I promise you. But nobody is going to shed a tear when AI puts the campaign admeisters out of work. I half suspect that the emails flooding my inbox from Sherrod Brown (personal!), Elisa Slotkin, Jon Tester, Tim Walz, Barack Obama, Michele Obama, Kamala Harris, Hillary Clinton, Adam Kinzinger, Gwen Walz, Doug Emhoff, Chasten Buttigieg, and Moo Dang, the baby hippopotamus, each of them supposedly writing me ten or twelve times a day, must be spewed forth from AI servers in Cupertino. Some guy probably fed in the parameters to Watson 9000 four or five years ago: show me a desperate candidate up against a funding deadline and facing a barrage of attacks by a menacing cabal threatening all that America holds dear. 

I doubt that anyone will shed a tear if and when the job of grinding out political attack ads gets snatched away from the Don Drapers and Darrin Stephenses of Madison Avenue and K Street. Turning the work over to soulless mainframes in the cloud instead of the soulless operatives doing it now might scarcely be noticed by the rest of us.

Unless we happen to spot the surplus fingers and triple-jointed hips in the grainy, slow motion, black-and-white videos of Candidates X.

Q Toon: Cast Away

Pre-S.: All of this had been written before yesterday.

While we're waiting to find out whether democracy can survive the onslaught from RePutschlicans, there has been a little controversy lately over the casting of cisgender, straight actors in LGBTQ+ roles in movies and on television.

The latest wave comes after James Corden's performance as a gay theater actor in "The Prom." I haven't seen it myself, but Corden has been criticized for portraying his character, Barry Glickman, as a flamboyant, self-important, swishy, insulting caricature of a theater queen — as, no doubt, the character was written and the director wanted him acted.

So the knock on Corden is that he took a role away from a card-carrying member of both SAG and the LGBTQ+ community. Had Dan Levy portrayed Barry Glickman as a flamboyant, self-important, swishy, insulting caricature of a theater queen, everything would be hunky-dory.

We can go down the rabbit hole of whether only gay actors should play gay characters, left-handed actors should portray left-handed characters, Catholic actors should play Catholic characters, evil masterminded actors should play evil masterminded characters, ad infinitum until ad domum revertir vaccarum.

There is nevertheless a serious issue here. While television has been making great progress in LGBTQ+ visibility, the people who make movies are in the habit of casting their top grossing actors in leading roles whether those roles suit them or not. Witness John Wayne as Genghis Khan in "The Conqueror," Natalie Wood as Maria in "West Side Story," Burt Lancaster as Massai in "Apache," and most cringe-worthy, Mickey Rooney as Mr. Yoniushi in "Breakfast at Tiffany's," or just about any other portrayal of Chinese or Japanese characters by actors of European descent.

Transgender actors and activists question whether someone who is not transgender can fully appreciate how a transgender person thinks and feels. And some cisgender actors, lesbigay and straight, are coming to agree, including actors like Jeffrey Tambor and Wilson Cruz who have portrayed trans characters in the past.

The flip side of the coin, of course, is that LGBTQ+ actors could be limited to playing only LGBTQ+ roles. No Neil Patrick Harris as Barney Stinson. No Cynthia Nixon as Miranda Hobbes. No Ian McKellen as King Lear.

But I guess it makes no difference to the plot if you imagine that Gandalf is gay.
 

Holy R.I.P., Adam West

In memory of Adam West, known mostly for his role in a campy 1960's TV show:

Q Toon: Must've Déjà Vu TV

NBC is indeed bringing back "Will & Grace" in the fall, resurrecting the 1998-2006 situation comedy, along with the network's 1980's slogan, "Must See TV."

"Will & Grace," in case you've forgotten, centered on Will, a gay lawyer; Grace, his best friend; Jack, his best gay friend; and Karen, an idle rich woman who hung around with them for no apparent reason. Together, they tossed bons mots about whatever was current in popular culture and ... well, I watched the show, and I guess they did sitcom stuff. Will and Grace had jobs and parents, Grace had boyfriends, Jack turned 30, and Karen could hold her liquor. That's pretty much the whole story.

Still, the show and each of its stars won Emmys the first time around. You can't knock success.

It was a groundbreaking show, in that a gay man was a central character. He wasn't closeted, and he wasn't insecure about it, even if he didn't get around to dating anyone until late in the series. The show wasn't about HIV/AIDS or hate crimes or antigay preachers or gays in the military or marriage equality, any of the Big Issues Of The Day. In a way, it was a show about nothing, although not quite as edgy as "Seinfeld." There definitely was no talk about who could be masters of their domain.

NBC executives obviously want to offer their audience something comfortable and familiar — and the fact that what was once groundbreaking is now comfortably familiar is something of an achievement in and of itself. But if the characters are still stuck exactly where they were in 2006, I doubt viewers will stick with the show.

Jack has hit 40, after all. The bloom is off the rose, and if he hasn't found independent means of support by now and is still leeching off of Will, there's no way Will can have held onto any self-respecting boyfriend this long. Karen may have hired Grace to remodel her office yet again (what ever does Karen do there?), but she's not a simpleton and would surely have become bored with Jack, if not Will and Grace as well.

Well, we'll leave it to the writers to figure that all out. This isn't Tristram Shandy, after all. There are plenty of fresh new pop cultural references with which to pepper their scripts.

If they are successful, we can look forward to the return of "Friends," "Malcolm in the Middle," "Desperate Housewives," and "Veronica's Closet."

Q Toon: To Seek Out Fabulous New Worlds

We editorial cartoonists are having a lot of difficulty keeping up with Donald Berzilius Trump's barrage of jaw-dropping behavior, so I'm just going to ignore him this week. You're welcome.

In Hollywood hype for the latest Star Trek movie, word got out that Helmsman Hikaro Sulu, played by straight actor John Cho, has a husband in the new film, Star Trek: Beyond. Everyone involved probably intended this as tribute to gay actor George Takei, who originated the role in the 1960's TV series. Takei's reaction must have come as a disappointment.

 "I’m delighted that there’s a gay character," he tells The Hollywood Reporter. "Unfortunately, it’s a twisting of Gene’s creation, to which he put in so much thought. I think it’s really unfortunate." ... 

"I told [Cho], 'Be imaginative and create a character who has a history of being gay, rather than Sulu, who had been straight all this time, suddenly being revealed as being closeted.'"

Frankly, hardly any of the crew on the original show had a sex life unless Captain Kirk or First Officer Spock were involved, so it doesn't necessarily follow that TV-Sulu was "closeted." As any hardcore Trekkie, Trekker, Trekkoid or Tribble will tell you in animated detail, the only clue to Helmsman Sulu ever having a sex life of any kind comes in Star Trek: Generations (1994), in which Captain Kirk meets Hikaro's daughter Demora on duty as Helmsman of the Enterprise B. (For that matter, Sulu and his husband have a toddler daughter in Beyond as well. It's not as if 23rd Century gay people won't have been raising families for 250 years.)

As far as the "closeted" thing is concerned, you could argue that, at least, Dr. McCoy assumes Sulu is straight at the end of the "Shore Leave" episode. Just don't be alarmed if my eyes glaze over while you do.

After M*A*S*H*, the Deluge

I failed to get a Sinkback Saturday post in yesterday; I had wanted to post a cartoon I'd drawn during Pope John Paul II's first visit to the United States, and a subsequent complaint about the cartoon, but I can't seem to find them.

So instead and a day late, here's a follow-up to last week's cartoon, from 1983.

The CBS comedy M*A*S*H* ran for eleven seasons -- almost three times as long as active hostilities in the Korean War on which it was based. And frankly, it had jumped the shark well beforehand, but was a top-rated program for its network.

I didn't get to see the final program when it originally aired. (I was acting in a local theatre production. The crew had it on a TV backstage, so I did catch a few moments of it; but for the whole show, I had to wait for the episode to be rerun at the end of the summer.) Like the series itself, the final episode dragged on too long, trying to give each of its major characters a Emmy-nomination-worthy send-off.

And there was, in fact, an attempt to squeeze more ratings success out of the expired franchise with the series After-M*A*S*H*, in which Col. Harry Potter, Father Mulcahy and Max Klinger went home to run a rural medical clinic, but that show didn't last long. CBS was already running Trapper John M.D., a medical drama with barely any real connection to M*A*S*H* at all but with a greater degree of success.

China Beach would eventually come along to satisfy the viewership for medical war television, but it wisely had no connection to M*A*S*H* whatsoever.

When Sculpture Goes Wrong

The other day, I mentioned the challenge a cartoonist faces when trying to draw someone for the first time. To illustrate the point, I included some preliminary pencil sketches of Indiana Governor Mike Pence as well as the finished product.

Now, there are times when even a pencil rough that I'm pleased with fails to translate to ink, even when I'm basically tracing over one to make the other. So I can sympathize with sculptor Dave Poulin, whose bronze statue of Lucille Ball went horribly wrong:

The 400-pound bronze sculpture, which was privately commissioned and publicly displayed in Ball's hometown of Celoron, NY in 2009, upset many locals and even inspired a Facebook group dedicated to its removal ("We Love Lucy! Get Rid of This Statue."). ...
Despite Poulin's offer to fix it for free, [Mayor John] Schrecengost has said he doesn't want Poulin to retouch the statue; he wants a new artist to repair it.

Perhaps they can get Cecilia Hernandez to touch it up.

Meanwhile, next time Mr. Poulin is commissioned to sculpt, he would be well advised to lay off the Vitameatavegamin.

Q Toon: Flipping Bad

There was no shortage of LGBT news stories to cartoon about when I sat down at the drawing board this weekend. I'm glad I didn't try to come up with something about Clay Aiken's narrow lead in the North Carolina 2nd CD election which might have gotten into poor taste when the other candidate suddenly died.

Speaking of sensational singers, Conchita Wurst, a gender-bending Austrian contestant, won the current season of Eurovision, a televised singing contest, to the shock and horror of the Russian government. No kidding.

And of course, there was also the big story of Michael Sam receiving the news that he'd been drafted by the St. Louis Rams and kissing his boyfriend on live TV. So much has been said about The Kiss this week that there is little chance that anything I drew would not already have appeared somewhere else in the media. Even the Benham Brothers weighed in on it. Besides, I've already drawn about Michael Sam this year.

Who are the Benham Brothers? Why, they're the subject of this week's cartoon. Cable channel HGTV had planned to launch a house-flipping series about the telegenic twin real estate speculators. Then Right Wing Watch pointed out David and Jason Benham's antigay political activity, David, for example, had organized a rally against the 2012 Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, North Carolina to protest "demonic ideologies" such as "a homosexuality and its agenda that is attacking the nation."

HGTV decided it didn't want to associate with the Benhams any more, and the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy went livid (until distracted by The Kiss). But shed no tears for the Benhams, who are sure to successfully peddle their series to any of the various Christianist cable channels out there.

Breaking Local News!

A propos of nothing in particular, here's a cartoon from my archives -- July of 1999, to be exact -- about TV news coverage of a big local tragedy. The reporters can't tell you much: the firefighters are still trying to put out the fire, the gunshot victims are still on the operating table, police have cordoned off the structural collapse, or authorities aren't letting camera crews anywhere near the plane/train/ship. But the folks at the TV station are staying on the air, determined not to be scooped by the folks at the other TV stations...

The names in this cartoon are of Milwaukee local anchors and reporters at the time, but I'm pretty sure this cartoon could be about local TV stations just about any time, anywhere. I believe that the particular story which inspired this cartoon was the Big Blue crane collapse during the construction of Miller Park, which killed three construction workers.

The long form address of my now defunct Geocities page on this cartoon won't take you anywhere, incidentally. Geocities got bought up and shut down by Yahoo!/SBC Global/AT&T years ago. Oh, and that thing the guy in the cartoon is staring at is what televisions used to look like.

Q Toon: Show Me Yours and I'll Show You Mine

After seeing a flurry of blog and Facebook posts about two trans* guests "schooling" Katie Couric for asking them about their gender reassignment process, I expected to see some insistently rude questions followed by a finger shaken to the tune of "Oh, No, You Didn't!" The Baltimore Sun headline, after all, was "Katie Couric's Offensive Interview Reveals Need for Transgender Visibility."

In preparation for this week's cartoon, I watched Couric's interview with model Carmen Carrera and actress Laverne Cox to see what in particular was offensive about the interview. What I saw was Couric asking a question about Carrera's gender reassignment surgery and being told that Carrera didn't want to answer such a personal question. Couric said she understood and moved right along to other questions. When she joined the other two on the show, Cox seconded Carrera's dislike of questions about their genitalia.

The tone of the discussion appeared friendly and sympathetic throughout. Couric didn't seem so insensitive or intrusive, really. After all, this is the woman who invited America to come along on her own colonoscopy.

So instead of using my cartoon to rake Katie Couric over the coals, I've resurrected Celiva Drewledge, a fictional talk show host character from a cartoon I drew over 15 years ago. She looks more like Katie Couric today than she did when I first drew her, but as the cartoon indicates, she's had some work done.

* No, you're not supposed to check for footnotes today.

Q Toon: Regnum Anatium

One could argue that highlighting Duck Dynast Phil Robertson's antigay comments in GQ Magazine only serves the purposes of Sarah Palin, talk radio, and all the Foxsters out there complaining that A&E is trampling his right of free speech. Not that they ever came to the defense of free speech rights for, say, Martin Bashir, Alec Baldwin, or Keith Olberman.

His opinions regarding African-Americans are the more ridiculous and worthy of censure. But I draw for the LGBT media through Q Syndicate, so I'm afraid I must leave to others his claim that Blacks were happier before civil rights and antipoverty programs ("No one was singing the blues"). I would, however, like to assuage Mr. Robertson's fears that anatomy poses an insurmountable difficulty to gays' and lesbians' ability to have and to enjoy sex. We really are not bothered by it anywhere near as much as he is.

Meanwhile, this Greek chorus of conservative American Catholics makes its second appearance in my cartoons this week. (Here's their first appearance, in September.)

Toon: Asylum of the Tea Party

Yeah, negotiate. That's all they want.

I started watching Dr. Who during the Tom Baker years when WTTW out of Chicago showed the programme on Sunday nights. At some point, WTTW ran out of new episodes and aired several episodes from the Jon Pertwee years instead. After they started running new episodes, I kept watching until sometime in the Peter Davidson years when I got a second shift job that included a lot of Sunday nights, and I lost track of the show.

In those days, Daleks were all slate gray, so that's how I colorized them here. On Google Images, I see that they now come in a rainbow of colors, which just seems wrong. I just can't imagine there being a sensitive Dalek with a flair for design. Next thing you know, the Borg will start snazzing up their wardrobe.

Rhapsody in Coach

United's TV ad may have been inspired by this incident, but they certainly don't want you reminded of it.

United Airlines is airing a TV ad these days that shows a symphony orchestra playing Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue aboard one of their airplanes.

It's hogwash.

If you think that child kicking the back of your seat all the way from D.C. to Denver was annoying, try sitting in front of the trombone section.

And I don't care what the screen shows, nobody is going to be able to play a cello on an airplane, or fit a french horn in the overhead storage compartment. It's like that Buick ad with Shaquille O'Neal that shows him walking up to their little car, and then shows him sitting inside it; they don't show him actually getting into or out of the car. (Actually, I think they have him curl up into the fetal position, then they just build the car around him.)

At least United doesn't even bother to get the tuba, bass, and percussion section into the plane in their ad.

For the piano alone, they would have to take out 24 seats.

Q Toon: Back After This Word

I was away on vacation last week, attending a family wedding and meandering back home through Tennessee and Kentucky. (What do you call that? The Shallow South?) This meant I was paying less attention to the news than usual; when we watched TV, we were watching entertainment programs that were unlikely to help me come up with any ideas for this week's cartoon.

But we certainly took notice of this commercial for Norelco, in which a hirsute fellow uses the company's trimming products to get rid of his beard and chest hair, and even trim his pubes, judging himself more attractive to himself at each step of the way. The professional umbrage-taking group "One Million Moms" also took notice:

"The ad shouldn't run at any time. It is not only inappropriate for children; it is offensive to adults also. The company's response to people's concerns is in poor taste. They are basically saying that they don't care, and they are going to run the commercial anyway."

(click here to view)

Paul Berge Q Syndicate‡May 15, 2013 EditorialCartoonists.com

OMM urged their followers to register their objections on Norelco's Facebook page, or to call the company on the telephone:

"Call Philips Norelco at: 1-800-243-3050 or 1-888-744-5477. Please remember to be polite. Here is a sample script: 'The new Norelco manscaping and grooming commercial is extremely offensive in many ways. Please do what you can to get it pulled off the air, or I certainly won't be buying anymore Philips Norelco products.'"

 I guess we can't look forward to any similar ads for Lady Norelco products.

Oh, the Pain, the Pain

Resistance Is Futile

Just a little something I threw together for my Trekker friends -- one of whom suggested that I had better sign it.

Before it shows up on George Takei's Twitter feed.

Q Toon: And the Rest

Paul Berge Q Syndicate-Mar 13, 2013 EditorialCartoonists.com

For its first season of "Gilligan's Island," the show opened with a catchy little sea ditty as its theme song, which told the story of how the castaways got to the island, then introduced the characters in its third verse:

"With Gilligan,

The Skipper, too;

The Millionaire

And his wife;

The movie star

And the rest."

There were only two other characters in the regular cast, but it wasn't until the second season that the writers crammed "The Professor and Mary Ann" into the last line (leaving, I suppose, the radio announcer as the last regular cast member out in the cold.)

This month, the British Commonwealth produced a "Charter for the 21st Century" proclaiming broad support for human rights, which states, "We are implacably opposed to all forms of  discrimination, whether rooted  in gender, race, colour, creed, political belief or other grounds." The London Daily Mail asserted that "other grounds" is meant to refer to gays, lesbians, transgender and bisexual persons.

Not everyone is impressed, however. British gay rights activist Peter Tatchell points out that:

"More than 40 of the 54 Commonwealth countries still criminalise homosexuality, mostly under laws imposed by Britain during the colonial era. Six of these countries stipulate life imprisonment. Uganda is currently considering legislation that would introduce the death penalty for repeat gay offenders. The Nigerian parliament has before it a similarly draconian anti-gay bill that will outlaw same-sex marriage, and LGBT organisations and advocacy. The Commonwealth's response to these two bills - and to the homophobic witch-hunts in Cameroon - has been feeble."

Homosexuality is still a flogging offense in Pakistan; in Jamaica, anyone convicted of the "abominable crime of buggery" faces up to 10 years' imprisonment, with or without hard labor; Nigerian punishment already includes death by stoning as a possible punishment. (Wikipedia has a page devoted to LGBT rights in all countries of the world -- worth checking before booking that Caribbean vacation.)

The difference between the British Commonwealth and Gilligan's Island is that there were only seven castaways on the TV show. There wasn't any question who "and the rest" were.

I Love Imperial Zombie Lucy

Here's a drawing I was asked to do for the Twin Cities Imperial Court of Minnesota (kind of an LGBT Elks Lodge, I suppose) to publicize an event this weekend:

It's their first annual Zombie Ball, and my assignment was -- wait, let me describe it in steps:

1. Start with the picture from "I Love Lucy" of Lucy, Ethel, Ricky and Fred driving in the car.
2. Replace Lucy, Ethel, Ricky and Fred with four members of the Imperial Court.
3. Make them zombies.

I started out by sketching the original picture, just to get the characters in place. Then, without zombifying them, I tried caricaturing the Imperial Court, beginning with "Ethel," since I was sent two pictures of her, and she bore some slight resemblance to Vivian Vance. "Ricky" was next, since he's in front; I was told he'd be clean-shaven for the event. The one photo I had of him is almost ten years old if the imprinted date is correct.

I found several pictures of "Fred" among the Court's Facebook photos -- which helped a lot. With "Lucy," on the other hand, I only had this one photo to work from, and it was the lowest-resolution photo of the bunch. (There were some photos of a woman who might have been the same person, but I just couldn't be sure.) That made her very difficult to draw, and I decided that nothing about this drawing would work at all unless I gave her Lucy's hair -- particularly since she and "Ricky" bear little or no resemblance to Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz. I suppose I should have done the same with Ethel, since the guy who's going to be Ethel is no doubt rustling up a Vivian Vance wig for the party.

The last step was to add zombie features. In the case of Ricky, that involved giving him a totally different facial expression than Desi Arnaz in the photo, in which the four appear to be singing. I beat up the hats, blackened eyes, tore off ears, and broke Lucy's neck. (Sorry, dear.) Jeff, who had signed me on to the project, had suggested turning the picture into a car accident, but then there would have been no element of the original picture left.

In the end, does it work? I'm not sure it does. I might have liked to choose a different picture to start from -- say, Lucy and Ethel in the chocolate factory. I can see severed heads going by them on the assembly line as they top the exposed brains with whipped cream and cherries; Fred could be messing with the line's speed dial, and Ricky... um, I don't know. Bandleading, or reacting to the mess, or something.

Or don't you think these four would be ideal as zombie Mary Ann, Ginger, Skipper and Gilligan?

This Week's Sneak Peak

As you ought to be able to guess from the sneak peek at this week's cartoon, the topic is Voter ID, and it involves one of those cable news opinion shows that feature discussion between or among panelists of widely differing viewpoints.


I've chosen to call this fictional program "Cross Talk," after the late CNN program "Crossfire." The reference is not to Christianity, but to the term for a major feature of these programs: multiple people talking simultaneously.

फोचुस ओं थे फॅमिली'स टीवी अड़

This cartoon refers to contradictory decisions by CBS regarding two advocacy commercials intended for airing during the Superbowl. The first, in December of 2004, was for the United Church of Christ, and showed a bouncer at a church door, rejecting various minorities, including a same-sex couple. Christ wouldn't turn you away, went the tag line, and neither will we. CBS (and NBC) rejected the ad on the grounds that it was controversial.

Fast forward five years, and Focus on the Family brings an ad featuring college football star Tim Tebow and his mother. Now, I'm sure the text in the cartoon is not a verbatim quotation of the ad, but anyone who knows the Tebows' life story will be able to catch whatever subtext underlies what they do say. Mrs. Tebow was on medication that, because she became pregnant with Tim, could have threatened her life; but she went through with the pregnancy in spite of her doctors' warnings and Florida won the Sugar Bowl.

Focus on the Family flaks contend that FotF merely "supports families." You'll forgive me if, since they have spent the last couple of decades loudly and enthusiastically undermining and demeaning my family, I don't believe that for a minute.