The Importance of Being Frank

Graphical History Tour remembers former Congressman Barney Frank (D-MA), who passed away Tuesday night at age 86.

in Q SaltLake, March, 1999

Barney Frank was elected to Congress in 1980, succeeding Rev. Robert Drinan, who had left office in order to comply with Pope John Paul II's call for priests to withdraw from government positions. Q SaltLake asked me to draw the above caricature of Rep. Frank for their cover story on his upcoming speech at a dinner of the Utah Stonewall Democrats, an LGBTQ organization.

Frank earned a reputation as an outspoken, quick- and sharp-witted liberal, but it must be noted that he was very pragmatic, even on LGBTQ+ issues. In the 1990's, he counseled marriage equality advocates that the public were not ready to accept same-sex marriage. In his last public interview, however, he argued that marriage equality is safe because Republicans today would be afraid of the backlash were our marriages to be taken away.

Perhaps the interviewer thought it impolite to bring up the fate of the landmark Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act during Republican rule.

Frank wasn't the first openly gay Congressman; Gerry Studds (D-MD) had been outed at the center of a scandal over Congressmen having affairs with congressional pages. (Studds was censured in 1983 for having a sexual relationship with a 17-year-old page ten years earlier; he retired from Congress in 1997.) Frank was, however, the first member of Congress to come out as gay voluntarily, in 1987.

in Ranger, University of Wisconsin at Parkside, Sept. 21, 1989 

The first cartoon I drew of Barney Frank was, unfortunately, when it appeared that his political career was about to be cut short because of a sex scandal of his own. He had befriended Steve Gobie, a prostitute, hiring him as an aide, housekeeper, and driver in 1985. He evicted Gobie in 1987 after their landlord told Frank that Gobie continued operating as a male escort, even bringing clients to their shared home.

This became public in 1989 when Gobie decided to sell his story to the highest bidder, but gave it away to the Washington Times. Frank called for a House Ethics Committee investigation, claiming to have had no knowledge of Gobie's extracurricular activities at their home. Rep. Larry Craig (R-ID) led the push to censure Frank; but in the end, he was merely reprimanded for misrepresenting Gobie's criminal probation record, and for using his congressional office to fix 33 parking tickets Gobie had racked up.

Craig, by then a senator, would have his own gay sex scandal in 2007.

in UWM Post, Milwaukee Wis., Jan. 30, 1995

During a January 20, 1995 radio interview discussing a possible book deal, House Majority Leader Dick Armey (R-TX) said, “I like peace and quiet and I don’t need to listen to Barney Fag, [pause] Barney Frank, haranguing in my ear because I made a few bucks off a book.” 

The slur was reported by several radio networks, whereupon Armey blamed the media for reporting on what he claimed was an audio glitch, not a slip of the tongue or intentional insult.

Rep. Frank refused to accept Armey's excuses, saying, “There are a lot of possible ways to mispronounce my name but that one, I think, is the least common, ... I turned to my own expert, my mother, who reports that in 59 years of marriage, no one ever introduced her as Elsie Fag.”

After a separate incident of Armey making a poor joke about Frank's homosexuality, a reporter asked Frank if he wanted an apology from the Texan. "I’m trying to think of what I would be less interested in than an apology from Dick Armey," he replied. "Maybe the lyrics to the national anthem of Bhutan."

for Q Syndicate, Aug., 1998

Frank's office requested the original of this cartoon. I have no idea whether he still has it.

When Republicans in Congress were holding hearings in preparation to file impeachment charges against President Bill Clinton over his sex scandal, Barney Frank seemed to be the only Democrat willing to speak up in Clinton's defense.

for Q Syndicate, Nov., 1998

Wisconsin's Second District elected Tammy Baldwin to Washington in 1998, the first out lesbian representative in Congress, so I drew Barney Frank offering her some practical advice.

for Q Syndicate, March, 2009

I tried looking up why I included Barney Frank in this cartoon about the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, but it dates from two months before I started this blog. (and I couldn't find it among oocities.com's cached pages of my previous Geocities blog). 

Did Frank call Scalia a homophobe? I guess I wouldn't have put it past him, and I can't think of another reason why I would have drawn him in the foreground.

It is, however, my best example of drawing his famously rumpled couture.

for Q Syndicate, March, 2011

This cartoon caught some ridicule from a web page (now long dormant) dedicated to ridiculing editorial cartoons, in part for daring to run afoul of the litigious Dr. Seuss Estate. The topic was the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA), a bill proposed in successive Congresses to afford workplace protections to LGBTQ+ private sector employees.

It faced stubborn resistance from Republicans and other conservatives. In 2007, Frank proposed deleting transgender rights from the bill, in what proved to be a futile ploy to attract support from moderate Republicans which succeeded only in deeply dividing the LGBTQ+ community. 

for Q Syndicate, Oct., 2007

Frank's reasoning was that transgender rights could be added back in someday if ENDA ever became law; transgender activists and their allies are profoundly disappointed by what to this day they regard as outright betrayal.

Congress never has passed ENDA in any form. In an interview with Washington Blade's Lou Chibarro, Jr., after he entered hospice care this month, Frank noted that the Supreme Court ruled in Bostock v. Clayton County (2020) that employment discrimination against LGBTQ+ persons is illegal under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, a ruling Frank was confident the Court would never overturn — and if it did, Congress would step in and pass ENDA into law.

He must never have met Mike Johnson.

for Q Syndicate, Dec., 2011

No, this is not my eulogy cartoon for the Congressman.

The 2010 census resulted in Massachusetts losing a seat in Congress. In the redistricting plan produced by the state legislature, the Democratic stronghold of New Bedford was removed from Frank's district. While Brookline, Newton and Wellesley remained in the district, Frank announced shortly after Governor Deval Patrick signed the redistricting plan into law that he would not run for a 17th term.

My reference, of course, is to the reported last words of Oscar Wilde, another gay icon with a not unblemished history. (In trying to verify the quotation for this post, I've found several variations on its theme, so take it with a grain of smelling salts.)

That was the last cartoon I have drawn of Barney Frank — at least so far. I am likely obliged to draw an actual eulogy cartoon for him for release next week. If not, he's got a book coming out in September.

Given his record, the book is not going to be pablum.

Q Toon: All Up In Her Business

Tammy Baldwin, the first out lesbian elected to the United States Senate, has had Republican opponents point out her sexual orientation in each of her four election campaigns. And I'm sure the guys have all just been trying to be helpful.

They don’t make it a campaign issue, but they never fail to mention it, in case there's some housewife up in Ashwaubenon who needed that nugget of information to make up her mind whom to vote for. I can't imagine why other Republican candidates don't bring up their heterosexual opponents’ sexuality unbidden, can you?

Senator Baldwin this year faces bank executive Eric Hovde, who has homes in both the Madison area and Laguna Beach, California; the latter described by the Los Angeles Times as "a mansion." Baldwin's TV and social media ads have played up his California residency, as well as statements Hovde made during his 2012 candidacy questioning allowing seniors who live in assisted living to vote, suggesting that farmers these days have it easy, proposing raising Social Security eligibility age to 72, and "completely" opposing abortion rights. Her tag line for these ads is "What's wrong with this guy?"

Hovde, since his last run, has grown a mustache that gives him the look of the guy in a 1980's movie plotting to steal away the girl, bulldoze the skateboard park, and buy out the rent-controlled apartment building where grandma lives. He has been trying to counter that California banker image with ads pointing out that Tammy Baldwin's girlfriend is a Wall Street financial manager whose investments might be affected by Senate legislation.

Some of his and his backers' ads call her "girlfriend," and some call her "partner." Hovde used the latter when he brought her up in the candidates' one and only debate appearance last Friday.

Baldwin and Maria Brisbane have been dating for about six years, and share an apartment in Washington D.C. They could get married if they wanted to, but for reasons that are none of our business, they haven't. Senate ethics rules have little to say about conflicts of interest covering the dating habits of unmarried members, and perhaps they should. Who wants the job of spelling out at what moment a relationship becomes reportable?

In the third panel of my cartoon this week, I quoted directly Baldwin's response to Hovde's demand that she report Ms. Brisbane's financial activities. I suspect it was a line Baldwin had ready and waiting to deliver, a handy pivot to Hovde's shared position with the Republican Party that women's health care decisions should be left up to statehouse politicians. 

She's hoping that it's a winning argument, and trends suggest it could be. Pro-choice advocates have done surprisingly well even in "red" states ever since the Supreme Court reversed Roe v. Wade, revealing that Republicans' talk all this time about reducing the size of government meant making it small enough to fit inside a woman's vagina.

The couple in the fourth panel of my cartoon are fairly confident in Baldwin's prospects on November 5 — more confident than I am myself. The polls are reportedly running extremely close, within the margin of error. And you will recall that this state inexplicably tossed Senator Russ Feingold aside — twice — in favor of Ron Johnson, of all people.

Early voting in Wisconsin started on Tuesday, so I marched right on down to the village hall and did my part to send Ron Johnson Jr. back to Laguna Beach.

I'd keep my fingers crossed, but I still have some cartoons to draw.

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.

WisToon: Ask Not For Hovde Bell Tolls

Eric Hovde is making his second try for the Senate seat held by Tammy Baldwin (D-WI) this year. In 2012, he lost in the primary to former Governor Tommy Thompson; this time around, he's the Republican Party favorite.

Like a traditional Republican, he promises to end budget deficits (without saying whose budget he intends to slash). His ads blame Senator Baldwin for inflation, illegal immigration, and the supposed Biden plot to get rid of gas-powered cars. A TV ad by a shadow group funded by Hovde's brother charges that Baldwin of told people to stay home when COVID-19 first spread, “but used your money to fly to New York to live with her girlfriend at her lavish multimillion dollar apartment.”

When not playing up what Senator Baldwin has done for Wisconsinites, the Democrats' TV and social media ads attack Hovde for being a wealthy hedge fund manager living in sunny California (he counters that he grew up in Wisconsin and graduated from the University in Madison), and that he wants to take away old people's right to vote.

The ad by Senate Majority PAC includes a sound bite of Hovde, whose company owns a nursing home, telling a radio interviewer, “If you’re in a nursing home, you only have five, six months life expectancy. Almost nobody in a nursing home is at a point to vote.”

The Hovde campaign responded that he was only talking about Republican-fueled (and exaggerated) complaints about what they charge was a suspiciously high rate of voting at some nursing homes in Racine and Madison in the last election.

Just the same, I wouldn't want my loved ones in a nursing home run with that attitude.

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Speaking of my loved ones, we joke that Eric Hovde might be a cousin of ours.

It's conceivable. My great-great-great-great-great-grandmother was a Hovde. We have her family traced back a few more generations, but we know nothing of any of her siblings' descendants. It's entirely possible, however, that the surname refers to the farm where she was raised, and that anyone who worked there would be given that last name whether they were blood relatives or not.

Barkeep! A Round for My Friends!

Eric Hovde is vying for Wisconsin Republicans' votes to run against Tammy Baldwin again this fall (he lost to former Governor Tommy Thompson in 2012). He's been out in California lately, so he has been advertising heavily on television this month to re-introduce himself to the voters.

I assume this commercial was not filmed at the "beloved neighborhood bar" he finally succeeded in shutting down after a 25-year effort.

Q Toon: Dial R-E-S-P-E-C-T

In the race to prevent our right-wing Supreme Court from unilaterally breaking up same-sex marriages from coast to coast, the U.S. Senate has taken a pit stop.

The House overwhelmingly passed the "Respect for Marriage Act" in July. The Senate version of the bill is cosponsored by Senators Tammy Baldwin (D-WI), Susan Collins (R-ME), Kyrsten Sinema (D-CA), Diane Feinstein (D-CA), and Rob Portman (R-OH). 

In today's 50-50 Senate, even the most innocuous bill has to have ten Republicans to support it or it will die by wordless filibuster. So far, Tom Tillis (R-NC) has also signed on to the bill, but its sponsors have been disappointed that Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) remains non-committal.

Wisconsin's other Senator, Republican Ron Johnson, is running for a third term this year. He said at first that he "saw no reason to oppose the bill," but later dismissed the bill as needless and divisive.

“I’m not happy with the Baldwins of the world who are just opening that wound and opening up that debate, okay?” Johnson said.

Meanwhile, his TV ads reopen the wounds of the 2020 Kenosha riot and the 2021 Waukesha Christmas Parade assault. All the more reason for Wisconsin voters to replace him with Mandela Barnes.

Anyway, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer has decided to put the Respect for Marriage Act on hold until after the November election, in hopes that there are seven Republicans who would vote to let the bill come to the floor if they could do so six years before the next time they have to run for reelection.

See anyone like that on this list of Republicans running this year?

• Blunt, Roy (R-MO)
• Boozman, John (R-AR)
• Burr, Richard (R-NC)
• Crapo, Mike (R-ID)
• Grassley, Chuck (R-IA)
• Hoeven, John (R-ND)
• Johnson, Ron (R-WI)
• Kennedy, John (R-LA)
• Lankford, James (R-OK)
• Lee, Mike (R-UT)
• Moran, Jerry (R-KS)
• Murkowski, Lisa (R-AK)
• Paul, Rand (R-KY)
• Portman, Rob (R-OH)
• Rubio, Marco (R-FL)
• Scott, Tim (R-SC)
• Shelby, Richard C. (R-AL)
• Thune, John (R-SD)
• Toomey, Patrick J. (R-PA)
• Young, Todd (R-IN)

Color me less than optimistic.

Supposedly, Johnson and Mike Lee were working on language that would exempt Christians from respecting marriage, if you can imagine language that didn't render the entire bill meaningless. "The terms and provisions of this Act shall not be interpreted to apply to persons, corporations or officials who believe that it doesn't apply to them."

Whatever. Even without such an exemption, Clarence Thomas and the gang are bound to find some reason that it doesn't apply to anybody, either. Probably citing Leviticus v. Gomorrah.

Q Toon: Erase to the Finish

Requblican-ruled states, especially in the South, have been rushing like mad to pass legislation against their LGBTQ+ citizens. New laws forbidding transgender students from participating in school sports have gotten a lot of attention; and Arkansas is the latest state to create a right of doctors, nurses, pharmacists, EMTs and other medical workers to deny health care to us.

On another front in Requblicans' culture war, Tennessee State Representative Bruce Griffey (R-Paris) proposed a bill last week to ban public schools in his state from authorizing any kind of educational materials that in any way address LGBTQ+ history, health, literature, current affairs, etc., etc., etc.:

 “LEAs (local education agencies) and public charter schools shall not locally adopt or use in the public schools of this state, textbooks and instructional materials or supplemental instructional materials that promote, normalize, support, or address lesbian, gay, bi-sexual, or transgender issues or lifestyle,” the bill reads.

When I first pitched this cartoon to Q Syndicate, what was being reported to Mr. Griffey in the third panel was going to be the tearing down of a Confederate general's statue, a common controversy last year. As I sat at my drawing board, however, I changed it from tearing down statues to renaming schools because I thought that made for a better analogy. And that was before I read about exactly that generating controversy in Florida this week.

As a Trumpster firebrand, Mr. Griffey has proven to be hotter than his own party's leadership is comfortable handling ― the Speaker of the Tennessee House, a fellow Requblican, kicked Griffey off all his committee assignments this week ― but his bill is merely one of many in Tennessee that the Human Rights Campaign calls a "Slate of Hate" ("Cancel Culture" having been already claimed).

Today, the Tennessee House passed HB 1182 (SB 1224), a discriminatory bill that aims to prevent transgender people from using restrooms aligning with their identity by requiring businesses with ‘formal or informal’ policies of allowing transgender people to use the appropriate restroom to post offensive and humiliating signage. This bill, along with the anti-transgender sports bill that Governor Bill Lee signed into law last Friday, are part of the 2021 “Slate of Hate” — anti-equality bills pushed by national extremist groups and peddled by lawmakers in Tennessee in an effort to sow fear and division.

In addition to these two anti-transgender bills, the legislature is considering SB 1367 (HB 1233), another ‘bathroom bill,’ HB 578 (SB 657), an anti-trans medical care ban, SB 1229 (HB 529), an anti-lgbtq parental notification bill, HB 800 (SB 1216), a bill that would prevent schools from providing an LGBTQ-inclusive education, and HB 372 (SB 193), a bill to permit all government employees, including teachers, first responders, and public officials to opt-out of diversity training.

And you thought editorial cartoonists weren't going to have anything to draw about once Donald Joffrey Trump was gone.

Q Toon: I Hear You Knocking

Democrats in the House and Senate have introduced the Equality Act to extend existing federal anti-discrimination protections in employment, housing, credit, jury selection, and education to include persons on the basis of gender identity and sexual orientation. The measure seems certain to pass in the Democrat-controlled House of Representatives.

Chief Senate sponsor Jeff Merkley (D-OR) has a tougher row to hoe. Among Republicans, only Maine's Susan Collins has signed on to the bill; and one of the Democrats' own, Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia, has announced that he will vote against the bill. His problem with the bill seems to come from its inclusion of transgender students among those whose rights it would protect.

Manchin had not made his decision known as I was drawing this cartoon Sunday night. Had I chosen to make him the focus of the cartoon, I suppose I would have drawn the other Democrats calling down a coal mine shaft.

As far as Yertle McConnell is concerned, however, when he eventually comes out of his shell, we'll find out whether it is to attach some poison pill amendment (say, protecting the rights of Clockwork Orange "reparation therapists") or to kill the Equality Act outright.

Q Toon: Sinema Vérité

I wanted to draw a cartoon this week about the Senate race in Arizona between Kyrsten Sinema and Martha McSally, which had yet to be decided when I sat down at my drawing board. Sinema was leading at the time, and has since been declared the winner, making her the first out bisexual elected to the Senate.

Reading a Huffington Post story about LGBTQ candidates elected to office convinced me to expand the scope of the cartoon to include Senator Tammy Baldwin (D-WI), who coasted to reelection in my home state, and three newly elected members of the House of Representatives: Angie Craig (D-MN), Sharice Davids (D-KS), and Chris Pappas (D-NH). Cramming them all into one cartoon, I barely had enough room to squeeze in my signature.

And as soon as I thought I was finished inking the toon, I realized that I had completely forgotten about Congressman Mark Pocan (D-WI). It turns out that Pocan had no opponent in his Madison-area district, so he wasn't even in the local coverage of election results.

For that matter, I also neglected to include David Cicilline (D-RI), Sean Maloney (D-NY), and Mark Takano (D-HI).  Shame on me for not fact-checking HuffPo! My Spidey sense should have been tingling, if only because when I originally read their story, the lead photo at the top of the page was of Representative-elect Ilhan Omar (D-MN), who has not been identified as L, G, B, T, Q, or any of the other letters of the rainbow alphabet.

As for the Congresspersons who did make it into this week's cartoon, Sinema flips a Senate seat that has been Republican for three decades. She has been a member of the House's Blue Dog caucus of moderate and conservative Democrats, even winning the endorsement of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in 2014. That didn't stop Republican opponent Martha McSally from trying to paint Sinema as a radical left winger, based on Sinema's having entered local politics as a candidate of the Green Party.

Baldwin is in fact well to the left of most Senators, but ran a finely tuned and savvy campaign for her third term. Unopposed in the primary while two Republicans duked it out for their party's nominations, she established herself in early television ads as having stood up for small towns hurt when their major employer pulls up stakes; for the cheese-making industry; and for favoring American-made products in military contracts. When ALEC stooge Leah Vukmir won the Republican nomination, Baldwin's ads attacked her relentlessly for acting to restrict access to and affordability of health insurance.

Craig, in a rematch of a race she lost in 2016, beat a militant libertarian who equated marriage equality with slavery and complained that calling a woman who has had more than one or two love interests in her life a "slut" just isn't acceptable any more. A former health care executive, she joined many others in her party in focusing her campaign on health care issues.

Davids makes history as the first out LGBTQ Representative from Kansas and one of the two first Native American women elected to Congress. A member of the Ho-Chunk nation, she unseated four-term Congressman David Yoder in the only swing district in a solidly red state. Another likely Blue Dog, she campaigned on working within the current health care system rather than promising Medicare for All, and she supported modest immigration reforms rather than abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

Pappas was elected to succeed fellow Democrat Carol Shea Porter in what has been described as a bitter election from primary to general. The general election was as much a referendum on Donald Trump as anything else; in their first debate, Republican Eddie Edwards attacked Pappas over a photo taken at an LGBTQ pride parade of Pappas wearing a rainbow t-shirt with the word "Resist" across the chest. "I'm proud of who I am," Pappas replied, "and I'm proud to stand up against hate and bigotry and intolerance."

Q Toon: For the Record

When I'm up late on Sunday night cussing at a blank sheet of bristol board that stubbornly resists becoming the editorial cartoon that I have to send to my editor by Monday morning, it would be really, really nice if I had some inside source on the Supreme Court who would leak to me that the justices were going to issue a ruling of particular interest to the LGBTQ community the next day.

Which is to say that this week's syndicated cartoon is not about the First Fondantmentalist Church of the Sacred Wedding Cake.

So instead, Buzz and Killer have noticed something remarkable about 2018 off-year elections. According to the LGBTQ Victory Fund, there are nearly 400 openly gay, lesbian, bi, transgender and queer candidates for local, state and national office — over 50 in Texas alone.

Former Dallas sheriff Lupe Valdez, another Texas-based candidate, already shattered a ceiling last month when she became the first Latina and openly gay nominee for governor in the state. ...
Valdez, 70, is no stranger to breaking barriers. Despite her family’s fear that her running for public office would ignite a homophobic backlash in Texas — where it is still legal to discriminate against people based on their sexual orientation and gender identity — Valdez was not deterred. In 2005, she became the only Latina sheriff in the U.S. and one of the country’s few out LGBTQ public officials.

Elsewhere, Wisconsin Senator Tammy Baldwin has been targeted by right-wing PACs for defeat as she runs for a third term this year. Her TV ads focus on keeping American manufacturing plants open, but she has also opened up about her childhood with a mother who struggled with drug addiction. Colorado Congressman Jared Polis is giving up his seat to run for Governor, taking the risk of appearing in his TV ads with his husband and son by his side — standard practice for heterosexual candidates, but something most LGBTQ candidates have been counseled to avoid.

Consider the example of Gina Ortiz Jones, the Democratic nominee for Texas's 23rd Congressional District. The former Air Force intelligence officer is an out lesbian, but only to a degree.

“My girlfriend teases me sometimes for not sharing enough about myself on social media, particularly as I endeavor into an arena where people need to know the person before they want to hear the policies,” Jones wrote in October, referring to a partner she did not name. “I can’t help but think that some of that is still related to the precautionary steps I took as a cadet and officer. All this to say, there are effects to not coming out, or feeling as though you’re not able to come out.”

But if some candidates now feel confident running as openly LGBTorQ, other candidates have decided that it's safe to run as an open Nazi.

In Illinois’ 17th Congressional District, in the state’s northwestern corner, Democratic incumbent Cheri Bustos will face a GOP nominee named Bill Fawell, who believes, according to CNN research posted Friday, that the 9/11 terrorist attacks were an inside job, and that Beyonce and Taylor Swift are stumping for the Illuminati, a worldwide domination sect that some conspiracists insist exists.
In the same state’s 3rd district, comprising southwest Chicago and its suburbs, Arthur Jones, a Nazi — not a sobriquet, his preferred affiliation — became the GOP candidate despite being rejected by national Republicans and the state party for denying the Holocaust.
Party leaders have also gone out of their way to denounce Paul Nehlen, who is seeking the soon-to-be-vacated seat of House Speaker Paul Ryan in Wisconsin’s 1st, and Patrick Little, who is running for the U.S. Senate in California. Nehlen proudly attacks his enemies as Jews and Little is a white supremacist.

Mr. Little finished twelfth in Tuesday's "jungle primary," and Nehlen is unlikely to win in my home district (he's got carpetbagging Green Beret Nick Polce to split the pro-fascist vote with him).

Happily, there are hundreds of LGBTQ candidates and only eight seven Nazis running for office this year. If it's unlikely that any card-carrying Nazis will be sworn into office next year, however, there are plenty of Republicans running just to the right of Mussolini who will be. They may not call themselves Nazis — they may not see themselves as Nazis — but the Nazis recognize their fellow travelers.

As Patrick Little told MSNBC before the California primary, Donald Trump "dog whistled about globalists,” even if he "didn't understand he was talking about Jews until after the election.”

Radical right-wing candidates have had the wind at their back in 2010, 2014, and 2016. For all the talk of a "blue wave" this year, Trump has the bully pulpit (and his Twitter account) and a devoted following that believes any bullstool he, Fox News, Sinclair Broadcasting, or their Facebook friends from Smolensk tell them.

Besides, I seem to recall all the experts predicting a Hillary Clinton landslide not very long ago.

Targeting Tammy Baldwin

The Koch Brothers are already targeting Wisconsin's Democratic Senator, Tammy Baldwin, up for reelection in 2018.

The right-wingers are now airing television ads warning that liberal!!! (shudder!!) Sen. Baldwin refuses to support the Republicans' tax break for billionaires.

But 63 percent of Republican voters told the pollster that deficit reduction should take precedence over tax cuts for corporations — and 75 percent said that combating the debt should take priority over cuts that benefit the wealthy. That’s a big problem for Republicans: A recent CBS News poll found that 58 percent of Americans believe that the GOP tax plan favors the wealthy, despite Trump’s vigorous assurances that it does not.
Nevertheless, the Kochs are persisting: On Thursday, the billionaire brothers announced a $1.6 million ad buy in Wisconsin attacking Democratic senator Tammy Baldwin. The 30-second spots are ostensibly geared at pressuring Baldwin to break ranks with her caucus and back Trump’s tax cuts — but, in reality, they are early campaign advertisements for her eventual Republican challenger in 2018.

This Week's 19-Year-Old Sneak Peek

I couldn't figure out a snippet of this week's cartoon that I could use for this week's sneak peek without giving the whole cartoon away, so here's the bottom half of a front-page illustration I did for the year-end edition of In Step in 1997, because it includes a gay Olympian in the mix.

Q Toon: A Totally Gay Election

2012 will go down in history as the first year that voters approved marriage equality.

Different-sex marriage remains the law in Minnesota; but voters in Washington and Maryland approved prior action of their legislatures in favor of marriage equality, and voters in Maine overturned a previous referendum restricting marriage to straight couples. (And voters in Iowa rebuffed an effort to unseat a fourth justice of their Supreme Court who had ruled in favor of marriage equality in 2009.)

The six congressional candidates alluded to in this cartoon are incumbents Jared Polis (D-CO), David Cicilline (D-RI), and newly elected candidates Mark Pocan (D-WI), Sean Patrick Maloney (D-NY), Mark Takano (D-WA), and Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ). The lone gay candidate to lose last Tuesday was Republican Richard Tisei, who narrowly lost to incumbent John Tierney (D-MA).

I went somewhat out on a limb by including Sinema in that list when I drew the cartoon on Sunday night. That race wasn't called in her favor until Tuesday. She will be the first openly bisexual member of Congress, and possibly its second out atheist.

And I'm particularly proud that my home state elected Tammy Baldwin to the U.S. Senate. I'll admit that I occasionally had some doubts that Wisconsin would elect as Senator one of the most liberal members of the House (and I was not alone here) after making such a sharp turn to the right in 2010 and 2011. But, the unrelieved nastiness from all advertising comers in the fall notwithstanding, she did a great job of introducing herself to the voters while Tommy Thompson and his Republican rivals were busy attacking each other in the spring and summer.

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Regarding Saturday's blog entry about in the Strand Magazine, I've been trying to find the next article in Arthur Lord's series on American editorial cartoonists in 1902, so far without success. In fact, I have been unable to find Mr. Lord's article in Google's on-line digitization of the October, 1902 edition of Strand Magazine in which it is supposed to have appeared.

What Mr. Gus Frederick says on his Homer Davenport site is: "Through Ebay, I recently obtained a selection of nine original pages from the October, 1902 number of The Strand Magazine from London. This was an article entitled The American Cartoonist and His Work by Arthur Lord and featured short bios and examples of four 'famous' cartoonists of the day."

Mr. Frederick posted an Optical Character Recognition rendition of the text and illustrations rather than images of those nine pages, so we can't confirm that they have "The Strand Magazine" in the top margin of alternate pages, as the magazine would have had. I have so far found no reference to anyone in the U.S. or Canada having started up a "Strand Magazine" stateside, or that there was a separate North American edition of the London publication. (Perhaps in London, Ontario?)

One reason I suspect that the publication is American is the lack of any British condescension toward the New World cartoonists or the U.S. press. When Ohio Senator Mark Hanna is first mentioned in the article, it is by his last name alone, indicating that the author expected all of his readers to know who "Hanna" was. It's a reasonable assumption that American readers would recognize "Hanna" as the Karl Rove of William McKinley's presidency, but would British readers?

Mr. Frederick notes the British spellings -- "draughtsman," rather than "draftsman"; "abhour" instead of "abhor" -- and florid language of the article, but that doesn't guarantee that the pages were published in London. "American" spelling was not universally accepted in in this country in 1902. American spelling dates back at least as far as Noah Webster's 1828 Dictionary, but there were resistance and ridicule when Teddy Roosevelt proposed making "simplified spelling" official in 1906.

My first thought was that the pages might be from another publication. I thought of Public Opinion, which was fond of printing editorial cartoons; but it was published weekly, not monthly, and doesn't appear to have attached bylines to its feature articles. It seems unlikely that Puck would have profiled a cartoonist from the competing Harper's Weekly while ignoring its own remarkable cartoonists. Harper's Weekly, of course, was published weekly; and, like any other magazine of its day, put its own name on the top of every page.

I'll keep looking.

QToon: Tommy v. Tammy

National media attention this week has been on tonight's debate between President Barack Obama and Bain Capitalist Mitt Romney. Less attention gets paid to the congressional and senatorial debates around the country, by and large, although the Elizabeth Warren v. Scott Brown debate over the weekend did get some tongues wagging.

(As an aside: I don't buy the media spin that it was a gaffe when Warren started to answer a question about which Republican now in the Senate she could work with on major issues by citing Dick Lugar. Dick Lugar is "now in the Senate," as David Gregory phrased the question, even if Lugar won't be there once the next Congress is sworn in. And while a Democrat might be able to work with, say, Marco Rubio on immigration reform, or Rand Paul on limiting government surveillance of private citizens, on "major issues," the Republicans who will be calling the shots if Scott Brown is reelected have no interest whatsoever in working with any Democrats.)

Last Friday in the race to succeed retiring Senator Herb Kohl, former Wisconsin Governor Tommy Thompson and Madison area Congressman Tammy Baldwin met in what was billed as a debate. It was no such thing; the format consisted them taking turns answering questions from four TV/radio people. They each got to give one answer to each question, and there was no opportunity for rebuttal or response to each other. The one time a questioner asked what he called a follow-up question, he changed the subject from abortion to marriage equality. Well, that's not a follow-up question; that's a question asked out of turn.

Having breezed through several debates in his races for governor, Thompson was at ease with the format, repeating his favorite talking points frequently but as if they were fresh new thoughts each time -- so that any given one of those sound bites could be used in news reports or his own campaign commercials. Baldwin faltered a bit more at the outset, with enough umms and uhhs that I began to wonder if she had only crammed for the event on the drive to the studio. But she addressed the questions directly, with detailed facts, and without harping on a select few talking points all night; and she seemed more comfortable by the end of the hour.

And, unlike Thompson, Baldwin did not come off as downright scornful of her opponent. It rang strange when, after Baldwin had given her answer to a late-in-the-debate question asking what could be done to keep Asian carp out of the Great Lakes, Thompson blurted out with mock astonishment, "I'm absolutely surprised! That's the first time I haven't been blamed for something or George W. Bush!"

Thompson brought up his wife three times during the debate, although, curiously, he never said her name. Now, admittedly, that's fewer times than he said that he'd cut taxes 91 times, but one wonders what kind of point he was trying to make. There was nothing all evening that he said that he hadn't planned beforehand to say. I have to suspect that this was a "dog whistle" to the people whom he wanted to remind that Ms. Baldwin is one of those scary lesbians.

What else went on during the evening?

We learned that somehow, when nobody was looking, Tommy Thompson built a hospital in Afghanistan. The morning-after research finds that not all is well with that particular project:

A contractor's assessment of the hospital found that Afghan physicians at the hospital often did not have basic knowledge of anatomy and physiology and lacked skills needed to resuscitate women and infants. In addition, the hospital routinely lacked basic supplies, including surgical gloves and antibiotics.

More impressively, he also built Wisconsin. He even claimed to have brought Wisconsin unemployment down below 2%. (Politifact disagreed with an earlier claim of 2.1%.) But don't blame him for any of today's problems. He's not in Congress, he's a private sector.

This Week's Sneak Peek

It's rare that I get to draw about Wisconsin issues for Q Syndicate, but this week, I'm afraid I'll have to insist.

Vintage Barney Frank cartoons

16-term Congressman from Massachusetts Barney Frank announced yesterday that he would not run for office again in 2012. He cited his redrawn district as one factor, and that at 71, he wanted to spend some time in academia before settling down to retirement.

As the first out gay man in Congress, he has been the subject of occasional Q Syndicate cartoons over the years. Rep. Frank's office requested the original of this one from August, 1998.

At the time, revelations of the affair between President Bill Clinton and White House intern Monica Lewinsky were coming out fast and furious; that the famous semen-stained blue dress was in existence and in evidence was a recent headline. While many congressional Democrats whispered that perhaps it was time for Clinton to resign and let Al Gore assume the presidency, Barney Frank was vocal -- and alone -- in his defense of the President.

Later that year, Frank was joined in the House by Tammy Baldwin (D-WI), who has the distinction of  being the first openly gay non-incumbent elected to Congress. The above cartoon  refers to an incident where Majority Leader Dick Armey (R-TX) was recorded referring to the Gentleman from Massachusetts as "Barney Fag."

After a separate incident of Armey making a poor joke about Frank's homosexuality, a reporter asked Frank if he wanted an apology from the Texan. "I’m trying to think of what I would be less interested in than an apology from Dick Armey," he replied. "Maybe the lyrics to the national anthem of Bhutan."

I'll wrap this post up with a cover I drew for Q Salt Lake. Playing up Rep. Frank's role on the House Banking Committee, I drew him as he might look on U.S. currency. This was in 1999, well before the subject of this week's Q Syndicate cartoon advocated throwing Mr. Frank in jail for the temerity of imposing rules and regulations on the banking industry whose reckless abandon (not, as Republicans have been trying to convince people ever since, schoolteachers' retirement plans) created the worst recession in 80 years.

This Week's Toon: Tammy Baldwin for Senate?

Curiously, I haven't drawn terribly many cartoons about Representative Tammy Baldwin, the first out lesbian elected to Congress. In part, that's because, like most cartoonists, I draw more cartoons that are critical of politicians than cartoons that say "Hey! Great job!" It's also because -- while she is no shrinking violet -- Ms. Baldwin doesn't spend nearly as much time on television or penning op-ed pieces for print journalism as some other congressmen do.

As such, she might be a fitting successor to retiring Senator Herb Kohl.

But because I haven't drawn her much, I haven't yet captured her caricature.

One of the first cartoons I drew about then-candidate for Congress Baldwin was for the cover of In Step Magazine, a now-defunct LGBT bi-weekly newspaper to whom I was a regular contributor in the mid-1990's. It was the year-end issue of the paper, and the drawing was a collage of faces and images in the news in 1997.


I thought this was a terrible likeness, but somebody on her staff liked it enough to secure my permission to use it on the cover of an invitation to a birthday party-cum-fund raiser for candidate Baldwin. (I forget how they got around that brush partly in front of her hair.)

I drew her again once she won election to Wisconsin's second congressional district -- this after House Majority Leader Dick Armey publicly referred to Massachusetts Democrat Barney Frank as "Barney Fag":

This Week's Sneak Peek

With Wisconsin Senator Herb Kohl's decision not to run for another term, some LGBT activists and Emily's listserve are excited by the prospect that 2nd District Representative Tammy Baldwin might run for the seat. In news reports, her name usually appears in the paragraph that begins "Others mentioned as possible candidates are..."