Q Toon: Proof Through the Night

Something a little lighter this week:

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

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

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

Or parent.

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

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

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

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

Q Toon: Olympians, Out or Not

The list of out athletes competing at the Tokyo Olympics keeps growing. The first article I read about them knew of 168; by last weekend, the number was up to 180. (Some athletes who were out to their friends and families had never had a reason to come out to the rest of the world before the games.) Outsports, the authority on such things, knew of only 56 out athletes at the 2016 Rio games, and 23 at the 2012 London Olympics.

A nosy reporter drew condemnation during the Rio games by writing a racy story about tracking down LGBTQ athletes on Grindr, heedless of their outness or the safety of being out in their home countries. He didn't include their names in his story for Daily Beast, but wrote enough details about the athletes that others could identify some of them. Accordingly, any resemblance between the people in panels 2 and 3 of this week's cartoon and any persons living or dead is, as the legal saying goes, purely coincidental.

And to anyone left out of panel 1, my apologies for not managing to squeeze all 180+ of you in there.

______________

Update: Someone has been at it again, outing Olympic athletes without their permission.

[Insider] discovered at least 10 Twitter posts and four TikTok videos, one of which was seen over 140,000 times and revealed 30 users’ full faces before the platforms removed them for violating community guidelines.

At least one male user reportedly signaled on his profile that he was from a country known for discriminating against LGBTQ people. (The posts have since been removed and could not be verified by Yahoo Life.)

Grindr later issued a statement condemning those who created the videos, acknowledging that they breached the app’s terms and conditions, which “prohibit them from publicly displaying, publishing, or otherwise distributing any content or information that are part of the Grindr services.”

That’s especially important at this year’s Games, as the International Olympic Committee (IOC) is hosting 11 nations where being LGBTQ is criminalized, according to Human Dignity Trust: Yemen, the United Arab Emirates, Afghanistan, Brunei, Iran, Mauritania, Nigeria, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Somalia and Pakistan.

In some of those countries, being LGBTQ is punishable by death.

Q Toon: Trading Places

Linebacker Carl Nassib of the Las Vegas Raiders came out as gay last week, the first active NFL player ever to do so. He did just about everything about his coming out right, except for waiting until immediately after my deadline for last week's cartoon. But we'll let that pass.

His video announcement had a somewhat matter-of-fact air; there was no sense of any personal crisis or I've Been Trying So Hard To Live A Lie, no apologies, no regrets. Perhaps most importantly, he didn't make the announcement purely about himself, instead pledging $100,000 to the Trevor Project.

“They’re an incredible organization, they’re the number one suicide-prevention service for LGBTQ youth in America and they’re truly doing incredible things. I’m very excited to be a part of it and help in any way that I can and I’m really pumped to see what the future holds.”

As part of a determined show of support for Nassib, the NFL has matched his pledge; the publicity also sparked a 100% increase in on-line donations in the first week after Nassib's announcement.

Meanwhile, teammates, coaches, and many others around the league have expressed moral support for Nassib, and we're just not hearing the sort of qualified tolerance or even homophobia that would have greeted such a statement twenty or thirty years ago. (Or just eight.)

Oh, no doubt that antipathy is out there, muttered sotto voce. We just aren't hearing it.

Q Toon: Changing Channels

After so many weeks cartooning about the right-wing assault on transgender Americans, and a week that saw a mass shooting just about every day, I felt the need to draw a little fluff for a change.

A recent contestant on ABC's The Bachelor, Colton Underwood, came out as gay last week. The former NFL linebacker (Chargers, Raiders, Eagles) had previously been one of the bevy of male contestants on The Bachelorette before becoming the focus of The Bachelor's season 23. In case you're unfamiliar with the franchise, there's a houseful of people who are the opposite sex of the season's bachelor/ette, who goes on a series of dates with them and winnows them down to a final, er, winner.

The object of the game is supposedly matrimony, which is as bad an idea as has ever emerged from a producers' brainstorming session. (The two shows nevertheless have a combined 42 seasons between them.) Happily, Underwood's star turn did not result in wedding bells, although there was a restraining order involved.

We all come to grips with our sexuality at our own pace and on our own terms. Some people make and embrace the realization in childhood, while others do so only later in life. There are still, moreover, a wide variety of pressures to deny oneself, whether from church, family, or the locker room, so I don't wish to second guess Mr. Underwood's choices. 

His choice now to share the reorientation of his life on a Netflix series seems ill-advised, I suppose; but on the other hand, famous people don't get the luxury of coming out quietly — what say you, Ellen DeGeneres, Greg Louganis, Lance Bass, Kaitlyn Jenner, Elliot Page? 

Besides, the phenomenon of newly out LGBTQ+ going kind of overboard in the process is fairly well known, even without the celebrity factor.

Of all the other LGBTQ+ celebrities, activists and mavens who have had anything to say about Underwood, whether supportive of his coming out or attacking him for "monetizing" his experience, perhaps the most insightful was 1990's NSYNC heartthrob Bass, who told the Daily Mail,

"So when someone comes out as a public figure, so many people immediately go, 'It's too late.' They don't like to support it because they don't feel like you know what you're talking about yet.

"But I don't think Colton is trying to lead that charge of trying to be the spokesperson for the LGBTQ community." Lance, 41, added.

So perhaps ABC could sign him up for a same-sex season of The Bachelor instead.

National Coming Out Days

Q Syndicate, October, 2013

Tomorrow being National Coming Out Day (NCOD), I thought I'd share a handful of the cartoons I've drawn over the years to mark the event. There are many years when I failed to publish an NCOD cartoon; it comes in the midst of election season every other year, so I often feel compelled to draw about more pressing matters. 

This year, I just couldn't keep up with the deluge of More Pressing Matters.

Q Syndicate, October, 1998

One of my early NCOD cartoons featured 18-year-old Dylan confiding in his gay Uncle Jim over coffee. Fourteen years later (although I miscounted and had Dylan say it was twelve), I revisited the pair. Well, it's not likely that any of my readers actually remembered the earlier cartoon, so let's just go along with Dylan's version of the time line; here's how I imagined 30-year-old Dylan and 50-something Jim had aged.

Q Syndicate, October, 2012

If the two ever make it back in a cartoon, I figure that Dylan has married and adopted a child. Uncle Jim, however, has commitment issues and is a swinging sexuagenarian single. He probably never did explicitly come out to his parents.

But let's not overlook some real people who have not come out.

Q Syndicate, October 2002

This wasn't exactly an NCOD cartoon, aside from its timing. Out magazine editor Brendan Lemon had written in his magazine in May, 2001, that he had been "having an affair with a pro baseball player from a major-league East Coast franchise, not his team’s biggest star but a very recognizable media figure" for a year and a half. A year and a half later, inquiring minds were still abuzz over who that very recognizable media figure might be, and New York Mets catcher Mike Piazza actually held a news conference to announce that it wasn't him.

Eighteen years later, we still don't know who Lemon's boyfriend was, but one has to assume that the stress Lemon wrote about, having to keep their relationship hush-hush while being very much an out public figure himself, eventually doomed the relationship. You can count Major League baseball players who have come out of the closet on one hand, and most of them did so after they retired from the sport.

As for the football player in panel four, he was just someone I made up for a punch line.

Q Syndicate, October, 2017

This odd little news item highlights the sort of thing that could get the vote of ordinary citizens like you or me thrown out. Overzealous election officials, and those pressured by Republican legislatures to suppress the vote, can disqualify you if your signature doesn't quite match what they have on record. Or if you've resumed using your maiden name. Or, certainly, if your gender doesn't present the same as it did when you first registered.

I hope not to have any reason to keep drawing more cartoons about this family very, very soon.

Q Syndicate, October, 2007

And I'm sure you remember Senator Larry Craig (R-ID), of wide stance in the men's room at the Minneapolis-St. Paul airport fame.

He's still not giving keynote speeches anywhere these days.

It's just as well if some people want to stay in the closet, anyway. Really. We're good.

Q Toon: The Family That Comes Out Together

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

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

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

 

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

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

Q Toon: Take Your Boyfriend to Work Day

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

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

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

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

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

Frankie and Donnie in the Q Cartoon

"And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything." — Donald J. Trump

The 2005 Billy Bush tape was not enough to keep Donald Trump out of the White House, but the barrage of allegations against boorish celebrities has succeeded in the premature end of another fake presidency: that of Frank Underwood on Netflix's House of Cards.

In his public statement after Anthony Rapp accused him of sexually assaulting him at a 1986 cast party, Kevin Spacey claimed not to remember the incident. He blamed the alcohol, but it appears that the incident simply didn't stand out.

Spacey, if reports are to be believed, has been using Mr. Trump's motto above as a personal modus operandi toward fellow actors, bartenders, a reporter, a military set advisor, and any other attractive male in the 14-to-29-year-old age bracket who have caught his eye, even before he achieved stardom himself. At the same time, he steadfastly refused to come out publicly as gay until that revelation was overshadowed by his being outed as a creep and pedophile.

Indeed, that "when you're a star, you can do anything" motto held true for decades. Harry Dreyfuss alleges that in 2008, Spacey repeatedly groped him in front of his father, Richard Dreyfuss. Personally, I do not know anybody, gay or straight, who would grope an 18-year-old in front of his or her parents without suffering the loss of some teeth; but in this case, Spacey was the elder Dreyfuss's boss and an idol of the younger Dreyfuss, who at the time tried desperately to keep his father from noticing what was going on. (Spacey, through his publicist, denies the incident ever took place.)

It has proven a simple matter for Netflix to kick Frank Underwood out of the White House; how the imaginary U.S. fares under Claire Underwood's presidency makes little difference to us in the real world.* With Red America having overlooked Donald Trump's crass objectification of women last year, real U.S. is stuck with him for the next three seasons.

And nobody else down the line of succession appears to be much of any improvement.

⸺⸺
* I don't watch the show — I watched the BBC version years ago, and once through that wringer was enough — so I don't know how its First Lady overcame the constitutional barrier to being her husband's Vice President. But you can put your mind at ease that there is absolutely, positively, 100% guaranteed no way that Melania Trump will be President of the United States.

Isn't that right, Edith Wilson?

Q Toon: Truth Will Out

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

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

Q Toon: One More Voice We Will Never Hear Again

This has been a bad year for popular music headliners: an incomplete list of the musicians we lost in 2016 includes David Bowie, Glenn Frey, Prince, Keith Emerson, Greg Lake, Paul Kanter, Maurice White, Leonard Cohen, Leon Russell, and, sometime before dawn on Christmas Day, George Michael.

There was a temptation to base this week's cartoon on Michael's "Last Christmas."  Instead, the quotation in this week's cartoon, and the headline of this post as well, come from "White Light," a song George Michael wrote after recovering from a serious bout of pneumonia in 2012.

So I just kept breathing, my friends,
Waiting for the man to choose —
Saying this ain’t the day that it ends.
There’s no white light,
And I'm not through —
I’m alive, I'm alive,
And I've got so much more
That I want to do with the music.
Was it music that saved me?
Or the way that you prayed for me?

Michael's t-room arrest in Beverly Hills in 1998 prompted his coming out as bisexual, and could easily have sunk his career and soured his legacy. But just as there was a tension in his music between the profane ("I Want Your Sex," for example) and the sacred ("Praying for Time," among others),   numerous reports have come out since his death about his philanthropy: proceeds from "Don't Let the Sun Go Down on Me" went to the Terrence Higgins Trust,a London HIV charity; and proceeds from "Jesus to a Child" went to a Childline, a London youth support center.

People are reporting on Twitter personal instances of Michael's charity which he had wanted to keep private. He volunteered anonymously at a homeless shelter, footed the medical bill for a TV game show contestant, and set up trusts for disabled children and adults.

So you can remember his public persona as a sexy, sensual pop phenomenon; or the private individual who saw social needs and worked to address them.

'Cause either way
I thank you.

Q Toon: The Talk

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

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

Q Toon: Savings in the Costumes Budget

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

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

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

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

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

Q Toon: Terms of Service

Since I had to send this week's cartoon to the syndicate Monday morning, it is not about the results of Tuesday's elections.

Q Syndicate✒Nov 6, 2014

At this point, you may be anxious to discuss something else, anyway.

You may recall that, back in June, CNBC squawking head Simon Hobbs had an awkward moment on his TV show when he mistakenly assumed the fact that Apple CEO Tim Cook is gay was common knowledge. (My blog entry on that is here.) Mr. Cook has decided to let Mr. Hobbs off the hook, whereupon Mr. Hobbs has probably added his outing of Mr. Cook to his list of successful market forecasts.

Meanwhile, this leaves the ladies from my Million Moms cartoons puzzling whether to okay the latest iTunes update.

Q Toon: Signs of Fall

Mine may be the only cartoon on the AAEC web site today that is not about the federal government shutdown.

But it's fall! Time to enjoy the fall colors and off-color jokes! National Coming Out Day is just over a week away, so it's time to start getting into the spirit of the holiday, deck the halls, bake some pumpkin soufflé, dress up and prowl the neighborhood. Or am I thinking of the Folsom Street Fair?

By the way, check back for another cartoon here tomorrow!

Qtoon: 14, 12, or 11 Years Later

Q SyndicateΔOct 11, 2012

Today is National Coming Out Day, and to mark the occasion, I decided to follow up on a cartoon I drew way back in 1998. (See this week's "Sneak Peek.")

In the original cartoon, Uncle Jim did most of the talking to his 18-year-old nephew, Dylan. The cartoon implied that Uncle Jim was past his 38th birthday but still well short of his 48th. Twelve years later, Dylan would be 30, and Jim somewhere in his 50's. Uncle Jim has changed his appearance significantly over the years. He's put on a fair amount of weight and decided to compensate for his thinning hair by growing a heavy beard. Nephew Dylan now wears glasses and has exchanged his shaggy mane for something with more product in it.

Now, most of my readers don't have my life's work at their fingertips, so it's not like any of the following really matters. But if there are any obsessive fans reading this blog, there is one nagging little inconsistency about this week's cartoon that I might as well try to explain.

I added the copyright date in the second panel as I was nearly done inking the cartoon, and suddenly realized that 1998 was fourteen years ago, not twelve. I hadn't left myself enough room to change "twelve" to "fourteen," so we're left to suppose that perhaps Dylan didn't come out to his parents at 18 (after all, in the original cartoon, Jim advises him that there's no rush to do so) but two years later after another conversation at this diner.

Then, when I hunted up the digital file for Monday's Sneak Peek, I found that for reasons I cannot recall, its copyright date had been changed to 2001. This cartoon was originally drawn in August, 1998 as a "reserve" -- to be released at some later date when I might not have another cartoon at the ready, so my first thought was that we held onto that reserve cartoon for three years.

There is a note on the page the cartoon was drawn on, however, indicating that it appeared in the Phoenix Echo in October, 1998. (Back then, a few of the papers in which my cartoons appeared would mail me those issues.) So either I mistakenly included this cartoon for three years in the January ritual of updating the copyright dates of the unreleased reserves, or somebody wanted to re-release this cartoon in 2001.

I don't have any idea. All I know is that I've fallen woefully behind in keeping up a supply of reserves; I've been without one for months, if not years. I've learned that there's little point in drawing up reserves such as the original Dylan and Jim cartoon for release at specific dates on the calendar unless I have plans to be busy or on vacation at that time. It's more useful to have something totally generic in case of emergency, and I have less need for a reserve Christmas cartoon than I have for a cartoon to be released for publication immediately after Christmas.

By the way, if you have any confident predictions about what is going to be a happenin' topic for LGBT readers around December 27 of this year, I'm all ears.

This Week's Sneak Peek

Coming home to find that the frivolous cartoons I'd left behind for Q Syndicate to release during my vacation coincided with some decidedly unfrivolous events in the news, I felt obliged to draw something more somber this week.

I also decided to observe the serious side of National Coming Out Day. Anyone who knows me is (or ought to be) aware that I am gay, but since Coming Out is more an everyday process than a single event, I decided to wear a rainbow tie and a pink triangle lapel pin to church on Sunday. (I am organist at a moderately sized ELCA Lutheran congregation.)

I don't know whether there are any gay kids in the congregation at this point, but if so, I want to remind them that one can grow up gay and well-adjusted and without abandoning one's faith. The ones calling them "faggot" and teasing them about pole sucking or carpet munching do not get the last word on whether their lives are worth living.

Well, I hope that's what I'm reminding them of anyway. I hope I'm not that creepy old gay guy as far as the Kids Today are concerned.

And if I am, well, screw 'em. I'm too old to care that much what other people think of me.

Q Toon: Last Week's Editorial Cartoon

I'm still getting over my post-vacation jet lag, so here's the cartoon I drew for Q Syndicate to release last week. National Coming Out Day is actually October 11, but since some of the newspapers that print my cartoons publish every other week, this timing enables whichever of them wants this cartoon to print it on time.

I don't have a lot to say about this cartoon, other than I hope that I got it out ahead of all the cartoons about the ever earlier and earlier commercialization of Christmas.

And here's this week's sneak peek, by the way.

Q Toon: Look, it's the new guy!

"The reality is, it’s taken me 43 years to come to terms with this part of my life. The process has been something that has made me a happier and a better person. It’s something I wish I had done years ago."

--Ken Mehlman, to Mark Ambinder in Atlantic Magazine

Part of the fun of drawing this particular cartoon was the opportunity to poke some light-hearted fun at the phenomenon of The New Guy.

We've all been there, and we've all seen it. When a person comes out as gay or lesbian, whether in high school or middle age, he/she goes all out. Suddenly, everything is rainbows, bright colors, leather, body piercings, mullets, the shaved head, late nights at the disco, or what-have-you, depending on the person's particular proclivities. The phenomenon also includes Devotion To The Cause:

Indeed, Mehlman’s first act as an out gay man will be hosting a fund-raiser of the foundation next month to help support the case [against the anti-equality marriage amendment to California's constitution], which likely carries a price tag in the millions of dollars (the group has declined to disclose exactly how much). Although the invitations have yet to be mailed, Mehlman told The Advocate Wednesday evening that just through pre-selling the event, organizers had already helped to raise about $750,000.

Well, welcome to The Cause, Kenny. You may have been the Roy Cohn of the '00's, but if you Republicans can welcome all those Dixiecrats into your party, the energy of The New Guy entitles you to our grudging acceptance. As long as it lasts.