Q Toon: What's In a Name

On the last day of Pride Month, Matthew Vines, evangelical author of God and the Gay Christian, published an op-ed in the New York Times headlined "I'm Gay, Not Queer. It Matters." In the essay, he complains that use of the “queer” label has contributed to a decrease in support for the LGBTQ+ community, not only among conservatives, but among the public at large.

The word queer “carries an adversarial charge that ‘gay’ does not,” Vines writes. Furthermore, “because the word ‘queer’ can describe any departure from social norms, it becomes an open door through which almost anyone can walk. Polyamorous? Queer. Vaguely uncomfortable with gender expectations? Possibly queer, too.” 

The word had been an antigay slur when activists chanted "We're here, we're queer, get over it" at 1970's Pride marches.  The point was originally to defang the word; later, as the word "lesbigay" proved inadequately inclusive, some advocated for "queer" as a more pronounceable name than "LGBTQIAA2S..." Easier to remember, too.

Vines, by the way, used “L.G.B.T.Q.,” periods and all, three times throughout his op-ed. I don't think that is a N.Y.T. stylebook thing. A.F.A.I.K.

Certainly, Vines is not the only gay man uncomfortable identifying as queer. But then, not every guy in the LGBTQ+ community identifies as gay, either. Or homosexual, on the down low, Two Spirit, M4M, a Friend of Dorothy, Uranian, malakoi, or any other particular sexual proclivity off to the right of the + sign.

But to disregard the most visible, provocative members of our community is to forget that we didn't come as far as we have by meekly accepting police raids of our gathering places and homes; by having to lie to family, friends, employers, and government; or by dying alone and quietly as a cruel disease cut hundreds of thousands of us down in the prime of life.

The queers of ACT-UP and the Stonewall Inn "carrie[d] an adversarial charge," because they had to in order to move society forward.

Without them, Matthew Vines might still identify as a gay evangelical author. But quite likely an unpublished and unemployed one. 

Q Toon: Xed Out

On her first day on the job as Governor of Arkansas, Sarah Huckabee Sanders issued an executive order banning the word "Latinx" from government documents.

The order, which she says was issued "to respect the Latino community," says that "ethnically insensitive and pejorative language," and the term Latinx specifically, "has no place" in government documents or employee titles. 

Latinx, by definition, is a gender-neutral alternative to Latina or Latino. 

"One can no more easily remove gender from Spanish and other romance languages than one can remove vowels and verbs from English," the order says.

RLY?

K

WTVR

As one of the former Press Secretaries for Donald Joffrey Trump, SHS presumably knows a thing or two about language, and I can't dispute that "Latinx" grates the ears of some Latinos and Latinas — much the same as they/them preferred pronouns do to some Anglx stick-in-the-muds.

Nouns have gender in Spanish, as do the adjectives modifying them, and there isn't a neuter option as there was in the language from which Spanish sprang.

I can imagine some pedant in the dawn of the Dark Ages grousing about the pueri hodie dropping all the neuter declensions from their lingo like a bunch of damn Ostrogoths. But such are the dynamics of language, especially when cultures meet and mingle.

Far be it from me to tell Hispanophones how their language should be run. Personally, I'd let the genderqueer niñxs keep "Latinx" and get rid of that ll thing. But that's just yx. 

Sinceramente tuyx,

Su amigx Pablx

Q Toon: Is Fox News Evil?

I'm exaggerating any antigay animus on Fox News's part because this is a cartoon drawn for the LGBTQ+ press. That animus exists — especially against transgender people as the whipping boy/girl/children du jour — even if Fox News hasn't been up in alarms about marriage equality or Gays In The Military lately.

What I'm not exaggerating is Fox News's reliance upon stirring up its audience's phobias and resentment against The Other, and promoting The Big Lie. As a Republican media outlet, Fox News is acutely aware that majority rule is a potential threat to their party; so it is eager to cast doubt upon the legitimacy of free and open elections.

Absent any real evidence of massive voter fraud by Democrats, Fox News can't state it as fact. (Indeed, nearly all of the instances of voter fraud that have come to light, rare as they are, have been individuals casting a second vote for Republican candidates.) Instead, Fox News puts democracy in jeopardy by casting its aspersions in the form of a question.

Fox News isn't accusing Democrats of busing dead illegal immigrant voters to the polls. It's just asking whether they might be doing it. Journalists are supposed to ask questions, aren't we?.

Hence the title of today's post.

Q Toon: One Small Step

Or, Friends In High Places:

Richard Branson won the billionaires' race to space on Sunday (or maybe not quite), and there have been a spaceshipload of cartoons criticizing Branson, Jeff Bezos, and Elon Musk for squandering so much capital on vanity flights when there are still so many problems down here on Earth.

Rather than strain to find an original way to make that well-worn point, I expound today upon a minor sidebar article. Among the guests and bric-a-brac Branson took on his Virgin Galactic spaceplane was an LGBTQ+ pride flag*, intended to commemorate the victims of the Pulse Nightclub massacre five years ago.

He also brought along a photo of Stephen Colbert, which I didn't catch what that was supposed to commemorate, but having to cut it down to postage stamp size because of the weight taught a valuable lesson about materialism or whatever. And he's organizing some sort of a Go Fund Me to send a couple random less-than-billionaires up to the outer limits of the thermosphere.

So he went to space and he's trying his darnedest not to be a dick about it, and he respectfully asks all you earthbound socialists to get off his back, like, as if you wouldn't jet up to outer space if you had several billion quatloos burning a hole in your bank vault, okay?

_______

* Update: Turns out it was a ribbon, not a flag.

Q Toon: Reveal Rethought

Or, What To Deflect When You're Expecting.

Gender reveal displays for newborns have become increasingly extravagant —and dangerous — as expectant parents seek to outdo every expectant couple that has gone before. Gender reveals have shaken the earth for miles around, or have sparked deadly wildfires and burnt tens of thousands of acres, or have killed guests or the father-to-would-have been.

Which must weigh awfully heavily on those kids as they grow up.

Especially if their birth gender isn't the one they want to stick with.

Imagine the scene: "You can't undergo gender correction surgery! Your father killed himself telling our friends you were a boy!" "We burned down an entire city to tell everyone you're a girl!"

Maybe it's past time to tone down the whole gender reveal game. Maybe even put it off a little while until everyone is on the same page. Just sayin'.

Q Toon: Whomit Macon Cern

Back when I lived in an apartment with mail slots a lot like this in the entryway, I once tried adding an unnecessary directional "S" in front of the street name on a magazine subscription just to see what junk mail lists that magazine would sell my information to. 

That worked, but too well. I ended up getting multiple copies of some junk mailings, some addressed to me at Fakename Ave., and duplicates sent to S. Fakename Ave.

That was back in the 20th Century, but whoever lives there now probably still gets them.

Q Toon: Dey, Dem, Deir

I finally got around to recognizing Merriam Webster's Word of the Year for 2019: "They," used as a third person singular pronoun to refer to someone who doesn't feel themself to be "He" or "She."

Well, to be honest, I have drawn about this already, but it was well before the year "They" was the Word of.

I can be a stickler for traditional language — don't you dare use "literally" figuratively around me — but I'm with the modernists on this one. "They, Them, Their" are already commonly used to refer to any person whose sex is unknown or whose existence is purely hypothetical, replacing the awkward "He/She, Him/Her, His/Her." What is new is using those pronouns to refer to a specified person whose identity, if not their sex, is known.

I'm not sure why or when Gino expects Tex to talk about dem in the third person anyway. Maybe dey is networking. Or dey are. Pronoun-verb agreement rules may still need to be worked out. The point is that it's just as well to announce one's pronouns at the outset and avoid embarrassing corrections later.

If Tex is fine with that, it's just something the rest of us will have to get yoused to.

✍

I'll bet Glenn Miller and the Dorsey Brothers never had to deal wit' dis:

I got word that one of my newspaper editors was puzzled by this week's cartoon, on account of "dey, dem, deir" being the way Jamaicans and Nigerians pronounce "they, them, their."

I had hoped that the New York Jets tattoo on Gino's shoulder would be ample indication that dey hails from Brooklyn, the Bronx, or Queens.

While checking whether residents of those New York boroughs are more likely to be Jets fans or Giants fans, I came across reporting that the "th" (as in "thin") and "dh" (as in "the") sounds are among the last that English-speaking children master. They are completely absent from many languages around the world, not just in Jamaica and Nigeria; many foreigners have as much difficulty pronouncing them as English speakers have with Spanish "ll," German "ch," Khoisan clicks, or the capital of Ukraine.

Non-English speakers often substitute "t" and "d," or "s" and "z," in English "th" words, and I have to wonder whether that means that they are unable to imitate people who lisp. I can't believe that lisping is a strictly Anglophone phenomenon.

At any rate, setting aside the Nigerian question for the moment, the issue of whether Gino might perhaps be Jamaican raises another question: what is the gender-neutral substitute for the Jamaican "mon"?

Q Toon: The Prehistoric Gay Dude

Turning to one of the lighter stories in the news, we learn this week that anthropologists unearthed the bones of a male near Prague who had been buried 5,000 years ago in a manner that was typical of females of the period.

"We found one very specific grave of a man lying in the position of a woman, without gender specific grave goods, neither jewelry or weapons," reported the [Czech Archeological] Society's Kamila Remisova Vesinova. "So we think based on data that it could be a member of a so-called third gender, which were people either with different sexual orientation or transsexuals or just people who identified themselves differently from the rest of the society."

Initial reports concluded that the bones were that of a gay caveman. Naturally, many anthropologists have disputed that conclusion. In the first place, the cave-dwelling era was more than 5,000 years ago, and the term "gay" only dates from Stonewall (which was a gay bar in 1969, not a cliff face where cavemen went to cruise each other). From CNN:

[W]hile acknowledging the "unusual" circumstances of the burial, [UW-Madison associate professor of anthropology John] Hawks said there is no way you can tell someone is homosexual by examining a skeleton.

Instead, the possibility of a third-gender grave -- as outlined by the archaeologists -- is more plausible, he said, noting that some cultures have a third category where, in some cases, men may have feminine characteristics or roles.

So I apologize to any anthropologists, insurance spokesneanderthals and editorialexplanations fans who object to my use of the term "gay" in the "News Item" box in this week's cartoon.

I should have written "queer."