Of Graham Bondage

Since last week's Graphical History Tour memorialized a sitting U.S. Senator who claims not to be dead, this week's episode rustles up my cartoons about one of his Republican colleagues whose passing is less, ah, speculative.

April, 2010

Lindsey Graham himself barely appeared in what I believe was my first cartoon about him, sixteen years ago. An anti-immigrant Tea Partisan then from South Carolina, William Gheen, alleged that Senator Lindsey Graham was being blackmailed over his widely rumored homosexual orientation to support Democrats' version of Immigration Reform.

"Sen. Graham, you need to come forward and tell people about your alternative lifestyle and your homosexuality. Come out of that closet, Lindsey. Come out of that Log Cabin closet," Gheen told a Tea Party Klatch. "Look, I'm a tolerant person. I don't care about your private life, Lindsey. But as our U.S. Senator, I need to figure out why you're trying to sell out your own countrymen, and I need to make sure your being gay isn't it."

Whether in response to Gheen or not, Graham announced that he opposed the immigration bills proposed by the Democratic majority in Congress. As for Gheen, he has since migrated across the border to North Carolina, where he is President of an anti-immigration political action committee.

December, 2012

I drew this cartoon in response to Graham advocating against achieving marriage equality by congressional legislation or litigation in the courts.

Graham knew full well how unlikely getting a pro-marriage equality amendment to the U.S. Constitution approved by Congress and ratified by 34 state legislatures would be. For years, Republicans pushed an amendment to do exactly the opposite, not to mention other amendments for all sorts of their pet peeves, without getting anywhere. 

October, 2014

Did you know that Lindsey Graham ran for the Republicans' 2016 presidential nomination? Even people who were paying close attention at the time may not remember it.

Graham was running for a third term in the Senate in 2014, and told Politico that in the (inevitable) event that he won reelection, he was considering looking into a 2016 presidential run. He made his official campaign announcement on June 1, 2015, but failed to qualify for a Republican presidential debate cattle call on CNN two months later.

The highlight of his presidential campaign was calling Donald Trump "a jackass" in successive interviews on CNN and CBS. Trump responded by telling Fox & Fiends viewers Graham's personal cell phone number.

By Christmas, Graham had suspended his campaign; he then endorsed Florida Governor Jeb Bush in January. Republican voters didn't listen.

October, 2018

Neither did the Electoral College.

As Chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Graham played a prominent role in the confirmation of Donald Trump's Supreme Court appointees. Allegations that the second of them, Brett Kavanaugh, was a beer-swilling bro in college suggested the "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof" character Brick to me; casting Graham as Maggie followed as a matter of course.

That's Senators Maizie Hirono and Jeff Flake as Mae and Gooper (well, I needed somebody in those roles) and Trump as Big Daddy Pollitt.

March, 2021

Insinuating Lindsey Graham's Kinsey rating couldn't be the point of every cartoon I put him in. Sometimes, he was just a recognizable Senator to populate a cartoon about the Senate Republican Caucus. But as the supposedly closeted gay one, he afforded me the opportunity to draw a cartoon about a non-LGBTQ+ topic for the LGBTQ+ publications that run my cartoons. 

(Openly bi Senator Kyrsten Sinema also figured in this one. A two-fer!)

February, 2021

In the post for this week's cartoon, I included Lindsey Graham's "Count me out" comment on the evening after the January 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol, disassociating himself from Donald Trump. I also included Trump's more recent story of Graham then calling him up to apologize.

You certainly can't take Trump's word for anything, but Graham counting himself out on January 6 did not extend to his voting to convict Trump when the Senate voted on his impeachment trial on February 13.

Graham just couldn't stay mad at his latest infatuation.

September, 2022

Republicans who bothered at all to explain their votes against conviction claimed that since Trump was out of office, his attempt to overthrow the government should be a matter for the courts rather than the impeachment process.

As the prosecution of Trump for offenses starting with January 6, tax fraud, and sexual assault crept ever so slowly forward during Joe Biden's presidency, Lindsey Graham and quite a few other Republicans complained that pursuing justice in the courts was a bad idea, too.

In the fall of 2022, Citizen Trump was refusing to return classified papers included among dozens of bankers boxes of files he had spirited off to Mar-a-Lago, directing underlings to hide them away when the FBI showed up to seize them. Graham warned that if Trump were ever brought to trial for those actions, his hordes of MAGA minions would reprise January 6.

To his dying day, Graham was mute about any possibility of Antifa, DEI, or Woke Inc., getting violent over what now passes for the Justice Department's overtly political, Trumped up prosecutions of anyone who has ever crossed Donald Trump.

This Week's Sneak Peek

We've got tickets to see The Scottish Play this week. Since we like to dress up nice for the theatre, I decided it would be most appropriate to wear my one plaid pattern tie.

It even has this one damned spot that I just can't get out.

Q Toon: The Center for Deforming Arts

Unsatisfied with crowning himself Emperor of the United States and Canada, Donald Joffrey Trump last month executed a hostile takeover of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.

Trump seized control of the Center's board, firing its chair and several members of its board of trustees and its president. In their place, he named himself chairman, and Ric Grenell, who was Ambassador to Germany, Special Envoy to Kosovo and Serbia, and White House liason to the LGB-minus-T community in Trump's first term, the Kennedy Center's president. Attorney General Pam Bondi, musician Lee Greenwood and Trump Chief of Staff Susie Wiles are among the new board members.

Trump, who boycotted all four Kennedy Center Honors award ceremonies during his first term, ostensibly launched his Kennedy Center Coup because a drag performance with the Gay Men's Chorus of Washington D.C. had been scheduled May 21 and 22. Promptly canceling the show, the Philistine in Chief screamposted on Trump Social:

"The Kennedy Center is an American Jewel, and must reflect the brightest STARS on its stage from all across our Nation .... For the Kennedy Center, THE BEST IS YET TO COME!"

Trump's idea of the brightest STARS from all across our Nation? Why, the J6 Insurrectionist Felons Glee Club, of course. And possibly another 39-minute concert from Trump's campaign rally iPod playlist.

In response, several other members of the Center's board quit in protest, including actress-producer Issa Rae and TV producer Shonda Rhimes, and as artistic advisor, musician Ben Folds. Mystery novelist Louise Penny, the cast of "Finn," and and the Alfred Street Baptist Church Christmas Show were among artists announcing that they would cancel their scheduled appearances.

JFK Center ticket sales for remaining shows have plummeted by half. 

It will be interesting to see how the JFK Center's Mark Twain Prize for American Humor ceremony for Conan O'Brien (host of Sunday's Academy Awards) comes off less than a month from today. Given that Trump and his sugar daddy Elon Musk consider themselves hilariously witty, this may be the last Mark Twain award ceremony worth watching for at least four years.

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I had some difficulty drawing the bust of Kennedy in this week's cartoon. Trying to depict the rough surface of the bronze casting in pen and ink utterly obscured the facial features. Attempting to portray the bust's texture in Photoshop, first in grayscale and then in color (I provide both versions separately), took hours. 

Later that day, well after I had sent my cartoon to Q Syndicate, I read a column by Jack Ohman about the death of Clint Hill, the last survivor of John and Jacqueline Kennedy's Secret Service detail that fatal day in Dallas. Jack's column includes a graphic description of President Kennedy's assassination, and it occurred to me that my drawing of that bronze bust lying on the floor might be upsetting to readers for reasons I had not intended.

I am not quite old enough to have my own memories of JFK, and most of my editors are even younger. It will be up to them to decide whether or not to print my cartoon, and I will respect their decisions either way.

Readers are likewise free to complain. That's what free speech is all about. 

I only ask that they do not call for a boycotts, firings, and banning my or anyone else's cartoons from syndication. (Or here on Blogger.) That is what cancel culture is all about.

Q Toon: Welcome Flaggin'

Until the Bidens move out of #1 Observatory Circle, Mike and Karen Pence are renting a home in Chevy Chase. A half dozen or so of the Vice President-elect's new, temporary neighbors there are flying rainbow flags in protest of his signing of Indiana's "Religious Freedom Restoration Act" blessing discrimination against LGBT citizens as long as there's a faith-based excuse for it. His record also includes support of "conversion therapy" and opposition to just about every LGBT civil rights measure, from marriage equality to respecting gender identity to repealing "Don't Ask, Don't Tell."

The flags are “a respectful message showing, in my case, my disagreement with some of [Pence's] thinking,” neighbor Ilse Heintzen told the Washington D.C. ABC affiliate. “I have no idea what he will think about, but I hope he will change his mind.”

Q Toon: Broadway Has Its Eyes On You

This kerfuffle over the cast of Hamilton addressing Vice President-elect Mike Pence in their audience over the weekend has served to distract national attention from a number of important stories about the incoming administration. Sure, some media reported that Donald Berzilius Trump settled the lawsuit over his Trump University Scam for $25 million; and the appointment of a racist Attorney General and a fascist Chief of Staff. But since a growing percentage of Americans get their news from late-night comedians, there is a danger of those of us in the Humor Biz aiding and abetting Trump's efforts to redirect the nation's attention toward issues of his choosing.

The curtain call speech was pretty mild stuff, especially if you compare it to the organized shout-downs of any attempt to discuss the Affordable Care Act in 2009. You'd never know it from the howls of indignation from the Tweeter-in-Chief, however.

What Brandon Victor Dixon (Vice President Aaron Burr in the play) actually said was:

“You know, we have a guest in the audience this evening — Vice President-elect Pence, I see you walking out but I hope you hear just a few more moments. Sir, we hope that you will hear us out.
“We, sir, are the diverse America who are alarmed and anxious that your new administration will not protect us — our planet, our children, our parents — or defend us and uphold our inalienable rights, sir. But we truly hope this show has inspired you to uphold our American values and to work on behalf of all of us. All of us.”

To Trump's base, this was one more case of librul ayleets lookin' down there nozes at Middla Murkan Valews — because that's a one-way speedway, ain't it? — so Trump is delighted to divert their righteous indignation in the direction of the Great White Way.

So where do I get off calling Jefferson Beauregard Sessions the IIIrd a racist, antigay bigot?

• Testifying before the Senate as it considered Sessions's 1986 nomination for a judgeship on the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Alabama, Assistant U.S. Attorney Thomas Figures testified that Sessions said he thought the Ku Klux Klan was "OK until I found out they smoked pot." Sessions passed the comment off as a joke.
• Concerning another allegation, Sessions testified, "I may have said something about the NAACP being un-American or Communist, but I meant no harm by it."
• As Attorney General of Alabama, Sessions worked to deny funding to student Gay-Straight Alliances at The University of Alabama, Auburn University and The University of South Alabama, stating "an organization that professes to be comprised of homosexuals and/or lesbians may not receive state funding or use state-supported facilities to foster or promote those illegal, sexually deviate activities defined in the sodomy and sexual misconduct laws."
• He is on the record against hate crime protections, marriage equality, and open military service by LGBT persons, calling gay rights "a threat to Western Civilization."

Well, I could be wrong about him.

He could, perhaps, be a complete misanthrope. My first cartoon about him, was back in 2009. A Filipino woman was testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee about the "Uniting American Families Act," which would have granted the partners of same-sex binational couples the same protections different-sex couples have, when her 12-year-old son started crying over the prospect of one of his mothers being deported. Sessions reportedly muttered to his aides, "Enough with the histrionics!"

Inquiring Minds Want to Know

There is a phenomenon in editorial cartooning known as "Newsweekification," refering to cartoons which seem to have been drawn with the goal of getting printed on Newsweek's Periscope page. Newsweekified cartoons generally are about a widely discussed topic and are more focussed on setting up and delivering a gag rather than making a serious point.

My cartoon this week takes Newsweekification one step further by referencing an actual Newsweek column — from the on-line version of the magazine at least — by Ramin Setoodeh. Setoodeh, who is himself gay, wrote that he found Sean Hayes performance in the Broadway production of "Promises, Promises"

"wooden and insincere, like he's trying to hide something, which of course he is. Even the play's most hilarious scene, when Chuck tries to pick up a drunk woman at a bar, devolves into unintentional camp. Is it funny because of all the '60s-era one-liners, or because the woman is so drunk (and clueless) that she agrees to go home with a guy we all know is gay?"

Setoodeh proceeds from there to generalize that all out gay actors are unconvincing playing straight romantic leads, essentially because the audience knows the actor can't possibly have any romantic interest in the actress playing his romantic interest. Broadway and Hollywood have responded by denouncing Setoodeh as a self-hating homophobe; for an summary of the flap, see The Week.

Setoodeh does have a point that audiences seem to resist accepting openly gay actors in straight roles. Nathan Lane had a short-lived sitcom in the '90's whose short life may have had something to do with viewers not identifying with his skirt-chasing character, for example. Who knows how many times excellent gay actors have lost leading roles to mediocre straight actors because casting directors decided that the audiences wouldn't accept the gay actor in the role?

Heterosexual audiences seem much more inclined to accept openly heterosexual actors playing gay -- Robin Williams in "Birdcage"; Wesley Snipes, Patrick Swayze, and John Leguizamo in "To Wong Foo"; Jake Gyllenhaal and Heath Ledger in "Brokeback Mountain" -- perhaps because the heterosexual viewer has no vicarious interest in getting sexually involved with the character. Maybe a heterosexual audience mounts defenses against gay actors playing straight romantic leads because they expect the relationship to end in betrayal sooner or later. Certainly the straight audience has less emotional interest in a gay character's love interest than they do in that of a straight character, and therefore a lower standard of what they are willing to accept as believable portrayal of a gay character.

It's an interesting facet of a larger question, really. It fits alongside the controversy over whether white actors can play non-white characters — even whether it's ethical for a non-handicapped actor to play a handicapped character.

Can Laurence Fishburne play Big Daddy in "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof"? Could Jackie Mason pull off the role of Thomas More in "A Man for All Seasons"? Would audiences accept Aziz Ansari as Tony in "West Side Story"? Or would they rather watch Hayden Christensen as Othello?