PRIDE!

In June I was on a Zoom panel with fellow Comics Kingdom cartoonists Bianca Xunise and Olive Brinker to talk about being queer and being cartoonists. Our audience was a group of LGBTQ folk who work for the Hearst Corporation. (Comics Kingdom, run by King Features Syndicate, is one of their ventures.) One member of the group asked in advance how readers responded when we did comics that incorporated LGBTQ themes.

…So I made a comic to share with them about my most recent experience.

When Rhymes With Orange got syndicated by King Features in 1995, we were in pre-Ellen Degeneres times. School teachers were getting fired if they came out. Having just landed my first big job, I was spooked.

I was out to family and friends, but not professionally. I think my editor knew, and I knew he knew, and he probably knew I knew that he knew. But such were the gay contortions of the 90s.

As a single panel strip, Rhymes With Orange works differently than a comic strip with characters. Since there are no known personalities, and it is something new each day, single panel artists rely on a cultural shorthand.

What that means is that if a reader sees a man and a woman on the page, before even reading the word balloon, they just know it will be a relationship joke. If there are two people of the same sex, they know it is a buddy joke. It is the air we breath.

So when my then-girlfriend said to me, “I realize that the things you do are not done for the sole purpose of annoying me,” I couldn’t be mad— she had just given me a great line for a cartoon! But for it to translate to a general audience, I drew a man and a woman talking.

As I struggled with this disconnect, I came up with some workarounds. Here are some snippets.

Don’t show the bodies.

2. Keep the love interest off screen. Use non-gendered words like “Cutie.”

3. Draw monsters instead of people.

And guess what? Queer readers caught on, because these were signals, and gay people were well-versed in this coded language. They reached out to me on their AOL accounts. “Psst…Are you gay?” I came out to these folks five years before I came out to my editor.

This next strip has been one of my most popular because so many couples (straight, gay and everyone in between) can see themselves.