The Side Of The Comic Book Rack I Always Stayed Away From…
…had a lot of these in it…
When I was a kid, I just couldn’t imagine how even girls liked these. Although I never actually saw any browsing that side of the comic book racks anyway. Maybe they were too embarrassed to be seen looking at these. Or maybe they just waited for the boys to leave first, before approaching them. I can imagine the snickers coming from the boys side of the rack were a girl to wander over and pick one up…
But there must have been a market for these, because the comic book publishers kept grinding them out. Some of the most famous names in comic book…er…excuse me…Graphic Novel history did these. Here’s one by Jack Kirby…
At the age I was buying a lot of comics, I could barely stand to look at these. They just completely creeped me out. That whole icky love stuff just totally mystified me. Who cares? I used to fidget in my seat at the movies whenever the love interest parts of the story were going on. I’d be sitting there thinking to myself, Ah Jeeze…come on, come on, let’s get on with it…
Had I bothered to sneak a look inside one of these, I might have found something like this inside…
…which would have just confirmed my suspicions for me. All that love stuff was for the birds. Who cares? Leave me out…please.
I just couldn’t fathom it. As I said…those things really creeped me out. Why would anyone…even a girl…bother with crap like that. Especially when you could buy a really neat comic like…oh…this one…
Or…this one…
Man…I couldn’t get enough of that when I was a kid. For some strange reason. Even though the stories were usually pretty lousy.
They say girls mature a tad sooner then boys in the romance department, and maybe that’s true to a degree. Also, I was a bit of a late bloomer. But there was a section missing from the comic book racks back then too, and had it been there, maybe I could have grown up understanding all that gooey, icky love stuff a little bit better. Maybe by the time my hormones really started to percolate, I wouldn’t have been so fumbly, clumsy and deathly shy.
I grew up in a world where homosexuals were twisted monsters who lurked behind schools waiting to pounce on kids my age. The messages we all got back then to beware of strange men fell on the ears of gay kids too…and looking back on it, I can clearly recall flinching away whenever my thoughts began to stray toward how…attractive…some of the characters in my comic books were. I didn’t want to be a monster. I didn’t want to be sick. So I just kind-of let my eyes wander over whatever it was something deep down inside of me had jerked them towards…
…and then wander away again without thinking about it too closely.
What I really needed in my young teenage life was something that spoke to me. Well…what I really needed was to grow up in a time when adults were willing to talk to teenagers honestly and rationally about sex and sexuality. The girls weren’t getting any of that either back then really.
Even so…as horrible as it was back then, to even contemplate being homosexual, had I seen something like this on the comic book racks, I would have snatched one up instantly…
I don’t know if I could have worked up the courage to actually take it to the cashier or not…but I’d have gotten it out of the store one way or the other…
Well…of course there would have been no “explicit content” allowed. But just the idea that boys could fall in love with other boys, and that it was okay, and that you weren’t a monster if you felt sexually attracted to one, would have made so much of a difference in my life later on… So very, very much of a difference…
Romance. Maybe it wasn’t so icky after all…
…maybe I could find one of my own someday…
Every time I buy one of these now…and I have several bookshelves full of them…I have to laugh at how contemptuous I felt toward those girl’s romance comics way back when. Yes…they were horribly sexist. But at least love always won in the end in those things. It was something you could hope for, for yourself too. Here’s a portion of the back cover of Constellations In My Palm…
What would you do if you lost the best thing that happened to you because of your own pride and selfishness? What would you do if you lost the best thing that happened to you because you were taught to be afraid of it? What would you do if you lost the best thing that happened to you because you were never taught how to reach for it like the other kids were? What would you do if you had another chance and lost it again? And again? And again? What would you do if you spent your whole life trying to get beyond that fear and confusion they put into you when you were a kid, and you couldn’t?
My generation, and the one just before us, the pre Stonewall generation, began this movement to break down those barriers of self loathing, fear and confusion, and reclaim our human right to love and be loved. And this is our great victory: that gay teens no longer have to live in a world where all they ever hear about themselves is that they are sick, broken, twisted, monsters. They can grow up now, believing that they are fully human too. They can grow up now, believing in the promise of love too.
It was, and still regretfully is, a hard and bitter fight. But every day now, more and more of us are finding our way to the promise land. Even, thankfully, some of us older gay folk too. Some of us will only stand on the hillside just beyond, never to find our way in after all, stricken by how much more beautiful it really was, how much more beautiful then we could have ever imagined, back when we first started fighting to win it back. But we can take heart in this, and carry on: so no kid will ever have to grow up in a world that tells them they will never find love, never be loved, because they are gay.
November 8th, 2008 at 1:58 pm
"Men in general, shy away from the woman who is self-sufficient and outspoken."
That’s actually really crappy advice. Just about every woman in my family fits that description, and I don’t recall any of them having trouble meeting somebody.
November 8th, 2008 at 3:52 pm
I know. That’s the kind of crappy world women had to live in until the feminist movement really got going. And you really saw the horrible straight-jacket women were being put into from an early age back then, in the girl’s romance comics.
November 8th, 2008 at 4:24 pm
It makes me jealous and bitter towards those bratty younger people who have it so easy these days. They really have no clue. But while I rejoice that they have a better world, and am a little (Probably overly..) proud of my small contribution to that….I also want to oppress them, just to show them what it’s like.
Ultimately, we oppress ourselves. We just needed a little training and some hints from our schools, parents and neighbors, and we became masters at oppressing, loathing, suppressing and shaming ourselves. Encouraging that a little bit was all they needed to do.
All of the "Gay Liturature" I was ever exposed to involved smutty scenes of pure sex. And while theres nothing wrong with that, it was only sex, not sexuality, and certainly not romance.
But there comes a point, and it’s not really desperation, but a sort of apathetic abandon, a sort of "It’s late in the game, and I’m losing, so why should I care about looks or …whatever" and I become somewhat "shameless", and just persue the object of my desire. Hell, once in a blue moon, it works out…..obviously not for very long, but whatever. Simple human contact can go a long way towards simulating romance, maybe even love.
I mean….I was seeing this one guy…..until someone stole my binoculars.
November 8th, 2008 at 4:52 pm
All of the "Gay Liturature" I was ever exposed to involved smutty scenes of pure sex.
I tried to avoid that. I came out to myself, finally, after falling in love, and I knew then and there what it was I wanted from life. Not Mr. Right Away. Not a fuck buddy. But a companion and friend. Body and soul. Nothing else would do. Problem was, back in the early 1970s there wasn’t much of that. Either it was sex, or it was tragedy. Gay people were allowed to fall in love, but only if they died horribly or committed sucide. But there was one stunning exception to that and I held on like it was a life vest: Mary Renault.
Go read: The Charioteer. Or two from her Alexander trilogy: The Fire From Heaven, and The Persian Boy. Read The Last of The Wine. You may find the mindset in The Charioteer a tad repressive…it takes place in Britain during World War II…but the sentiment is honest and beautiful. It is a love story. These are all love stories, and they kept me going through the 1970s, until better stuff began to come along.
It’s still way too hard to find decent same sex romances out there, either in books or film. The big gay hit a at the box office a few years ago, Brokeback Mountain, ends in a horribly heartbreaking way and I simply could not watch it. The gay rights movement had the misfortune to happen just when western pop culture stopped believing that romance is a real thing, and not something you only find in trashy paperback novels. We never had our part in Hollywood’s golden age, other then as the sinister villains lurking in the shadows, or the faggot comic relief. We didn’t get our Casablanca or To Have And Have Not. But it’s still better then it was when I was a kid.
I mean….I was seeing this one guy…..until someone stole my binoculars.
Hey… I got a really nice looking guy’s name from some…friends…who told me he was a friend of a friend and seemed like a perfect match for me. Then they kind-of…just…let it go…
November 8th, 2008 at 7:46 pm
"….only if they died horribly or committed sucide. "
Hey! I’ve been doing that all my life!
Theres some old (Chinese, I think?) saying "If you are prepared to die, then you can do anything".
So, that name you got? Call it! "Perfect match" is always such a silly thing to tell someone else about someone else. "Perfect matches" are made in heaven….but you arn’t dead yet, so heaven isn’t going to work out for you, at least not right now. Who the hell wants a "Perfect match"???? That sounds really boring. Old old couples who have been married for 50 years are a "Perfect match", because two abrasive objects will eventually wear their grooves into each other…and THEN they match, perfectly. (And believe me, MY parents were VERY abrasive!) …but it’s all of that rubbing and wearing, and grinding each others parts down that is the fun!
Its that old thing, that never seems to be like to pom-pom cheerleading encouragement that its supposed to be, but: You gotta break the egg if you want omlettes!
Sometimes life is like a dream….and you just have to go to work not wearing any pants….
Wait, wrong euphamism.
*THEY* didn’t just "let it go" (Unless theres more to the story…) "Match makers" are a dangerous thing "Mess makers" is what they are. BUT, any good cop is always looking for leads to a likely suspect, or ‘person of interest’….so take those tips and go with them!
Sometimes *YOU* are the egg that you need to break….to serve up omlettes for someone else.
But don’t listen to me. I’m basically in the same situation….except I can put on my "Stage face" and say the most …uh…"amazing" things to people. And sometimes that actually works.
Heartbreak? Bullshit.
I’m babbling. Too much coffee.
November 8th, 2008 at 7:57 pm
So, that name you got? Call it!
Trust me…if I had any contact information at all that would have happened months ago. They didn’t give it to me. All I have is a name, and a feeling of complete and total betrayal.
At some point soon…very soon I think…I’ll tell this story. At the moment I’m trying to concentrate on getting A Coming Out Story back on track…
Do coffee drinkers think there is such a thing as too much coffee?
November 8th, 2008 at 11:04 pm
Happy endings are WHY I write GLBT romance.
I’m a child of the 80s. While my geeky little proto-dyke heart lusted for Batgirl and Catwoman and Uhura, I was reading stuff like Happy Endings Are all Alike, which preached there were no happy ends, just happy moments. At least for lesbians. The straight girls got happy endings.
Now, I write for my daughter, so she can believe that it doesn’t just have to be Mr. Right, it can be Ms. Right too. And that she can have a happy ending (after she defeats the zombies, of course) I write them for myself. I write them for all my ex-boyfriends, who, to a man, came out after dating me. (one of them even reads my stuff)
Bruce, remember, 90% of everything is crap. Sturgeon’s Law applies to romance novels just as much as anything else. Bearing that in mind, I’m going to refer you to Torquere Press , which is all GLBT, and Ellora’s Cave , which has just started jumping on the m/m bandwagon. At Torquere, you can pick how spicy you like the romance, too. I strongly recommend trying an anthology to get a feel for various authors.