Life happens.  My cartoon pages have been terribly neglected recently and I apologize to those of you who enjoy that part of the site more then this one. 

When I included the political cartoon page, my goal was to do one a week.  I was frustrated then, and still am, by the disinterest of mainstream political cartoonists in the gay rights struggle.  They were not nearly so reticent about racial equality in America, although now that I think of it, the women’s rights struggle also got pretty short shrift from them too…at least among the male cartoonists.  Most of them are pretty terrible at dealing with issues of gender.  Witness Pat Oliphant, who I mostly admire for his style and willingness to let a cartoon deal with a subject (like racism) passionately.  That’s a rare quality in a political cartoon these days, and getting rarer.  But he once portrayed the equal rights amendment as a Wagnarian fat lady, decked out in a ridiculous Brunhilde costume. 

It’s gotten better in recent years, as the gay rights movement seems to have finally found acceptance as a legitimate issue in mainstream news.  But it’s still not great.  Some prominent and well respected cartoonists still can’t seem to get beyond treating the whole subject as a joke. 

Now I’m hardly the only gay cartoonist out there.  There are many others, most of them a lot better at the drawing board then I am.  But I still don’t see anyone else out there taking on this subject in the traditional political cartoon format.  What I see are many excellent multi-panel cartoons…often done in a slice-of-life style…documenting our lives and our struggle.  The best of them is Howard Cruise, whose artwork is a level of draftsmanship I will never be able to touch.  He is an amazing story telling, as are cartoonists Robert Kirby, David Kelly and Robert Triptow who all contribute these absolutely wonderful gay slice-of-live comics.  Cartoonist Willie Hewes, who I came to know through the Love Won Out protests, did an absolutely stunning zine style comic on the topic of forced conversion therapy, and she continues to produce first rate comics on gay issues. 

These are not a trivial things.  The more the stories of our lives can get out there where they be seen, the more our heterosexual neighbors can see us as human beings, and not the monsters we’re made to be by the religious right.  But none of them do political cartoons in the traditional form.  Single panel, black and white, whose impact comes largely from the imagery it uses to convey a point of view.  You take one glance at it, and it hits you squarely with its message.

As I am a gay man myself, and in love with the political cartoon as an art form ever since I was a teenager, I consider this topic my particular beat.  But the cartoons have been absent for quite a while now.  That’s partly because my personal life has been relentlessly crowding out my time at the drafting table.  But also because I just got tired of being angry all the time.  Another reason I started the political cartoon page, was to have a way of venting a little of the anger I always seem to be carrying around with me.  You live a life that is constantly under attack by massively financed right wing anti-gay machines and it’s hard not to be angry all the time.  What I discovered was that simply researching the material for each week’s cartoon just made me angrier.  After a while, I got tired of being angry all the time.

I’d wanted to see if I could sustain a weekly output.  I found that I could…the material was, unfortunately, abundant…but it became less and less rewarding.  But I never quite stopped altogether.  I have dozens of cartoons that never made it to the scanner.  Things I drew intending to post here, and then never finished because I lost steam in the middle of it.  

Well that’s about to change.

Several weeks ago, during a Baltimore Guerrilla Gay Bar event, I met Steve Charing, editor of Baltimore OUTLoud.  He’s invited me to contribute a political cartoon to his bi-weekly newspaper.  I just turned in my first one and hopefully it gets published in this week’s edition.  Now I have a steady gig, and I’ve got the drafting table all fired up again and I’m hot to go.  I’m going to finish off some of the cartoons that never made it to the scanner and post them here over the next few weeks.  And I’ll be posting the cartoons I send to OUTLoud, a week after they appear in the paper.

The bi-weekly time frame of OUTLoud gives me some breathing room, but at the same time I want to see if I can get back to doing these on a weekly basis.  Again, regrettably, there is no dearth of material for me out there.  But don’t expect one every week for now.  The bi-weekly OUTLoud cartoon however, will continue for as long as Steve wants me in his paper.  I really appreciate his giving me this opportunity.

Hopefully, this will also kick-start A Coming Out Story.  If I don’t knuckle down on that one I’ll still be working on it when I’m 100.

[Edited a tad…]