Wherein Left and Right brains have a no meeting of the mind…
I can laugh about all this now, all these years later. But it was no joke while it was happening. I can make the various parts of my consciousness embody as cartoon characters and get playful with it (cartooning is Fun)…and I was a Lot luckier than most of my generational gay peers…but this is pretty much how it went for a while.
I was in love…it was wonderful. And it was alarming. I thought I was above all that mushy love stuff. And then it happened to me. And in that moment I understood why all that dating and mating stuff didn’t appeal to me.
I was never shown a wholesome same sex romance, never told that it was possible.
I wasn’t quite ready to face it. For years I was in denial. And then I got shoved into it. This is why I can really relate to the Cupid in Rick Riordan’s novel, House of Hades…and to Nico in that moment…
“Stop t!” Nico yelled. “It’s me you want. Leave him alone!”
Jason’s ears rang. He was dizzy from getting smacked around. His mouth tasted like limestone dust. He didn’t understand why Nico would think of himself as the main target, but Cupid seemed to agree.
Poor Nico di Angelo. The god’s voice was tinged with disappointment. Do you know what you want, much less what I want? My beloved Psyche risked everything in the name of Love. It was the only way for her to atone for her lack of faith. And you – what have you risked in my name?
“I’ve been to Tartarus and back,” Nico snarled. “You don’t scare me.”
I scare you very, very much. Face me. Be honest.
Really could have benefitted from having those books back then…but it was 1971.
I was reviewing my server logs, as I always do, while I was at Disney. My little website gets next to no traffic, mostly because it probably isn’t all that interesting, but also because I do next to nothing to promote it. If I get a lot of traffic I’ll have to pay extra for hosting it and that could mean making a deal with the advertising devil.
But also, I’ve a weird self consciousness about drawing attention to my artwork, which is what I initially set up the website to be a showcase for. The blog started out as a lot of the early blogs did, as itself a kind of public art. Believe it or not, blogs began as open online diaries and people thought when it all started that the bloggers were crazy to put their lives out there like that. But it appealed to me as a way of getting things off my chest, and since the website didn’t get hardly any traffic I figured it was okay. I used to joke that it beats yelling at the TV.
But it gives me a bunch of joy to see what little traffic there is coming in, and especially when someone randomly hits an episode of A Coming Out Story and then binge views the entire thing. It’s a very rewarding feeling. On the other side of that coin are the readers who start binging it, then suddenly stop…and I go look at the episode they stopped at and wonder…why did you hate that one?? And of course then all the insecurities about my abilities come rushing back out. I have to keep reminding myself that a lot of readers are probably looking for the sex scenes and they’re going to be getting impatient and frustrated when it becomes staringly obvious that it’s not That Sort Of Comic. Oh…you finally figured it out There did you…
It’s the repeat viewers, the regulars, that keep me going though. Mostly those are folks who check in from time to time to see if I’ve put up a new episode (I am SO SORRY ABOUT THIS…). They hit the main page where I used to have progress bars (which I later gave up on) and maybe re-read the last one or two (I repeat: I am SO SORRY ABOUT THIS…).
Then there are the regulars who come back and revisit what seem to be favorite episodes, or at least episodes that are particularly meaningful to them. I really appreciate these, because it means I actually struck a chord. Maybe even the sort of chord that gets a comic strip put up on a refrigerator. Except my formatting of this story doesn’t easily lend itself to that. (I take full advantage of the fact I can make each episode as long or as short as it needs to be since it’s all on the web.) Maybe someday I’ll gather them into comic book form (hahahaha…sure thing Bruce…)
I can’t tell specifically who it is visiting because IPs are so seldom static these days. But I see familiar patterns, ISPs and locals and I think I can make some educated guesses.
And it’s the semi-regular readers like the one that visited from a familiar Florida ISP while I was down there last week of March, and hit several of the more recent episodes, and then a couple out of sequence from further back…especially that one “Conversation With God” episode, like those particular ones meant something to them, that really lift my spirits and make me want to actually finish the damn thing one of these days.
Yes, life did feel so much more wonderful than it did before. Or since. Maybe I’ll go into that a little more in the next blog post…
Trying Something Different For A Coming Out Story Episode 20
It’s been slow going getting these episodes out. In part that’s because I have a job that uses up a lot of my daily reserves of concentration. In part it’s the roller coaster from hell I’ve been put on since I re-connected with the object of my affections back then. And truthfully, in part because I never really know exactly how I’m going to do an episode until I’ve finished it. Many of the episodes I’ve finished in the past few years have had bits tacked on the front and back, and some dialogue reworked, as I’ve come to understand the material better.
I want to try something different with episodes 20 and 21. Instead of doing all the pencils and inks and finishing up the entire episode before posting it. Hopefully it will seem like installments of a weekly (or semi weekly) comic strip until each episode is complete. I think given the scripts for these two episodes that’ll work.
Continuing in our series of Homeland Security Color Alert Code illustrations. Because you all want to be safe and secure in these uncertain times don’t you? Well we’re not from the government and we’re here to help! Our color coded alerts will keep you informed and up to date on everything you need to be afraid of.
Today’s color is YELLOW: Hit the brakes or the gas…think quickly now…
On Facebook a friend posted earlier today that Homeland Security was resurrecting its color code terror alert system. Coolness! Back in the Bush years when it was first rolled out I did an outline for an alert color system of my own, but beyond one sketch never pursued it. I should have. I think mine’s better than the official one.
I hadn’t initially thought of dividing this story into sections, but it’s a work in progress and now that I’ve finished this little three part story arc about why I’m so bottled up inside when I should be asking this beautiful sexy classmate out on a date, I see that it puts exactly the right closure to everything that came before it. So I’m calling this End Of Part 1.
Part 2 begins soon (I hope!), and we shall see how this gay kid and the object of his affections manage to deal with their angsty adolescent hormones in a world that would as soon push them off a bridge than give them role models, support and maybe even a prom to go to. This is 1971/72 we’re talking about here. I try to explain what that means in the first strip of this episode.
I apologize for the excessive delay in getting this one out. But I had to pull some stuff out of my guts I never did before. Plus…everything I said a few posts ago.
I just now finished the last of the pencils, inks and line art scans of A Coming Out Story, Episode 19. It’s been like pulling teeth getting this one out of me, but now that I have it to look at completed (except for some texturing detail), I think I understand better why. I had to pull out of myself and present to the world a part of me I really wanted to keep private forever, to make this story make sense.
I’ll have it posted by the end of this weekend at the latest. But check in if you’re interested between now and Sunday evening because I’ll probably have it up before then…I just won’t notify anyone until I’m satisfied it looks right.
Click on the graphic above and you’ll be taken to the beginning of a cartoon series I’ve been planning now for months. My regular readers here will know that it began with a one-shot slice of life comic I did a few months back, about the time my high school buddies dragged me to see my first X-rated movie. I got many requests to expand on that story, but even before I’d finished it I knew I wanted to tell more about that time in my life. Here it is, or at least, here is where it starts. I’m going to try and have a new episode up each week, but for the time being I can’t promise that. Just keep checking in, if it interests you.As good as I had it, and I admit I had it really, really good compared to many gay teens, I still had a very awkward coming-out process. In part it was my Baptist upbringing. Though I had walked away from church by age 14, the experience left me very socially awkward, and with this embedded idea that boys shouldn’t be too interested in girls until they’re old enough to get married. Ironically enough, I was fine with that.
But mostly it was the horrible Sex Ed class I had in 1969, which was taught by our gym teachers who seemed to want to keep us as ignorant as they could about sex and human sexuality. Those classes were full of awful grainy black and white 1950s films about the dangers of “heavy petting” and VD. All we learned was a bit of human anatomy many of us already knew, and a hodge-podge of ignorant ideas about human sexuality that mostly consisted of Don’t Do That!
What we were taught about homosexuals and homosexuality was nothing more then the myths, lies and superstitions of the time…but the high octane version. We were taught that homosexuals usually killed the people they had sex with, that they mutilated the genitals of the people they had sex with, that homosexual men were mentally ill and thought they were really women, and wanted to have sex with children and sometimes animals too.
We all just listened to it raptly, like a group of kids being told ghost stories by the scoutmaster. Looking back, I realize now that if they had only laid it on a little less heavy, I might have grown up knowing I was gay, and loathing myself like a lot of other gay teens back then did. But what my gym teachers did was convince me absolutely that I couldn’t possibly be homosexual, because I wasn’t any of the monstrous things they taught us homosexuals were.
Problem was, I had this thing for good looking guys that kept yanking my chain the older I got. It didn’t make me afraid, so much as confused and irritated and disgusted with the whole love and sex thing generally. By the time I was 17 I figured I’d just skip the whole thing, and go live on a higher plain somewhere, and be beyond the reach of all that dating and mating stuff. Ha Ha Ha.
So this new cartoon series is about that first step your gay and lesbian neighbors take in the coming out process…the time when you come out to yourself. I’m old enough now to look back on a lot of it with a sense of humor, mixed in with a bit of amazement that I came through it all mostly okay. The 1970s were a different time. There were hardly any resources for gay adults back then, let alone gay teens. You just kind of flailed around on your own, grabbing whatever bits and pieces of knowledge you could, from wherever you could dig them up. The Stonewall riots had only happened a few years previously, the only national gay paper, The Advocate, was hard to find anywhere except inside of seedy bars and grimy adult bookstores, and if you subscribed it came in a plain brown envelope. There was no Internet, no personal computers, no way of discovering the larger gay community beyond your doorstep, other then fumbling your way down to the city’s one dank gay bar…not exactly the best place for a teenager to hang out.
Hopefully I can capture some of the sense of coming out back in those days for readers today, but not in a heavy handed way. The story I want to tell is mostly light-hearted, although it has it’s dark moments. About a third of what you’ll see as the series progresses really did happen to me…about a third is artistic license…and about a third is pure fantasy. It was a trip. I had great times, and I had terrible, awful moments that even now I really don’t like to revisit. On the whole, I think I’d rather have grown up in a society that didn’t give a good goddamn about sexual orientation. But I had to deal with coming of age, and coming out, during the Vietnam/Nixon/Counter Culture/LSD/Watergate/Long Hair and Bell Bottoms years. Black people were rioting for what decades of segregation was doing to them, women were fighting their way out of the 1950s womanhood straight-jacket, people were coming home from Vietnam crippled or in body bags, and hard hats were bashing long hairs in the streets. The adolescence we live is the one we’re tossed into. This was mine. Mostly.
Bruce Garrett Cartoon. Weekly gay editorial cartoon.
Send comments, questions and hysterical outbursts to:
bruce@brucegarrett.com
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