I’ve been systematically removing my artwork from Facebook whenever a “Facebook Memory” presents it to me, because I’m disgusted with the way its automatic censor handles other people’s artwork, as well as mine at least once. But I think I’ll leave this Work In Progress note up…

…at least for another year maybe…and also put it here too…because I don’t have any other copies of this particular piece in progress. And I’m still very happy with how this one-off turned out. I called it The Rain, The Park, And Other Kids, riffing on one of the ultimate 60s songs by The Cowsills (The Partridge Family TV show band was modeled after them). The cartoon about growing up gay in a world that refuses to acknowledge that gay kids like you exist, and you end up mentally changing some pronouns as you’re listening to the radio, so you can imagine the songs are speaking to you too.

Because those teenage feelings are pretty universal…

It is an old stereotype, that homosexuality has to do only with sex while heterosexuality is multifaceted and embraces love and romance.
-Vito Russo, author of The Celluloid Closet

…but the world around you tells you that homosexuals don’t love, they just have sex. And there you are anyway…crushing on a classmate, listening to all the pop tunes about being in love, and on the one hand those songs are making your heart sigh, and on the other they’re telling you that your feelings aren’t real because you’re never in them. At best you maybe got a few gender neutral songs. Eventually you gravitate to female vocalists who could sing songs about being in love with a guy and nobody thought anything about it and you could imagine yourself into those songs. Stevie Nicks. Carole King. Carly Simon. Janis Ian singing At Seventeen.

I’m certain The Cowsills never intended anything like that about their gay and lesbian audience. They were just writing and singing songs about their own lives as artists do. It was the music industry, and the culture at large, that decreed back in the 1960s that songs about gay love and romance were unfit for the airwaves. That said, The Cowsills did do one song that hit me so hard I wore out several 45 rpm copies playing it over and over: In Need Of A Friend.

While I was working on this cartoon I decided to do something out of the ordinary for me and try to get it published. But it seemed then that nobody was doing a gay comics anthologie like the one Howard Cruse began a few decades ago. I asked Howard if he could point me to someone who was and he graciously gave me a pointer to someone I could ask. He would give me lots of encouragement on A Coming Out Story. But when I asked the person Howard pointed me to about submitting this one, they politely told me to go away (just self publish it). So I ended up putting it on my website that nobody reads. It’s okay…at least I got it out of me.

I have another one like it in the works, but it’s a struggle to get it out of me now. I just don’t have the energy I used to. And if I am honest, the interest. I haven’t touched my cameras or the film I still need to develop in almost a year either. Grant Snider, who is light years better than me at getting his stuff out there, has one with Dickens three ghosts, only they’re the ghosts of creativity. The last one, the Ghost Of Creativity Past, is telling him “Nobody will remember you unless you make something lasting.” I saw it just now, right before I saw this Facebook Memory, and it kinda hit me.

Fear of being forgotten is not why you make art of course. that’s just another way artists have of tormenting themselves. Social memory is a tricky thing and often what is remembered isn’t what actually was. But it would be nice if the artwork has a life after mine. Probably it won’t, and I’m getting too tired to make more.

I take a retrospective look at some of my stuff (there’s a bunch of it here on the website) and I see that I was actually pretty good at it. Then I regret not making more of it. But I had no focus, and dragging an emotional ball and chain around with you all the time doesn’t help. I needed a friend. A boyfriend. I never found one.

I did what I could.