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.

Some years ago when I began A Coming Out Story my intention was to do the artwork in the style of the old underground comix. It would be all ink line art with cross hatching instead of my usual charcoal shading. In addition to the object of my adolescent crush, Mom, and various friends whose names and faces I would change around a bit, I had a notion that my journey to sexual self discovery would also include three fantasy characters representing different aspects of my consciousness.

Left Brain and Right Brain would represent the art/spiritual versus the science/techno geek in me. Then, because this was a coming out story, there would be a character representing my libido. I visualized him as an unfailingly polite yet absolutely relentless nag who would be making me very anxious and irritated all through the story. Unlike the other two, who would only inhabit subconscious central, Libido would be able to interact with me in the real world, because he was a sudden pest whenever I least needed it.

And in the spirit of the underground comix I initially decided that he would embody as a naked version of me. Left Brain would embody as a stereotypical nerd with white business shirt, narrow tie and a pocket protector. Right Brain would be hippy child me with a flower in his long hair, a tie-dye t-shirt, bell bottoms and bare feet. But I figured Libido, because he represented my sexual self, had to be naked, just like nearly all my favorite underground cartoonists would sometimes represent themselves. To Hell with the comics code authority!

But as I began working out the first few episodes of the story, I kept feeling very uncomfortable about drawing myself naked. Let me see if I can illustrate that with a side story.

Back in sixth grade one day I arrived in class to see someone had written stuff on the big blackboard in the front of the classroom. It was some kids from the class ahead of us, who had gone on to Junior High (what they now call Middle School). They wrote a bunch of stuff on the blackboard to tell us what to expect because Junior High was a very different experience, according to them. Instead of just one classroom all day long, you went from this class room to that and each one taught a different subject. Also, there was no recess. But there was gym class.

My eyes came across the following verbiage: “Tell them not to worry about group showers, it’s no big deal.”

I could feel my jaw dropping. What?! WhAT??! WHAT!!!???

You might think a gay kid would be just delighted to shower naked with all the other boys, but I was in denial all the way to my senior year, and I never got past the embarrassment of showering with the others. I would just tune everything out. I love a good shower, especially after a lot of physical work. But I would just imagine I was the only one there and that got me through it.

And it’s a bit of a running joke in the story (and my life) about how mom and I would just avoid the subject of her boy’s emerging sexuality whenever it got dangerously close. To paraphrase Monty Python, are you embarrassed easily…I am…but don’t worry, it’s all part of growing up and being Baptist.

So there I am fretting about drawing my libido character as a naked me, but I felt I had to in order to respect the truth of my story, except it was too damn embarrassing to draw myself naked…but TRUTH…but…but…I just can’t do it…

..and then I realize…hey wait…that’s Truth. And I swear as soon as I thought that, the first four episodes of the story just immediately came to mind fully formed. And the punch line in that first episode is perfect; “I’m your libido, not Robert Crumb’s libido.” Yes…that.

And all this is a long drawn out way of saying that I’ve still been fussing with how to draw that cartoon riff on Randy Newman’s “You Can Leave Your Hat On” that I started about four years ago and couldn’t finish, because I couldn’t get comfortable with drawing the dancer in it naked but for the hat which they were told they could leave on. Last time I brought this cartoon up I said I was going to do it the way the song was written because TRUTH, instead of the way I started it which was to just let the dancer keep their tiny little briefs on. But no…TRUTH.

But I have my own truths to deal with, and this reticence about nudity and how to draw nudes is one of them. Maybe I’m a prude after all. Maybe this is what you get when you raise a gay boy in a Baptist household. But I dislike sexuality being turned into cheap push button entertainment and I would much rather be teased than doused with porn. Pornography is obvious. I like sensuality and romance, which is why porn never really did much for me. And there is a sweet sexy and romantic subtext that I see in that Randy Newman song. That is what I want to develop in the cartoon.

And I’m getting back to work on it because I think I see a way now, to respect the song’s truth and my own. An artist has to be faithful to their own truths or don’t even bother because it’s way too much work to be faking it.

Hosted from a Facebook memory…

My first grade teacher wrote in my record that Bruce “…takes excessive interest in personal art projects.” Years later my high school art teacher, Frank Moran, one of the best teachers a kid could ever have, approved when he saw me taking apart a project I’d spent days working on, so I could start over. Don’t let yourself get stuck trying to make something work that isn’t, he said. Let it go. Try something different. You won’t find what works if you get stuck in what doesn’t.

Everyone fails from time to time. Everyone gets it wrong now and then. Not everyone can let it go. The trick is not to take it personally. It’s just life. I would rather wrong answers didn’t become chains around my soul.

I have been called “a piece of work.” Perhaps. But there’s another word for it. It’s a word that feels really pretentious to call myself. But I am an artist. Given what Stephan Fry said even so…

Oscar Wilde said that if you know what you want to be, then you inevitably become it. That is your punishment. But if you never know, then you can be anything. There is a truth to that. We are not nouns, we are verbs. I am not a thing – an actor, a writer – I am a person who does things – I write, I act – and I never know what I am going to do next. I think you can be imprisoned if you think of yourself as a noun.
— Stephen Fry

This is truth. So maybe artist is just one of the verbs I go by. But notice all the verbs he goes by are arts. I am an artist, and not simply because I create art…

art·ist / noun

a person who produces paintings or drawings as a profession or hobby.

a person who practices any of the various creative arts, such as a sculptor, novelist, poet, or filmmaker.

I would add something to this. Something about you produce art so you don’t go crazy. Something about you do it because you have that inner compulsion to do it and you can’t not do it. Vincent van Gogh so I’m told, once said he painted so he wouldn’t go mad. I know that feeling even if not to the degree he felt it. And to that I would also add that you have that need to get it out of you, whether or not you have an audience. You would do it if you were alone on a desert island. You would do it alone on a desert island if you did not have any of your artist’s tools, because you would make tools out of whatever you found on that island.

This is me. There was a time when I became so depressed at seeing what was coming out of me…my second attempt at finding love failed miserably because I’d crushed on a straight guy…that I stopped completely because I just didn’t want to deal with my feelings anymore. But it’s not so easy. You can’t stop yourself…

One way or another it comes out. I was doing volunteer work for a gay BBS and while creating login scripts and programs to help out with some of the work I’d signed up for, I discovered there was beauty in the relentless machine logic of computer code, and it was a kind of beauty that didn’t get into my broken heart feelings. It was mostly a left brain enchantment, all logic and elegance of form. I dove into it. And that led to a well paying career as a software engineer that I worked for just over thirty years before retiring. Then, part way through that I stumbled onto the Hopkins student fair grounds while they were setting up the rides and something inside me reawakened, and I got out my camera again after nearly a decade. I rediscovered my other art media…painting, drawing, cartooning. I am a graphic artist, mostly. For a while I felt whole again.

Maybe being a bit older by then allowed me to work with my feelings and make art again. Also, I was part way into strike three and it had not yet come undone, so there was a new allotment of hope there. Now I’m 70 and at a crossroads feeling hopeless again and not wanting to do art anymore because I hurt so much inside. But I know I will eventually.

So this is the essential thing to know about me, noun or verb: I am an artist.

And the thing about that is, if you have a thin skin, we really can’t be friends.

Because I’ll either piss you off or weird you out. I won’t mean to, I won’t want to, but it’s like that scene in the movie The Adam Project, where Big Adam played by Ryan Reynolds asks his younger self (it’s a time travel movie) played to perfection by Walter Scobell, “Do you ever have a thought and not let it come out your mouth?” I’m 70 years old now and I’m only just getting the hang of that. It mostly goes into my artwork, but sometimes it does just come out of my mouth or it’s something I do or something I’m wearing or something I’ve done with my hair that you just think is weird.

I am an artist. I will occasionally say and do some very weird shit. I’m pretty solidly Chaotic Good on the chart, but that’s my tribe.

I am not the sort of person who provokes for the sake of provoking. To make me deliberately insult someone they have to really Really get on my nerves and even then I’m more likely to just walk away. I was raised by a single divorced Baptist mother and there is a lot of morality baggage that comes with that, some of which I still very much appreciate and live by, some of which I still struggle with (I really should have learned to dance). But though I might initially appear to you as some sort of middle class quiet kind of guy, not very adventurous, not given to extremes (except for that long hair), I am an artist. I will occasionally say and do some very weird shit. Not that I think it was weird when I said or did it. If anything I might have thought you would appreciate it. 

If that is going to bother or offend you then maybe just keep your distance. Even if I am sending signals that I’d like to get closer. No…especially if. 

We tend to wear our hearts on our sleeves (if you’re any sort of regular reader of this life blog you know what I’m talking about here), and that makes them easy targets, even if you don’t really mean to stab. And the thing about that is we also wear the scars on our sleeves (have you been reading my blog?). Hell, we take them out and make art with them. Some of my best art is stuff I made from the scars. Nearly all of my art photography is off of some bleeding part of my heart. This is how we deal with the weight of our lives. Normal people just drink. Well…we do that too actually.

The fact is a thin skin does not pair well with an artist.

(This post is mostly for a certain lieber Deutscher. Yes I was talking to you. Mostly.)

I found this on my porch this morning so either the delivery person left it late last night or sometime before 6am today.

Of the great film photographers, there are four whose influence have always been with me, going back to my teen years. David Plowden, Margaret Bourke-White, Robert Frank…and one I tend to mention with some hesitation: Diane Arbus.

Her photography is like an ice pick to the soul, or at least it is to the painfully romantic such as myself. But she was unquestionably one of the grand masters of the art form. She knew what she was about, and she hit her mark with precision.

If I were to choose one image that most represents her to me, it wouldn’t be the boy with the toy hand grenade, or the work she did with asylum patients, the images of midgets, transvestites, old people. It would be the shot of the Hollywood set house on a hill. It’s an unusual one for her in that there are no people in it, its subject is in the distance, and the sky and space around the subject are essential to it. I don’t think there is anything else in her oeuvre quite like it.

Diane Arbus: A house on a hill, Hollywood, Cal. 1963 

This one shot to me is the heart of it. Everything she ever did emerges from what she is saying in that one shot. 

I could not be more distant from her in my own work, and yet it speaks to me and I admit a lot of it resembles her. I admire David Plowden for his straight on composition and for the deeply felt, timeless silence within. I love the drama in the photography of Margaret Bourke-White, and her mastery of the black and white process, which is every bit as good as Ansel Adams’. Robert Frank’s work captures moments that show us the humanity of its subjects in their environment. He is as humane as Diane Arbus is alienated. I don’t think anyone who knew her was surprised by her suicide. Saddened and grief stricken surely, but how can you look at the body of her work and not be surprised at how she ended it.

Her work speaks to me because I am usually wandering down the same dark paths she did. Why I didn’t fall in like she did I have no idea, other than different metals behave differently in the fire. Maybe I’m just too curious to be completely demoralized. Or maybe I just accept the indifference of the universe in a way she never could. There is no despair in my photos, at least I hope that’s not what anyone sees in them. What I do in my art photography is, as best as I can tell from a lifetime of doing it, maybe something akin to brutalism, a sensation of the gods talking past you, conversing among themselves and not even seeing you, timeless, eternal, indifferent. It’s the silence that moves me. I am more like David Plowden than Diane Arbus. There is no silence in her work, just a lot of despair.

She was one of the grand masters. I admire her because she knew what she was about and she hit it with precision every time. That not only takes skill, it takes a lot of self examination to be that good at it. I have one of her photography books, and I bought this because it promises to tell me more about the artist and hopefully I get a better idea of why she fell into the darkness she saw everywhere.

Those of you who browse my website every now and then might notice a new link on the main page. It goes to the art gallery I’ve been meaning to put up for years now. This is a place for everything I do at the drafting table that isn’t a cartoon. It’s a gallery for my serious “pure art” artwork…stuff I do to express feelings I need to get out of me.

I don’t have any of my oil paintings up here yet, and not all of it is finished artwork. Some of what I’m putting up there are sketches I did leading up to a finished piece, some of it are pieces that I stopped working on for one reason or another, usually because I got stuck trying to figure out how to move forward with it: unfinished works that I might copy over to the iPad and finish digitally. I’m putting that up because I’m still proud of the work I did, but also because I want to give people an idea of how I work, and that there is no magic to it, just persistence.

The Art Gallery is Here.

At some point after I’ve finished with the next and final-ish episode of A Coming Out Story, I will need to set up a page and sub galleries for my stand alone artwork and sketches. Because all of that I’ve posted on my Facebook page is going away.

Disengaging from online commercial social media may have another benefit besides not having to endure the censor algorithms. Less time with my face in a smartphone app, more time at the drafting table.

The sketches above are for a cartoon I have been trying to get out of me for, no kidding, four years now. A lot of that is my struggling with how sexy to make it and still not go over the line into cheap thrills. I’ve drawn and re-drawn the frames in it many multiple times because I want it to be authentically what I meant without any ridiculous self-censorship. But when all is said and done it’s still my own personal take on a particular song, nobody else’s, and there’s a reason why the character of my libido in A Coming Out Story is wearing a fig leaf. “I’m your libido not Robert Crumb’s libido…“

If I’d grown up in a more sexually relaxed culture I probably wouldn’t be fighting with myself about this. Also…being raised in a Yankee Baptist household isn’t helping.

I’m getting a bit stuck working on episode 38 of A Coming Out Story, and I’m so close to finishing the thing that I’ve started working on what I’ve been calling The Mirror Episode, which I think will be the last one in the story. Except I still need to do an epilogue after that one for completeness.

38 and 39 are my way of expressing how it was I was able to simply discard everything I’d ever been told about homosexuals once I saw that I was one myself. I’ve been ruminating about doing a blog post while I get those last two in the story arc out…something along the lines of How hard is it really to see bullshit for what it is when it’s staring you in the face?

There was some luck involved…by then I had already started discarding a lot of what I was told to believe in church. That had to do with my coming to better understand that concept of original sin, and my getting static all through childhood from some of the family over being my dad’s son. By the time I was a teenager I’d already adjusted to the idea that there would be people in my life that would always give me static over something I could not help being. And I was already easing myself out of the fundamentalism of my childhood, into a more blissful agnosticism.

So when the moment came, I could compare the person I knew myself to be with the things I was taught about homosexuals, and see that nearly all of it was wrong. Every time I hear that crap now I think about the scene in Duck Soup where Chico tells his wife after finding him in bed with another woman, “Who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?”

I hadn’t originally intended for the mirror episode to be the last one but I’m not sure how much time I have left to work on this so I’ve cut a bunch of stuff out. Maybe I’ll put some of it back in after the fact. My thinking now is I wrap it up with an epilogue and it’s officially done.

Lately I’ve been very worried that my drawing hand is getting arthritis in it, but now I’m pretty sure that it’s just injury to the thumb and forefinger muscles, and it’s the Apple Pencil with Procreate that’s doing it to me.

When I work with traditional media I use a Very light touch. The charcoals and graphite I work with are all very soft and I can get a lot of dynamic range out of them by varying light to just a bit of moderate pressure. Same with my ink pens. I use my dip pens less often now, but when I do I gravitate to the most flexible nibs because I can get the range of lines I like with those. Mostly I use the new pigment based technical pens. I still haven’t the hang of inking with a brush yet, and given how much I’ve come to like Procreate I may never get it. My favorite writing instruments are my fountain pens, especially my Montblanc Diplomat (which I have with me in California) and my Parker Duofold. All I need with either of those is a very light touch.

So my writing/drawing hand is not used to having to bear down much and I’ve been doing a tad more of that with the Apple Pencil and Procreate now that I’m doing more of my artwork digitally. Problem most likely is I just accepted the default sensitivity settings and now I have to spend some time tweaking them.
In the meantime I’m being forced to take a break from drawing for a while until my drawing hand stops complaining.

I’m having a good time now finishing up episode 37 of A Coming Out Story (finally). It’s a good sign when I find myself laughing while I’m adding all the little details after the inks are done.

Speaking of which…I can really fuss over the smallest of lines, especially around mouths and eyes, because just a tiny change makes a Big difference in a facial expression. I’ve redrawn mouth and eyes dozens of times and you might think I’m not actually changing anything, but it’s that little difference that can make a scene work.

So just this morning I was working on one of the strips and noticed I could do something with one of the figure’s eyes that made a big difference in the running gag in this episode. It’s a dialogue between my left and right brain characters and the joke is right brain is completely blissed out and I just pasted the same drawing of him with a blissed out expression throughout the episode. But then I realized I could do something with his eyes in two of the panels that makes the moment in them hit the bullseye and it was so satisfying to see it happen on the screen while I was doing it.

Probably next to nobody will notice what specifically I did, but it makes the whole episode work Much better.

Like I did before, I’m adding the strips to the episode 37 page as I finish them, but no live link until it’s all done and I have a chance to look it all over. But those of you who can figure out how I was building the links to the individual episodes can go see it happening as I add the strips. Probably be finished in two or three days more.

In my drawings I have always worked to very well defined lines like the cartoonists I’ve admired most (Howard Cruse for example). It’s only lately that I’m discovering that if I let my lines get a little scruffy, like in my roughs, the finished artwork seems more lively.

And it’s easy in Procreate, to simply make a duplicate layer of the rough blue lines instead of just inking over them in a fresh blank layer, and then changing the line color from blue to black. I will still tidy things up a bunch, but not to the point I’m taking away the scruffiness. That most recent drawing I posted the other day is, I think, the beginning of a new(ish) style for me, though I did it once before. But that one happened because I was feeling too tired to do my usual ink lines so I just copied the roughs and made them look inked and low and behold it worked. That last one was a deliberate attempt to duplicate the effect of that other one and it worked too.

I’m going to stick with it…at least for a while…and see where it goes. At least for the one-offs if not the multi panel cartoons. I’ve got another I’m working on I’ll post about later.

Finished with this one…

…and then made a couple prints with the good art room inkjet…

Oh lord have mercy I do believe I’ve outdone myself this time. This photo does Not do the final print justice. I really hit the bullseye with this one. Just delighted with it.

I got a reminder about the memorial for cartoonist Howard Cruse happening later this month and went ahead and made preparations to go. The first time I heard of this happening I was pretty sure I would be in California by now, but the scheduling of the colonoscopy made me put that off and I realized I could do it after all. It’s not so close to my Disney World/Gay Days trip that I couldn’t get there and back in time, and Massachusetts is a state I’ve never visited. Also the drive takes me up the Hudson River Valley in New York and that’s one I’ve always wanted to do because my favorite American landscape artists (of the Hudson River School) lived and worked there. Maybe I’ll take a slight detour and visit Frederic Church’s house. His paintings are amazing.

I’m retired now, and I can go wherever I want, whenever I want (providing the retirement money is there). And Howard gave me lots of encouragement with my cartoons, and A Coming Out Story. There’s a little nod to him at the end of “Intermission 2” that I pinged him about after I put it up…

…and he replied with thanks and more encouragement to continue on with it. A few days later he was gone. I had no idea he was in the hospital.

I have some of his original artwork, including page one of his magnum opus, Stuck Rubber Baby, about growing up gay in the deep south during “Kennedy Time”. I even commissioned a drawing from him around the time of National Coming Out Day. It is a magnificent piece about the moment a teenage boy comes out to his parents. Howard’s lines are as fluid and meticulously perfect as anything Al Hirschfeld did. He even put a couple easter eggs in it that speak to my interests and work at Space Telescope.

I miss him lots, so do his many fans and fellow cartoonists. So I should be there. His original memorial got put off because of COVID, so this is actually happening years after the fact.

This is a hard one to get out, largely because I am so emotionally invested in it and I want it to be exactly right. So each panel of it is a Lot of work. And adding to that is I can’t use any of my usual time saving copy and paste tricks. Nearly everything in each panel is unique from all the others. The only exceptions are the backgrounds of three of them, one of which I’ll show you here. This is the second from the last strip up in GIMP, which I’ve been using ever since Adobe stuck an eight-hundred and fifty dollar knife in my back…

I’m breaking a rule I had when I started this cartoon story, that I would always use cross-hatching for shading and textures and such. I wanted the story to be a visual nod to the black & white underground comix back in the day. The printing they used wasn’t always the best, but they made it work, sometimes with zipatone, but more often just by painstakingly (really Really painstakingly) cross-hatching.

But for this one episode I’m using the paintbrush and grey tones here and there, to make some of it snap out, but also to create a distinctive change in mood. I used to do a lot of that in Photoshop, but you can’t depend on anything from Adobe, nobody can, so I switched to GIMP and other open source artist tools, and this is the first time I’ve done something like this with a gradient in GIMP. It worked perfectly.

This episode is forming up almost Exactly as I’d visualized it back in 2005, when I set out to do this story. It’s been a long road and I’ve rewritten many parts of the story as I’ve gone along, but not this part. This is, as The Doctor would say, a fixed point in time. This, and one other, which I hope to also get to soon. I’ve said the story I’m telling is one third what actually happened, one third artistic license, and one third pure imagination (as in the parts involving my libido and left/right brains as imaginary figures). This is the part that really happened just this way.

I was having a lot of trouble and frustration with one of the panels I was working on the other day, and when that happens it helps to work for a while on a different part. Some classmates might recognise the place I’m looking at into the sunset there. There, at the moment of truth.

I’m finally starting to make some kind of progress at the drafting table that I was hoping for when I retired. Apart from A Coming Out Story, I’ve had several other things that I began working on years ago that I’m beginning to make some progress on, and some new stuff too. But alas, some of that is not going to be visible here because it isn’t safe for work. For nearly all my life I’ve had a reticence about certain subjects that you generally don’t see in a graphic artist. At least not in the free world. I’ve lived with it, made excuses for it, and ignored it. But there are some things I want to do now that I’ve retired, things I want to explore, and that reticence is something I have to deal with if I want to make progress. 

Mind, I don’t do pornography. Pornography is obvious and cheap and all it does is push buttons. But I have struggled for nearly three years now with a short graphic story riffing on the song You Can Leave Your Hat On, ever since I first heard it at a gig my classmate Rev Billy did with another band, and it’s been basically about this deeply ingrained reluctance I’ve always had about

about

about

about nudity in my artwork. There. I said it. Specifically about how much to show. If you’ve read the first episode of A Coming Out Story, that gag came about when I realized that I simply could not draw the character representing my libido as a completely naked me, and then realizing that it was right after all because that reticence was a truth about me after all.

“I’m your libido, not Robert Crumb’s libido.”  It was a self truth that became the series running gag. Ha ha. 

The song I was listening to in that bar that night, waiting for my classmate to take the stage again, was about a guy asking what I assumed was his girlfriend to take off her clothes and give him a dance. The line You can leave your hat on, recurs throughout. That first time I was listening to it, it seemed your usual pop heterosexual love and desire song, a little odd for a Randy Newman song, but he has a very wide range and I have loved his movie music, especially for Avalon and Pleasantville. So I was sitting in this bar among a bunch of middle aged and older (like myself) customers observing the crowd and waiting for my classmate to get his turn on stage. Everyone was getting into the song…

Baby, take off your coat… (real slow)
Baby, take off your shoes… (here, I’ll take your shoes)
Baby, take off your dress
Yes, yes, yes
You can leave your hat on
You can leave your hat on
You can leave your hat on

And this was the sort of bar crowd I’m not usually in the middle of and I’m almost zoning out just then because these sort of pop tunes never speak to me. If I really like a song and it’s your usual boy loves girl loves boy song I’ll mentally change the pronouns in it so it can speak to me too. I am barely a post Stonewall gay guy and living in a pop culture that until recently simply refused to even admit that such as I existed, I’ve had to do that all my adult life. But I’m watching the crowd and they’re loving the song and having a good time and I will never begrudge anyone that. This poor angry world would be a lot nicer and a lot more peaceful I’m thinking if everyone could have a fulfilling sex life.

Then I hear this…

Suspicious minds are talking
Trying to tear us apart
They say that my love is wrong
They don’t know what love is
They don’t know what love is
They don’t know what love is
They don’t know what love is
I know what love is

…and suddenly now the song is speaking to me and I’m fully absorbed. Wow.

I’m pretty sure Newman didn’t intend this to be a song about a gay male couple…the dancer was asked to take their dress off after all.  And heterosexuals often get static from their families and communities over their choices in love. But those lyrics…those lyrics. When I heard them I knew I had to do my own take on the song. I listened to it carefully and when I got home that night I bought several copies of it in the iTunes store. And I listened, and the entire thing I wanted to draw, the artwork, all the panels and the layout, came to me.

I knew it had to feature the guy I’d drawn about that same time, after some babbling nitwit online complained that gay guys at Pride were all wearing nothing but short shorts and go-go boots…

He was already wearing a hat, which made him perfect for the role of the dancer in the song. Mr Homophobic nitwit hadn’t said anything about a hat, but I added one on an impulse when I drew him because I thought it added to his sexiness.

I had a good idea of what the singer looked like and was wearing too. Another guy, maybe slightly older, suit and tie like he’s just got home from work and he’s had a very tiresome day and his boyfriend comes over and he asks him to give him a dance and the boyfriend is all in for it. Because at that age one of this life’s simple pleasures is making the one you love all hot and bothered.

So I had my story, I had the layouts, I knew Exactly what every panel was going to look like. Sort of. Then I sat down to actually draw it my built-in reticence about nudity kicked right in. I kept trying to draw the dancer in the song tastefully if minimally covered, because deep down I just could not go where the song went.

I had reasons. Perfectly logical reasons. That left/right brain running gag in A Coming Out Story is no joke. I wanted my take on the song to be postable most anywhere. I wanted it to be safe for work. I don’t do pornography. But nudity isn’t necessarily pronographic unless you’re a right wing nutcase, and truth be told, somewhere deep down there were fears that at age sixty-nine I still hadn’t really examined.

Charlie Chaplin writing to his daughter said…

“Your naked body should only belong to those who fall in love with your naked soul.”

The artist shows their naked soul in every work they produce. But giving the world the naked bodies of my art subjects just cut too close to the bone…so to speak. I couldn’t do it. It wasn’t shame, it was if I’m honest, a deeply ingrained fear of being vulnerable I’ve had since grade school. And of being Scrawny. Weak. Ugly. I was a slight, somewhat girlish kid and I got a lot of bullying from some of the other kids, and a lot of body shaming by adults in my life for being so thin and unmuscular. The mother of one of my classmates asked him outright if I was a heroin addict. Ragweed season always made me look like I was on drugs all the time. My clothes, mostly second hand, never really fit very well. My teeth were crooked. 

There’s a story I like to tell about the day I came to class in sixth grade. Next year I would be in junior high school which I’d learned by then was a whole new world. Instead of sitting in the same classroom day and and day out I would be given a schedule of classes for math, english, science and art and so on, and walk from one to the other. I’d have my own locker to put things in between classes. And every class would be a different teacher, and a different mix of other kids. But there was a very unpleasant surprise in store.

That one day in that sixth grade class I saw that some kids from the previous year had come to class before we got there to visit their old teachers. They’d written about their experiences in junior high on the chalkboard. I started reading. Then I came to this line…

Tell them not to worry about group showers. It’s no big deal.

I wish I had a picture of my face just then. My jaw dropped. I was horrified. What!? WHAT!? WHAT!!!???  Suddenly I was no longer looking forward to high school, junior or otherwise.

So there I am at the drafting table trying to get this little slice of life story out of me and on to paper, make a statement about gay love and desire, and I’m all inhibited and trying to be restrained and temperate and keeping my dancer suitably covered for family audiences…and the song just doesn’t read like that. Well…except for the hat. There’s still a hat.

So no matter how I drew the dancer I was never satisfied with what I was drawing. I’m pretty sure I got the singer/audience right the first time I drew him. But the dancer just would not appear. Worse, most of my tries were crap that made me doubt I was good enough to even try illustrating this song in my own way. It had to be done right or it would be embarrassingly awful. It was making me hate my drawing and I hate it enough as it is. But it wouldn’t let go of me either. I kept coming back to it, there was something there I wanted to say, and I kept having to walk away depressed.

Finally I had to admit my drawing was crap because I wasn’t really being faithful to the song.

I was riffing on this song because I wanted to shine a light on what it said to me about love and joyful playful desire, and that is universal across the Kinsey scale. It was important to me. Gay love and desire is a beautiful, meaningful, fulfilling thing for those who are lucky enough to find it. And nothing that came out of my pencils was working. Finally I had to admit nothing I did would be right unless I was completely faithful to the song. Which meant that I needed to get over some residual reticence about nudity in my art I’ve had since…forever.

So I’m going for it.

And now it’s working. The dancer is there finally on my drawing board. He’s everything I need him to be to make this graphic story work. This is going to be one of my best.

Problem is, it won’t be safe for Facebook. Or any social media.

That’s okay…I have my own website here.

And at age 69 I feel a little more free. One less brick in the wall…