Gay Content in Newspaper Comics

Abstract

During last thirty years, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered (LGBT) characters have been appearing with increasing regularity most media genres, from television sitcoms to comic books (Becker; Waldman). However, newspaper comic characters continue to be overwhelmingly heterosexual. In strip after strip, married heterosexual couples bicker over forgotten anniversaries, young men try feeble pick-up lines on women, young women endure endless dates with losers, and children and family pets pursue hapless heterosexual romances. Heteronormativity, ideological insistence that heterosexual desire and behavior are universal human experience (Warner xiv; Nielsen, Waiden, & Kunkel 285), is promoted so loudly and incessantly that one finds no gay lead characters at all, and fewer gay minor characters than even most timid of children's picture books.However, inclusion of specifically identified LGBT characters is only one strategy of representing same-sex desire, behavior, romance, and identity. Hennessy decries the heteronormative tyranny of empirical, presumption that gayness exists only phrase I am gay, so absence of self-declaration, all characters, statements, situations, and themes are to be taken as heterosexual (31). Artists working venues where identifying characters as gay is risky or prohibited often depend on subtext, relationships, and references presumably opaque to general consumer, but obvious to those in know, or supratext, situations so outrageous that they lose any element of veracity and therefore cannot challenge consumer's heteronormative presumptions (Johnson).Queering, locating representations of same-sex desire, behavior, romance, or identity that appear independently of specifically identified gay characters (Doty 10), has been successfully applied to several genres of mass culture, including novels, popular movies, cartoons, and even children's television (Sedgwick; Dennis). This study will apply it to newspaper comics, investigating frequency with which heteronormative ideology is disrupted through several different types of gay content. It will demonstrate that gay content appears newspaper comics with some regularity, spite of near-absence of gay characters. It further investigates role of cartoonist's gender, age of title, and strip genre facilitating or prohibiting various types of gay content.Gay Content Newspaper ComicsCharacters who exhibited homophobic stereotypes were once commonplace comic strips. Heer reproduces a Mickey Mouse strip from 1930s which Mickey demonstrates his masculinity by assaulting a lisping, mincing pansy, and Applegate reports that during World War II, adventure strip Terry and Pirates regularly featured stereotypic gay and lesbian villains. During 1940s and 1950s, however, comic strips began to adhere to postwar clampdown on nonconformity general, and especially on depictions of same-sex desire, behavior, romance, and identity (Mann 121). Even stereotyped characters became vanishingly rare, and there were no references to same-sex desire or behavior, except occasionally heavily coded jokes or situations. For instance, a 1976 Wizard of Id strip, medieval knight Rodney is assigned to fight Fierce. What a drag! he exclaims. The king admonishes, That's kind of talk that made Bruce fierce!During decades after Stonewall, organizations, such as GLAAD (the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation) strongly advocated for increased representation media, and LGBT characters began to appear movies, television programs, popular fiction, and comic books. However, advocacy had little impact on newspaper comic strip. Between 1950 and 2000, only three specifically identified gay characters appeared.In a 1976, continuity Gary Trudeau's political Doonesbury strip, law student Joanie Caucus makes romantic overtures to classmate Andy Lippincott, only to be rejected because he is gay (Are they sure? …