Kitchen Sink Press published the first five issues of Gay Comix thereafter it was published by Bob Ross, publisher of the Bay Area Reporter gay newspaper. Lee Marrs and Trina Robbins, two of the original members of the Wimmen’s Comix Collective. Syndrome, Satyr, and the cover of issue #3 Robert Triptow, editor of issues #5 through 13īurton Clarke, creator of Cy Ross and the S.Q. Howard Cruse, editor of the first four issues
Roberta Gregory, who created Dynamite Damsels (1976), the first lesbian underground serial comic book, and the character Bitchy Bitch Mary Wings, creator of the first one-off lesbian book Come Out Comix (1972) and Dyke Shorts (1976)Īlison Bechdel, who created Dykes to Watch Out For and whose graphic novel Fun Home was adapted into a Tony Award-winning Broadway musical All three editors made a deliberate effort to feature work by both women and men.Īrtists producing work for Gay Comix included
It is generally less sexually explicit than the similarly-themed (and male-focused) Meatmen series of graphic novels. The contents of Gay Comix were generally about relationships, personal experiences, and humor, rather than sex. Gay Comix also served as a source for information about non-mainstream LGBT-themed comics and events. Autobiographical themes include falling in love, coming out, repression, and sex. Much of the early content was autobiographical, but more diverse themes were explored in later editions. Created by Howard Cruse, Gay Comix featured the work of primarily gay and lesbian cartoonists. Their Kickstarter campaign to build will remain live until Wednesday, April 16.Gay Comix (later spelled Gay Comics) is an underground comics series published from 1980–1998. Along with Alysia Abbott, author of Fairyland: A Memoir of My Father, she is launching The Recollectors, a storytelling forum and digital community for people who have lost parents to AIDS.
Whitney Joiner is a senior editor at Marie Claire magazine. And all he would’ve had to say in return was: I am.
“I asked Mom once if you were gay,” I would have said. I wish I could have known that some part of him accepted-and was proud of-who he was. I’m not angry about it I just wish it had gone differently. It was probably one of the hardest conversations he’d had in his 38 years. He sent me a starstruck postcard from London exclaiming, “Guess what? You know Jimmy Somerville from Erasure? I met him at a club here!!” (Never mind that Somerville was actually in Bronski Beat, another of Dad’s favorites.) But to actually let me in-to sit on that blue blanket, look me in the eye and tell me he was gay-was something he couldn’t do. When he went to see Truth or Dare with his hairdresser, Mickey, he told me about it.
In some ways I think Dad was on the verge of coming out to me back then. “Something like that,” he answered.Įvery once in a while, my brother and I talk about the what-ifs: What if Dad had held out a little longer, if the drugs had been approved a little earlier, if time and the eventual softening of our culture would have softened him? Would he be meeting me for dinner in New York? Would I be flying to visit him in Louisville or Lexington with his middle-aged partner? “Like leukemia?” I once asked, as we drove away from the doctor’s office, thinking of the hokey Lurlene McDaniels books scattered around my middle school classrooms, in which innocent cheerleaders bravely fought some sort of cancer or another, hoping to get one kiss before they died. I knew he’d had some kind of “blood problem” for a while he’d explained that much when we accompanied him to get his blood drawn during our summers together. Since my brother and I spent most of our time with my mother and stepfather, two hours from Dad in a small town south of Louisville, his life seemed far away when we weren’t with him. Dad taught business law at Eastern Kentucky University and served as a deacon at our church. I didn’t want to know.įor the previous four months, my father had been in and out of the hospital in Lexington, Ky., half an hour from this rented duplex in Richmond, where he’d lived since he and my mother divorced three years earlier. I didn’t know what he was going to tell me. We sat on the itchy baby-blue blanket on my bed in the room I shared with my 8-year-old brother. On a Saturday afternoon in April 1992, when I was 13, my father told me we needed to talk.