Qomics for Queers: Beating around the Bush

Did you ever notice that Comic strips fall far behind every other medium out there when it comes to any representation of queer people? Sure, the political cartoons seem to realise we exist, but the joke-a-days and soaps printed in mainstream papers do everything to can to pretend like there are no queer people.

Which is why I started Qomics for Queers over at Q-Bomb, where I read between the lines, reinterpret artwork, and completely make junk up to get some representation.


Here's this Friday's Apartment 3-G:


For those of you who don't follow the travails of Tommie Thomson, LuAnn Powers, and Margo Magee at Apartment 3-G, then you've missed most of the Friday that Never Ends. LuAnn and Margo are both away from the apartment that evening working, and Tommie is left to her own devices. Of course, without the women she lives with, her life is meaningless until her neighbor Gina whisks her away to her play and the ensuing cast party. At that party, Tommie makes out with the director, only to be pawned of on our friend Gary, seen above.

Now you're all caught up on the greatest telenovela to ever grace the funny pages!

While people have been following the closeted lesbianism of Tommie Thomson for years, I don't think we've ever seen her definitively express herself one way or the other. Sure she's kissed a few men drunk, made a few sly looks at women, and generally tried to be the non-sexual one of the bunch.

Now, dressed as a character from a Lynne Cheney novel, Tommie is face-to-face with a man who's hitting on her, who by all accounts is sweet, but something's missing, a spark, a certain je ne sais vagina. When this party is all said and done (maybe four weeks from now?), Tommie's going to be thinking about why she subconsciously thwarts chances at heterosexual love every time they come her way. And then, and only then, can we celebrate Tommie and Gina's new romance.


This Wednesday's Hagar the Horrible:


Not particularly gay, except that have you noticed that most of the Hagar-at-the-restaurant-making-fun-of-food-and/or-pop-culture strips involve Lucky Eddie instead of Helga? One can only wonder why Lucky Eddie prefers to dine with his boss instead of his family or friends or why Hagar doesn't go out with Helga.

I know, I know, he travels a lot for work, but I don't think that in between raiding the English and pillaging the French that he would have time to stop at a restaurant without anyone else from his army. Nor would a blood-thirsty viking be welcome in those just pillaged countries' restaurants. No, this has to be near home. And that's the same waiter who serves Helga and him.

I can only imagine what life would be like as a closeted viking, constantly escaping home life as resentment towards heteronormativity builds, all the while finding my only relief in a member of my own army. Of course, in my imagination, we wouldn't sit around at restaurants and make jokes that fit easily into a two panel setup, one panel punchline format.

Alas, I'm not a student of viking history.


Here's this Tuesday's Family Circus:


Jeffy doesn't stop! He continues to attempt to defend himself from castration! Good work, Mom, because you know that snowball is destined for the back of your head.

Qomics for Queers

Every week, like a good little gay boy, I turn my expectations of fair representation in the comics into innuendo for the weekly feature Qomics for Queers. I'll do my best to read between the lines, reinterpret artwork, and completely make shit up about the past week's comics.

We start the week with the Family Circus, h/t to the Comics Curmudgeon, because I don't usually read the Family Circus. These are from Sunday and Monday:

Well, well, well, Jeffy. I don't know many 4-year-old straight boys who want to hurt their mothers as much as Jeffy apparently does. That's probably because they're sexually attracted to them and act out against their fathers out of fear of castration in retaliation. Of course, Freud thought that all people were constitutionally bisexual and that resolution of the Oedipal conflict led to heterosexual sexual expression; a failure to properly resolve the oedipal complex because of a distant father or an overbearing mother inhibits a boy from identifying with his father and makes him identify with his mother as a role model, making him express homosexuality.

Uhhhh, yeah, advanced for the 1800's, I guess. Dr. Richard Isay returns to the psychoanalytic subject of male homosexuality in the mid-90's in Becoming Gay, starting from the idea that some men are constitutionally homosexual. He says:

I had found that, like the population of heterosexual men who recalled opposite-sex attraction from an early age, many homosexual men could remember experiencing same-sex attraction when they were as young as four, five, or six years. For gay men, this earliest attraction is to the father or father surrogate.

Isay goes on to say that the boy's non-traditionally-masculine behavior causes rejection from the father and for the gay boy to seek protection from his mother.

But what if a father were totally OK with a non-masc boy? (I think that, since the Family Circus is all things wholesome, Jeffy's father is probably unconditionally loving.) It would follow that the boy would expect his mother to retaliate against him through castration, so he would act out against her. In Jeffy's case, he's using snowballs to protect his own balls. (Yuk yuk yuk)

This Wednesday's Beetle Bailey:

The incredible gayness of Beetle and Sarge continues. Beetle is all too willing to get his beard hitched because he knows that this farce cannot continue forever. Dumping a woman who is totally out of his league isn't an option for him, but he's right there ready to pass her on to the next guy who shows any interest in her at all. All I can say is that Beetle should either come out or give up on sexuality altogether, because acting as Miss Buxley's boyfriend/pimp is not becoming.

Here are my improvements to this Wednesday's Archie: