From the 1970s to the Present Day

by Tim Pilcher

  Eric Shanower has adapted many of Frank L. Baum’s Oz stories into graphic novels, and has since self-published his epic retelling of the Trojan War in his Age of Bronze series and graphic novels. “I came to terms with being gay… in late 1987. It then took me a year or so to let family and friends know. Before the San Diego Comic-Con in 1989, Andy Mangels, the Gays in Comics panel coordinator, phoned and very judiciously asked me whether I’d have any interest in being on the panel since he’d heard from a mutual acquaintance who wished to remain anonymous that I might be gay. I was flattered to be asked to appear on a panel, and I thought I could set a positive example, so I agreed to appear,” Shanower revealed in an online interview. “I’m not sure how it’s affected my career. I guess I wouldn’t have had a story in Gay Comix… Perhaps I’ve met some people because I’m gay who I might not have met otherwise, or editors have thought of calling me for a job because I was in a certain place at a certain time somehow having to do with my being gay.”

  Craig Hamilton worked on the 1986 Aquaman miniseries for DC Comics. The artist’s work wove an implicit homoeroticism into the story, with beautifully toned male torsos draped across the page. Both Wonder Woman and Aquaman have always been incredibly popular superheroes in the gay community, possibly because of the glamor and beefcake that each character exudes, and Hamilton’s art certainly played up the latter. As, Phil Jimenez noted, “DC is a very gay-friendly company. They always have been.”

  Coming to comics slightly later than the others, Phil Jimenez has flourished in mainstream comics. He was born and raised in Los Angeles, but moved to New York City to attend the School for Visual Arts. After graduating at 21, he got a job working for Neil Pozner, DC Comics’ creative director. “He was probably my greatest mentor at DC Comics. He was an incredibly talented man, with some very strong opinions about the way things should be done. I developed a crush on him the minute I met him…” recalled Jimenez, and the two became a couple—despite the 15-year age gap, and Pozner’s HIV-positive status. They remained a couple until Pozner’s tragic death from AIDS-related illnesses in 1994. “Nobody at DC knew that we were together. They just knew that we were really good friends…” In 1996, Jimenez wrote and drew the Tempest miniseries, based on a character from Pozner’s earlier Aquaman series. In the last issue, Jimenez wrote an editorial, dedicating the series to his late partner and publicly outing himself, the first creator to do so in a mainstream comic. “It got over 150 letters,” the creator revealed, “including the classic letter from the kid in Iowa: ‘I didn’t know there was anyone else like me.’ That’s what counts. It meant a lot to people.” Since then Jimenez has gone on to work on many huge projects, such as Wonder Woman and Infinite Crisis, and continued working on LGBT themes with a short story in Vertigo’s Heartthrobs anthology written by Robert Rodi, and in Grant Morrison’s The Invisibles, which featured a transvestite lead character, Lord Fanny.

  The Myth of Hycynthus/Hycinthus (sic), written and penciled by David Sexton and inked by P. Craig Russell from Gay Comix #21 (1994). The story recounted the ancient Greek gay love story between Hyacinthus and Apollo, the sun god.

  Craig Hamilton and Tony Harris’ pin-up of lesbian vampire lovers from the back of Gay Comix #18 (1993).

  Heartthrobs #1 (Vertigo/DC, January 1999) featured this gay romance story, Genes and a T-Shirt, by Robert Rodi and Phil Jimenez. In the satirical story, a homosexual has a medical procedure to stop him being gay, with the expected failure.

  DESERT PEACH & DONNA BARR

  Born in 1952 in Washington state, Donna Barr served in the US Army between 1970-73 and received a bachelors’ degree in German from Ohio State University in 1978. Both elements would become strong influences in her work. The Desert Peach, Barr’s series about the WWII adventures of Field Marshall Erwin Rommel’s younger, fictional, gay brother, Pfirsich, is an exquisite piece of genre-busting work. Primarily set in the Afrika Korps, during 1940–1943, Manfred Pfirsich Marie Rommel is the understanding father figure to a gaggle of ne’er do well, would-be soldiers. “He is a man of integrity and peace thrust into a conflict he finds appalling,” explained the writer/artist. In reality Rommel’s youngest brother, Manfred, died in infancy, “So all I’ve done is pick up and let live a human being that the universe threw away.”

  The original three-issue miniseries was published by Thoughts & Images in October, 1988 and started out as a simple play on the color Desert Peach and Rommel Senior’s nickname, The Desert Fox. “I couldn’t resist the pun,” explained the creator, in an interview with Ruth Saunders. “I was badly infected by The Goon Show [a BBC radio comedy series] as a callow child.” But Barr was very careful to avoid obvious, crass clichés, “It’s not ‘Gay Nazis.’ It’s a WWII German officer, who is homosexual. Don’t think in genres and sound bites if you’re going to read the [Desert] Peach; you’ll only confuse yourself.”

  The Peach has two weaknesses — his lover, Lieutenant Rosen Kavalier (whose real name is the less glamorous Melvin Gonville Ramsbottom) — and his Prussian-style uniform. “Riding breeches and boots do wonders for a man!” exclaimed Barr. The Desert Peach went on for 30-issue run and was collected into several books. The series also earned Barr a Xeric Award and Grant in 2002 to help her continue self-publishing.

  Barr even turned the series, fittingly, into Desert Peach, The Musical and praised the leading man, “Jon Winston Hauer, who played [Pfirsich] in the musical, is him to a T. Jon can even ride horses, and is, for all his delicate and pretty appearance, tremendously powerful…”

  Barr’s other work has included Stinz (1984), about a centaur who joins a pre-industrial Germanic army and has a hard time fitting in (like The Peach), Hader And the Colonel, and Bosom Enemies. Barr also examined another aspect of LGBT culture with Barr Girls, which was all about life in a hermaphroditic world, with the great tagline: “Just because everyone is one sex doesn’t mean they’re any more together than we are.” Barr’s books are now sold from Japan and Australia to Serbia, Croatia, and Slovenia, and she continues to pave the way for female comic creators.

  A fashion sketch by Barr from 2006. The image implies the ongoing link with super heroine Wonder Woman and the LGBT community, with the text, “The wonder look — NOT just gender-limited any more.”

  Interior pages from The Desert Peach reveal its erotic, sensitive, and humorous nature.

  Donna Barr’s gauche pin-up of the Desert Peach’s tank crew.

  This watercolour illustration of the traditional “Green Man” is given an erotic spin by Barr.

  A fully painted cover to The Desert Peach, by creator Donna Barr. It guest stars The Peach’s elder brother, Erwin Rommel, The Desert Fox.

  Manfred Pfirsich Marie Rommel, The Desert Peach, is grabbed by his lover, Rosen Kavalier.

  A.A.R.G.H CLAUSE 28 AND ALL THAT

  Staggeringly, homosexuality was illegal in the UK until 1967, when it was finally decriminalized for over 21 year-old men (lesbianism was never made illegal). But then, after 20 years of struggling to gain acceptance, the gay community was struck a blow, and tolerance hit an all-time low during Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government in the 1980s. The repressive cabinet introduced a controversial amendment to the Local Government Act — Clause 28 — in 1988 that prevented the education, discussion, or “promotion” of homosexuality by local authorities.

  At that time, the comic book writer extraordinaire Alan Moore was in a relationship with his then-wife, and their girlfriend, and he felt that the law would obviously affect them personally. “[It was] sort of an…experimental relationship, I suppose you’d call it. It was something we were very serious about, and it endured for two to three years, which was a mark of that seriousness,” explained Moore in an interview with Newsarama in 2004. “It was also around about that time that the government over here first proposed Clause 28…”

  “That was the first kind of legislation over here in a long time that was aimed at one specific minority, which had more than a whiff of the Third Reich a
bout it…” explained the Northampton writer. “It was very, very nasty — the implications of it were very serious.”

  Outraged at this discriminatory act, and to help raise money for the Organization for Lesbian and Gay Action (OLGA), Moore formed Mad Love—his own publishing company—and gathered up as many big names as possible and published a protest comic anthology, A.A.R.G.H (Artists Against Rampant Governmental Homophobia).

  “We asked all of my friends in comics, or in some instances people who I never had contact with, but were very generous in offering work, and we put together a fairly stellar roster of talent very quickly.” The anthology was an eclectic mix of work by Neil Gaiman, Bryan Talbot, Dave Sim, Frank Miller, Dave Gibbons, and many other big names in the industry. Moore contributed an eight-page story called The Mirror of Love, an overview of gay history drawn by Steve Bissette and Rick Veitch. “Having that idea of trying to come up with a history of gay culture — I had eight pages to do it in,” Moore said. “I did it with Steve…and Rick…who did a beautiful job on the comic strip between them, given the constraints of what we were trying to do in just eight pages…”

  The officially-entitled “Section 28” became law on 24 May 1988 and schools and local authorities scrapped various programs for fear of prosecution. In 1994, there was a chink of light when a compromise amendment to the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994 lowered the age of consent for homosexuals to 18 (it is 16 for heterosexuals in the UK). Finally, Clause 28 was eventually repealed in 2003, “So I guess it is a victory for common sense and human decency, even if it did take a long while in coming,” said Moore.

  The Mirror of Love was reworked as a book with gay Spanish illustrator and comics colorist, José Villarrubia for Top Shelf. Villarrubia performed the work on stage at numerous readings and called Moore’s work “a love letter that is also a political manifesto,” and “One of the most touching pieces that Alan has written and it has been an honor to turn it into an illustrated book.”

  David Shenton’s funny strip, Controlled Hysteria, reveals the benefits of gay men in 1988’s A.A.R.G.H, pointing out that Tchaikovsky and Michelangelo were both gay.

  Frank Miller’s Robocop parody, Robohomophobe, from A.A.R.G.H, caused much controversy, as many saw the strip as homophobic as the British government’s Clause 28.

  The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen artist, Kev O’Neill, drew this strip that ridiculed James Anderton, the then-Chief Constable for the Greater Manchester police. Anderson was openly swayed by his Christianity, publicly espousing anti-gay views and supporting Clause 28.

  STANGROOM & LOWTHER: MEATMEN AND BUDDIES

  The British duo of writer Howard Stangroom and artist Stephen Lowther were at the forefront of the gay comics scene throughout the ‘80s and ‘90s, being regular contributors to Gay Comix, Meatmen, and other gay titles.

  They met in the baking British summer drought of 1976. “I was working at a pornographer’s in Darlington, in the North East of England—we’re both Yorkshiremen by birth. It was my first job out of reform school,” joked Stangroom, in a 2005 interview. Stangroom’s boss was trying to diversify, and wanted to produce a comics fan magazine. “I was one of the artists that stepped forward,” explained Lowther.

  The duo worked on many fan projects, but it wasn’t until around 1980 that they started work on gay themes. Their stories were sexy, humorous, and thought-provoking, with a more inclusive range of ages and body types than the usual beefcake (big muscle men) and twinks (younger, lithe men). Their first strip for Gay Comix #11, Second Chance?, was a twist on the post-apocalypse-survivors-restart-the-world sci-fi story, replacing Adam and Eve with Adam and Steve.

  Stangroom also helped launch and edit Buddies, alongside Don Melia — the co-editor of the 1988 AIDS charity comics anthology, Strip Aids. Sadly, Melia died of AIDS-related illnesses, and after issue #2 of Buddies, Stangroom continued the title for another four issues from 1993 to 1996. Stangroom recalled,“Don was trying to start a British version of Gay Comix, and we gave him the story Can We Do It Until We Need Glasses?, a true life adventure in Gutersloh, Germany. [It was the] first time I’d had myself as the star of a strip and, hey, I got lucky a couple of times after people saw me in the comic!”

  Stangroom and Lowther’s stories of “balls and brains” started appearing in Meatmen #6, a semi-annual gay comics paperback launched in 1986 by Winston Leyland. Starting out as a mixture of humorous and erotic strips, the title plunged into the latter, with later issues of Meatmen consisting mostly of full frontal male nudity and sexual encounters. As Gay Today magazine remarked, Meatmen was packed full of “explicit erotic fantasy adventures with greater arousal power than any photographs in my memory.”

  Meatmen ran for 25 issues before the publication folded in 2005. Each book-sized issue was self-contained, but several creators and their characters became regulars, such as Zack, aka former Dan Dare illustrator Oliver Frey, whose tales of not-so-innocent boys in heat were perennial favorites. As was the late John Blackburn’s Coley, a blond, buff, bisexual, “19-year old voodoo sexgod” who travels through space and time getting into the inevitable sexcapades. Other popular contributors included Belasco, Stepan Zubinski, Jeff Jacklin, and Patrick Fillion. However, the increased testosterone — and decreased intelligence — turned off the creative pair of Stangroom and Lowther, and their last contribution was in #15.

  Stangroom has since contributed to Donna Barr’s Ersatz Peach collection, Avalon, Boy Crazy Boy, Heartbreak Hotel, Him, Joy of S*x, and the slightly less homoerotic Masters of the Universe and My Little Pony. Much of his and Lowther’s work was collected, in full-color for the first time, in the Bruno Gmünder paperback Prime Cuts, released in 2005. These days Stangroom, under his civilian name of Will Morgan, is the manager of the London comic shop, 30th Century Comics, based in Putney. Stephen Lowther works as a medical archivist in London.

  The erotic pirates in Maneater, by “Mike,” are reminiscent of S. Clay Wilson’s underground comix work.

  The cover to the gay anthology, Meatmen #25, beautifully painted by fan favorite, Swiss-born Zack who also supplied interior strips.

  Don’t Dream It, Be It! An erotic sci-fi fantasy written by Howard Stangroom and drawn by Stephen Lowther.

  Stangroom and Lowther’s Archie Comics style parody, Ride The Wild Surf, appeared in Buddies and Meatmen and was eventually colored for their 2005 collection, Prime Cuts.

  John Blackburn’s gay icon Coley, who makes himself come by sheer force of will, in Stagecoach from Meatmen #25.

  ROBERTA GREGORY AND LESBIAN CARTOONISTS

  Running alongside the revolution in gay comix, lesbian sisters were also producing high-quality comics. While perhaps less defined as true erotica — with the intention of arousing the reader — lesbian sequential art is no less sexual in its content. Sexual politics play an important part of many of the strips. At the forefront of the dyke cartoonist movement was Roberta Gregory, who self-published 10,000 copies of the first lesbian-themed comic, Dynamite Damsels, in 1976, the same year Gay Heart Throbs was launched. The comic included two short stories: Superdyke, a lesbian super-heroine, and Liberatia, the story of a women-only land.

  Gregory went on to create her most famous and funny character, the ever-angry-at-the-world Midge—better known as Bitchy Bitch—in her comic Naughty Bits #1, published by Fantagraphics, in March 1991. Gregory went on to create Bitchy’s lesbian counterpart, Butchy, who — as the artist put it—“Remembers the glory days of the early feminist movement, before‘those darn straight women’ spoiled it for the rest of the dykes!” Gregory was asked to create Butchy for an anthology but managed to succeed in enraging and offending the commissioning editor!

  Gregory then created the three-issue miniseries Artistic Licentiousness. Originally intended to be a “smutty” comic to cash in on the success of the Eros Comix line, it was the story of Denise, a writer who has just come out of a bad relationship with a man and decided she really prefers women, and Kevin, a comics crea
tor. Each discovers that making assumptions about someone’s sexuality — especially their own — is not a good idea. Unfortunately, the publisher, Starhead Comics, went bust, so Gregory self-published the last two issues, making them “less overtly sexual and more intriguing.”

  Another high-profile lesbian cartoonist with an angry creation is Diane DiMassa, whose The Hothead Paisan is a no-holds-barred reaction to the misogynist underground comix of the early 1970s. Born in 1959 in New Haven, Connecticut, DiMassa created her “homicidal lesbian terrorist…” as therapy while recovering from drug and alcohol addiction in 1991. Her uncompromising character had wild hair “and a fetish for guns, grenades, mallets, and sharp objects,” used to avenge wrongs against women. Highly political, the comic is reminiscent of Spain’s comix creation Trashman, who used over-the-top violence to get revenge on corporate and governmental miscreants. The series is narrated by the Paisan’s cat (called Chicken) with a dry wit. The first 20 issues were published by the fantastically named Giant Ass Publishing and were collected into one volume by Cleis Press. DiMassa has also contributed to several gay comic anthologies and publications, including Robert Kirby’s Strange Looking Exile, Gay Comics, Frighten the Horses, The Advocate, and Oh. She also collaborated with “Post Punk Porn novelist”, Kathy Acker on Pussycat Fever in 1995.