In the 1970s and '80s, LGBTQ artists created queer underground comics, strips, and zines, decades before these representations would be seen in mainstream circulation. The new documentary from PBS highlights these trailblazers and their creations.
, LGBTQ artists were creating queer comics in the 1970s and ‘80s. They weren’t working for Marvel or DC, though: They were making underground comic books, strips and zines out of their homes, DIY-style.
“There’s a history of erotic illustrations, like Tom of Finland, and gag strips in the Advocate, but ‘Come Out Comix’ was the first ‘literary’ queer comic,” said Justin Hall, who produced “No Straight Lines” and is chair of the graduate comics program at California College of the Arts.in the basement of a radical women’s karate cooperative in Oregon, making this thing on a photocopier and distributing it through mail order.
After Wings’ book came Roberta Gregory’s “Dynamite Damsels” in 1975, a series of humorous vignettes about the lives of lesbian feminist activists, and then Lee Marrs’ “The Further Fattening Adventures of Pudge, Girl Blimp” in 1977, about a 17-year-old runaway who arrives in San Francisco looking to lose her virginity.
“I’ve been obsessed with comics since I was a kid; it’s how I learned to read,” said Hall, whose own work includes the comics “True Travel Tales” and “Hard to Swallow.” “I always knew I wanted to be involved somehow in creating comics. It was a phase I never grew out of.”“It’s both a storytelling and visual art form, which I think is very powerful,” Hall said.
Cruse also published “Wendel,” a strip that appeared in the Advocate throughout the 1980s. It followed a young gay man and his friends in the Reagan-Bush era, touching on same-sex relationships, gay bashing, HIV/AIDS and other hot-button issues.His 1995 graphic novel, “Stuck Rubber Baby,” was about a young gay man coming of age in the South amid the civil rights movement.
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