It came along to grad school in Bloomington with me, along with my Greek New Testament and the copy of The City and the Pillar that I bought in West Hollywood.
I was mesmerized by these 1970s college students, who live together on a commune outside Walden College, and form an alternate family, with heterosexual romance virtually absent.
The radical hippie Mark Slackmeyer.
Pot-loving "freak" Zonker Harris
Conservative all-American B.D.
And especially Joanie Caucus, a housewife who abandoned a heterosexual life for the wild freedom of the commune.
In Bloomington in 1982, I started reading the strip in the Herald-Times. The politics bored me, and I disliked the custom of using weird icons for political figures, like a cowboy hat for Ronald Reagan.
But hetero-romance was still virtually absent, and there were occasional glimmers of the same-sex friendships that once fueled Walden Pond.
From January 1983 to October 1984, Trudeau took a hiatus from the strip. When it returned, I was in Hell-fer-Sartain, Texas, the worst place in the world, and to my consternation, the characters had "grown up." That is, most of them had acquiesced to the heterosexist life trajectory of husbands and wives. Mike married J.J. , B.D. married Boopsie, Joanie married Rick Redfern.
But I have researched the gay story lines.
1. Andy Lippincott appeared in January 1976 as a fellow law student Joanie is crushing on. In February, he tells her that he's gay. She's shocked -- she asks "are they sure?", certain that he must have gotten several doctors to diagnose such a serious condition.
Then Andy vanishes. In the late 1980s, he appears again, to die of AIDS. Many newspapers refused to run the continuity, stating that the topic of gayness was "inappropriate for the comics page."
Not a lot, but still, more than most newspaper comics.
See also: Escape from Hell fer Sartain
It seems back in the 80s, you just had to give a character AIDS, and wow, such courage.
ReplyDeleteAndy hadn't appeared as a character for year -- he was a sort of a one-shot, there to come out to Joanie. But when Gary Trudeau wanted to write about someone with AIDS, he decided to go with Andy rather than introducing a new character. Thus helping the gay=AIDS myth along
DeleteBut I remember AIDS showing up even outside the normal context. Actually, this is why I regard Youngblood (Liefeld's version of Teen Titans, as if Teen Titans was too optimistic, rejected by DC but now he has his own publishing company) as the most offensive comic book I ever read, well, one reason: You see, at least some of the Youngblood program were injected with a dormant strain of HIV which can be activated at any time, a little motivator for them. (What remote control could be so small? Isn't the big problem with HIV that it mutates rapidly? Smile and nod.) So, when Chapel finds out Spawn, the man he killed, is back among the living, he starts murdering people to summon Spawn and asks Spawn how. Spawn explains his pact with Satan. Then Chapel kills himself, goes to hell, and makes the same deal. Dark Age of Comics, everybody!
DeleteAnd recall that this is 1994, near the peak of AIDS-related mortality, including AIDS-related suicide. I mean, I get that Liefeld is somewhat homophobic, but still...