From the 1970s to the Present Day

by Tim Pilcher

  Another raw, emotive page from Stuck Rubber Baby. The story was set in the Deep South in the 1960s and explored major taboos, such as interracial homosexuality.

  Stuck Rubber Baby’s central protagonist Toland Park in a sexually awkward moment.

  GAY COMIX

  Denis Kitchen was already a well established underground comix writer, editor, cartoonist and publisher—with such successful titles as Bizarre Sex and Dope Comix—when he approached creator Howard Cruse to launch a new anthology, Gay Comix. The comic would prove a turning point for Cruse, “I came out professionally in 1979 as part of the process of soliciting work for Gay Comix. Since we were just starting Gay Comix at that time, I took that occasion to indicate that I was more than just some liberal doing his bit to help out the downtrodden. It was important for the credibility of the title that I be clear about being gay myself,” explained the artist in a 1998 interview with Gayleauge.com. “The cartoonists we were trying to find had to know that there would be a gay editor in charge who would understand where they were coming from.”

  Cruse sent out a call for submissions stating, “We’re starting this book, and we’re sending this letter to everyone because we don’t know who’s gay and who’s not. If you’re gay, or you have cartoonist friends who are gay, please give this to them — we’d really like to have good people for this book.” And Cruse got them. There were very few openly gay cartoonists at the time, but Cruse invited Roberta Gregory and Mary Wings, as they had already come out in their previous work, and more importantly, he wanted the project to be “a co-gendered project, [he] didn’t want a strictly male book.” Renowned underground cartoonist Lee Marrs also joined, as well as Rand Holmes, heterosexual creator of the counterculture favorite Harold Hedd. Holmes drew the first issue’s cover, which proudly announced, “Lesbians and Gay men put it on paper!”

  Cruse’s strip in the first issue, Billy Goes Out, was a milestone, “I was a little scared while I was doing it, because it was pretty frank about that backroom bar scene, and the sex was, like, really in your face. I mean, literally! Putting stuff like that on paper was a little like inviting your mother to come in and watch you masturbate! Crumb and the other undergrounders had done lots of sex stuff, but this was gay sex, and that always gets looked at differently. And what were my readers gonna think about me?”

  Editor and cartoonist Robert Triptow’s excellently subtle cover to Gay Comix #11 (1987). Note the fruit shapes and the T-Shirt legend, “We are everywhere.”

  Howard Cruse’s brutally honest Billy Goes Out strip from Gay Comix #1, which revealed the cruising scene in New York pre-AIDS. The artist described publishing the strip as “a little like inviting your mother to come in and watch you masturbate!”

  The late Jerry Mills’s colorful cover to Gay Comix #6 (1985) featuring the cast from his popular strip, Poppers. Mills passed away in 1993, tragically, from HIV complications, aged just 41.

  Gay Comix became a clarion call for cartoonists who hadn’t previously been open about their homosexuality in their sequential art, and a new generation of gay and lesbian artists and writers emerged and flourished. As Cruse wrote in his editorial for issue #2, “The goal is to share our authentic selves, however perceptive, however flawed.”

  The gay bookstores supported the comix anthology and further issues were released on a tortuously slow schedule of one per year.

  Of course, AIDS became a major factor in the gay scene and by the fourth issue of Gay Comix, in 1984, Cruse felt that the anthology could no longer avoid the issue and wrote and drew a sensitive strip, Safe Sex, which followed up on his Billy character from issue #1.

  After four issues — and wanting to get back to more personal projects, like his Wendel strip — Cruse passed the reigns of Gay Comix on to fellow contributor and cartoonist Robert Triptow. “Editing a book involves a huge amount of correspondence. It was a very time-consuming thing, but it was never seriously income-producing,” Cruse explained. Triptow (and his successor, Andy Mangels) attempted to increase the frequency of publication, with varying degrees of success.

  Gay Comix changed its name to Gay Comics, signifying the switch from an underground publication to mainstream acceptance with #15, after Mangels took over the editorship with #14. He remained editor for eight years, and 10 issues, overseeing contributions from such gay comic stars as Donna Barr, Jeff Krell, Tim Barela, Alison Bechdel, and P. Craig Russell, as well as German cartoonist, Ralf König. Gay Comics’ last issue, #25, was released in 1998, and the series remains a fondly remembered and important, if erratic, publication.

  The cover to Gay Comix #12 (1988), by Brad Parker, makes an amusing commentary on effeminate gay men and butch lesbians.

  Major Power and Spunky, an above-average gay Captain America parody strip written by Mal Coney and drawn by Sean Doran that appeared in Buddies and Gay Comix.

  TOM OF FINLAND

  Despite the success of Gay Comix in reaching a broader audience and gaining acceptance in society, there were actually gay comics and cartoonists serving the underground LGBT community long before. The US “Muscle” or “Beefcake” magazines of the 1950s masqueraded as sports and physical exercise publications, but were essentially gay pin-up magazines. Titles like Physique Pictorial, Vim, Tomorrow’s Man, and American Manhood featured covers by quality draftsmen like George Quaintance and Etienne (aka Dom Orejudos) who drew lavish homoerotic fantasies featuring chiseled, toned gods oiling each other down. But one artist — who would become synonymous with gay erotica and comics — outshone them all, Touko Laaksonen, much better know as Tom of Finland.

  Unsurprisingly, Laaksonen was born in Finland in May 1920. Growing up in the wilds, Laaksonen was surrounded by rough farmers, loggers, and frontiersmen and these would have a profound effect on his creative and emotional life. Raised by his teacher-parents, he loved art, literature, and music and was playing the piano and drawing comic strips by the age of five.

  Aged 19, Laaksonen went to Helsinki to study advertising at art school. His lure toward men expanded to sexy city types that he found in the cosmopolitan port, such as construction workers, sailors, and policemen, themes that would feature heavily in his work. When Russia invaded Finland, Laaksonen was drafted into the army as a lieutenant. In the World War II blackouts Laaksonen experienced his first sexual encounters, with German soldiers in their smart uniforms. After the war, Laaksonen continued studying art and the piano, but with gay sex now a rarity, Laaksonen returned to his teenage habit of masturbating over his self-drawn homoerotic fantasies.

  He did freelance artwork during the day, and at night played the piano at parties and cafes, joining Helsinki’s bohemian set. He avoided the fledgling gay scene because it was dominated by the flamboyant effete queens, who had no appeal to the macho-loving artist. Laaksonen traveled regularly and frequented the gay cruising scenes in nearly every major city in Europe, but in 1953 he met Veli, a fellow Finn who would become his partner for the next 28 years.

  At the end of 1956, a friend suggested Laaksonen should send his erotic artwork to Physique Pictorial, a popular US muscle magazine. Believing his Finnish name was too complex for Americans he signed them simply “Tom.” The artwork was an instant hit and appeared on the cover of the spring 1957 issue. It featured a blond laughing lumberjack, drawn by “Tom of Finland” and a legend was born.

  Two typically toned petrol pump attendants prepare to provide full service in 1972’s Kake: service station minicomic by Tom of Finland.

  Tom of Finland’s closest artwork to a traditional comic page featuring Mike, circa 1965. The character’s original Finnish masculine name, Vicky, was changed for the US market.

  A penciled cover to the very first Kake story, The Intruder, from 1968. Note, the character’s name is made from two erect penises.

  Tom had always drawn sequential strips — or “dirty drawings” as he called them — as far back as 1946. He developed his erotic 20-page minicomics, with one panel per page, giving them to friends. His stories,
undoubtedly inspired by his cruising years, involved various homoerotic stereotypes, from sailors and bikers to policemen and pin-striped office workers, picking each other up for intense, and always happy, sexual encounters. He was encouraged to carry on these strips in Physique Pictorial and by 1965 was looking for an ongoing character to base his vignettes around. After experimenting with the blonde Mike and Jack, he finally settled on the leather-clad biker, Kake, in 1968, published by the Danish company DFT and subsequently by Coq and Revolt Press in Sweden.

  Despite his popularity in the United States, erotic and homosexual art still didn’t pay very well and it wasn’t until 15 years after he was first published before Tom of Finland could to quit his day job in advertising and concentrate full-time to his erotic art.

  In 1973, Tom’s first art exhibition, in Hamburg, Germany, turned into a disaster when all but one of the pictures were stolen. Badly bruised by the experience, it would be another five years (in 1978) before Tom would hold another exhibition, this time in Los Angeles, which surprisingly was his first trip to America. The introverted Helsinki artist soon became an international gay celebrity, with such friends as the erotic photographer Robert Mapplethorpe. In 1979 Tom became business partners with Canadian-American Durk Dehner, and two years later, in 1981, Tom’s lover, Veli, died of throat cancer. Throughout the 1980s, Tom began splitting his time between L.A. with Dehner and Helsinki, but at the age of 68 the artist was diagnosed with emphysema and was forced to reduce his traveling.

  When the disease made his hand tremble too much, Tom switched to working in pastels, creating a series of color nudes until he died on 7 November 1991 from an emphysema-induced stroke.

  Tom’s work helped change the gay world’s self-image, from pale shadows of women to strong, healthy, masculine sun-worshippers in boots and leather. This “social engineering” via his art was Tom’s plan from the beginning, consciously striving to show homosexuality in a positive, upbeat, and open light. “I work very hard to make sure that the men I draw having sex are proud men having happy sex!”

  His legacy lives on in the Tom of Finland Foundation set up by the artist and Dehner in 1984, initially to archive all his work. Since then the non-profit organisation has undertaken the noble and monumental task of promoting and preserving erotic works of art.

  A selection of scenes from the 20-page Kake story, Cock-Hungry Cops, originally published in 1968. Despite the apparent molestation, no one is ever really hurt, or looks particularly distressed in Tom’s erotic fantasy world.

  RALF KÖNIG

  Born in August 1960, in Soest, Westphalia, König came out as a gay cartoonist in 1979, when he created his SchwulComix (which translates as Gay Comics) strip about the gay scene, in various underground comic magazines such as Zomix and the gay periodical Rosa Flieder. In 1981, he enrolled at the Academy of Fine Arts in Düsseldorf, studying for five years. In the first of these years, three collected works appeared, Sarius, Das Sensationelle Comic Book, and SchwulComix.

  Bizarrely, in 1983, he was commissioned to create the series Bodo und Heinz for the snappily named magazine Arbeit und Sicherheit im Deutschen Bergbau (Work and Safety in German Coalmines), and the strip ran for two years.

  With the publication of SchwulComix 2, in 1984, by Rosa Winkel, König finally found his own style. Inspired by French cartoonist Claire Bretécher’s minimalist art, König created a series of satirical vignettes of the daily life of gay culture. Another two volumes of SchwulComix appeared in 1985 and 1986 (reprinted as Silvestertuntenball, aka The Queer’s New Year’s Party, and Sahneschnittchen, or Creamslice) and König was to become recognized as an important chronicler of gay culture.

  In the English-speaking world, König’s best known work is Kondom des Grauens (The Killer Condom) created in 1987. The parody detective story spawned a sequel, Bis auf die Knochen (Until Blood Flows) in 1990. 1987 also saw the release of Der Bewegte Mann (Maybe, Maybe Not, aka Most Desired Man or The Turbulent Man). It was König’s mainstream breakthrough title and brought him to the attention of the wider public. There was a follow-up a year later, Pretty Baby and Der Bewegte Mann, which was made into a movie in 1994 with over 6.5 million German cinemagoers seeing it. It became the country’s second most successful film to date. In fact, many of his books have been adapted for the silver screen in Germany.

  Ralf König’s modern sex comedy, Maybe, Maybe Not (aka Pretty Baby in Germany), sees the masculine, and seemingly straight, Axel move in with gay activist Norbert Brummer and cross-dressing Walter when his girlfriend kicks him out.

  König continued to broaden his creative horizons and — in the tradition of Picasso and Aubrey Beardsley — adapted Aristotle’s sex comedy, Lysistrata, and paid homage to Tom of Finland with his book safere Zeiten (1988). König’s stories often feature the potato-nosed couple, Konrad and Paul, as the central protagonists (originally created for the gay magazine Magnus in 1990) and the cartoonist continues to recount their chronicles of everyday gay life.

  Always a political animal, König tackled the sensitive topic of AIDS in Super Paradise (1999), and gay marriage in Sie Dürfen Sich Jetzt Küssen (You May Now Kiss). His blend of humor and passionate plots has helped spread the message of tolerance toward gays and lesbians, and in 1989 König created eight comics for the German AIDS Prevention Society.

  Despite his wide-ranging success, the ‘90s also saw criticism and lawsuits from the conservative Bavarian youth authorities. In the same year that he won Germany’s highest comics award—1992’s Max und Moritz-Prize for “Best German Comic Artist”—König’s book Bullenklöten! (Bull’s Balls!) was deemed harmful to young people. However, the case was dismissed due to the book’s artistic content. Yet another investigation was launched by the German state of Meiningen’s public prosecutor in 1996. It involved the confiscation of comics from over 1,000 shops across Germany, including The Killer Condom and—bizarrely—Art Spiegelman’s Holocaust memoir, Maus. Typically, any obscenity trial failed to materialize, but the heavy-handed authoritarian intimidation is reminiscent of the tactics used on comic shops in the USA by an overzealous establishment.

  2004 saw König create the anthropomorphic series Roy & Al about two dogs who belong to a gay couple. During 2005 and 2006 he wrote his biggest work to date, the two-volume Dschinn Dschinn, which dealt with the phenomenon of radical Islam. König also draws short stories for the monthly gay magazine Männer Aktuell and the French adult humor anthology Fluide Glacial. His books have been translated into 14 languages and sold almost seven million copies so far, making him the world’s most popular author of gay fiction.

  Axel trips out in König’s Maybe, Maybe Not. The strip was turned into a massively popular movie in Germany and spawned a sequel graphic novel, Maybe, Maybe Not…Again.

  Axel, the sexually ambiguous philanderer, from the cover of the US edition König’s graphic novel, Maybe, Maybe Not.

  PATRICK FILLION

  Alongside Joe Phillips, Patrick Fillion is possibly one of the most renowned of the new wave of homoerotic comic artists. Born in Quebec, Canada, in 1973, Fillion began drawing comic book art and nudes at a very early age. Growing up in a small Catholic community didn’t make things easy, but Patrick persisted in illustrating the male form. When Fillion moved to Vancouver and discovered the gay community he became increasingly comfortable with his sexuality and began pushing the artistic envelope with his work, moving from slightly homoerotic to more uninhibited hardcore comics.

  Having been inspired by US comic books at an early age, Fillion was no stranger to the superhero genre and he began incorporating these themes into his work, with strong gay overtones — superheroes in skin-tight costumes, barely concealing huge phalluses, which hark back to Tom of Finland’s uniformed hunks. Fillion and his partner, Fraser, set up their own publishing company, Class Comics, and released humorous erotic comics like Camili-Cat, “a sexy Felinoid ‘bottom’ [submissive] who can’t seem to get enough hardcore sex,” who originally appeared in the Meatmen gay comic
s anthology; and Naked Justice, “a daring superhero with a minimalist approach to fashion and a very large and unique weapon.” Other Fillion titles included Satisfaction Guaranteed and his popular Boytoons. Class Comics are published in France by H&O Editions, and Bruno Gmunder—Joe Phillips’ publisher—released four of Fillion’s art books; Heroes, Mighty Males, Hot Chocolate, and Bliss: The Art of Patrick Fillion.

  Fillion also illustrates the gay magazines Black Inches, Latin Inches, and Torso magazine. The reserved and private artist has always been a supporter of fellow gay creators and helps emerging artists to find their voice, through his blogs, Class Comics’ anthology, Boytoons magazine, and Artistic License. In 2006 Class started publishing other gay creators such as Logan, Max, HvH, Mike, and Zan Christensen.

  This Camili-Cat in…The Djinns strip by Patrick Fillion originally appeared in Meatmen #25 in 2002.

  Patrick Fillion continues Tom of Finland’s homoerotic tradition of a surfeit of oversized phalli. (“In space no one can hear you cream.”)

  A sated Satan slumbers.

  Fillion’s permanently masked, but nude, crime fighter, Naked Justice.

  Fillion’s cheeky Zahn in 5 Easy Steps strip combines fantasy comics with extreme erotica, turning traditional themes on their head with a homoerotic approach.

  Another adventure for alien sexplorer, Camili-Cat in The Game.

  ERIC SHANOWER, P. CRAIG RUSSELL, CRAIG HAMILTON, AND PHIL JIMENEZ

  Possibly the four most famous openly gay artists working in mainstream comics today are Eric Shanower, P. Craig Russell, Craig Hamilton, and Phil Jimenez. All—with the exception of Jimenez—have contributed stories to Gay Comix, while also creating more conventional comics for publishers like Marvel and Dark Horse. Russell is renowned for his successful adaptations of classic operas, Michael Moorcock novels, and Oscar Wilde’s Fairy Tales, as well as working with Neil Gaiman on the homoerotic Murder Mysteries graphic novel. His delicate, romantic artwork has won him both a Harvey and Eisner Award, and he came out to the industry in an interview with The Comics Journal in 1991, when he described himself as “Just another left-handed, night-dwelling, gay libertarian cartoonist.”