RHINO / ALEC – I agree because I think most gay comics are mainstream and we kind of stereotype ourselves! You see the characters listening to Madonna or shopping at Pottery Barn!

TONY- Or just having sex! It seems to me like most gay comics are…

RHINO / ALEC – …just sex comics. Which I have nothing against! I love sex comics! But it’s like, I do think the artists assembled here have set ourselves apart.

ABBY- Yeah, I think it’s funny because when people say “gay comics” on the one hand they wonder, are there really that many working in the alternative gay area to even be able to set themselves apart, and separating everything out like that? There’s Howard Cruse who was such a big influence on me, and I think a lot of other people here, probably, and cartoonists in general, and folks like “Love & Rockets” who kind of broach gay subjects, but I don’t know if I can even think of lists of loads of Mainstream gay comics, much less Alternative gay comics. I but I noticed when I was on a book tour for Tough Love with Tim Fish, who did the excellent comic Cavalcade of Boys, Tim and I did a signing at A Different Light in LA, and I remembered that there used to be A Different Light here, and it was pretty awesome, but the one there was really small, and yet it had this insanely large Porno Comics section, and I never heard of ANY of these comics! I was like…there are just so many gay porn comics that I never had any idea that were out there!  It was a shock! All this stuff out there, kind of in the underbelly, but It was defiantly straight-out porn comics, there weren’t even any stories. You know?

TONY- That does seem to contrast to our comics, which are very story oriented. I know for myself, even when I do a one-panel sex comic, I try to put a whole big story into it with just the single panel and caption. And I always seem to gravitate toward a story that includes music in some way. Some of us here have been in, or are now in bands… as well as being involved with comics.  Why do you think comics and rock-n-roll seem to go together?

ABBY – They’re both part of pop culture maybe? There may be a connection between story-telling and lyric-writing.

TONY- Do you have any ideas about it Craig?

ABBY – Wait, Russ is a musician as well.

TONY – Oh, are you really, Russ? What do you play?

RUSS – I play piano and write songs, and sing them but I’m not a rock & roller, unlike the fabulous Abby Denson here. I do my own thing. 

CRAIG- I dunno, I think punk rock and underground comix come from the same place. It’s not mainstream because we can enjoy ourselves by being…

ABBY … DIY.

TONY – Yeah, DIY.  Okay, Where do think gay comics have been in the past, and where you see gay themed comics headed in the future,… in terms of themes?

RUSS - I can tell you this, when I was 12 or 13 or 14, I grew up in New Jersey and we used to take art trips from NY to Manhattan to look at art museums and of course we’d all go shopping, and I went to Forbidden Planet comic book shop, not the current location, the old location, a bigger one, and even as a kid I think part of me knew I was gay, although my sexuality, as far as my awareness of it was concerned was a blank. In the early eights I didn’t know what “gay” meant, but I remember buying Issue # 1 of “Gay Comics” it was a comic book called “Gay Comics” and I also bought something, I think was called “Tits & Clits.”  I was buying all the dirty comics! I didn’t know why, I was just a freshman in school…

ABBY – They were actually not legally allowed to sell you those. I don’t know how at age 14 they let you buy those…

RUSS- …and I remember I was so…this is how much my brain was on auto-pilot, when my mother picked me up after school to take me home, I showed her. “Look what I bought.” Because I didn’t even have a clue that there was anything wrong with them. I was so ‘space-cadet,’ even more than I am now. But, issue #1 of Gay Comics had a few things that really stuck with me…because I lost the comic, I don’t remember what happened…       

ABBY- Your mother didn’t take it away???

RUSS- Oh, no, no.  But anyway, Howard Cruse had one story in it and in this story, “Billy Goes Out,”  he flashed back to something where he and his partner were having a Gay Pride March in the city, and it wasn’t shown in the story but his friend got killed by an angry mob. And that really stayed with me, along with a lot of other things in the comic about the shame of growing up gay. But today, kids come out at 13, and it’s come so far that the comics today aren’t about being closeted, they’re about being who you are and being proud. It’s such a freer world.

ABBY – Well a lot of it depend on where you are, what town you live in, I’m sure. One thing I noticed what that I was getting a lot of correspondence by email….now it’s Myspace…all my fan mail, before I used to get a really depressing, freaked out letter, which is why I put a suicide hotline phone number in the back of the book, that was really important,  but …I mean, like, I’m really trying to promote getting Tough Love into schools and libraries because it really has a lot of important information in the back that can help kids, and I’m trying to get more speaking engagements in libraries and stuff. But I also notice now that I get a lot of kids who say “I can’t find it in my library, and I can’t ask my parents to buy it for me” so now my crusade is to make sure to get it into as many libraries as possible, so that when kids want to read it, it won’t cost them anything. I tell them the ISBN number and tell them how to request it online.

TONY – When I was a kid they never even had any kind of comic book in a library.

ABBY – And now they have whole graphic novel sections.   

TONY- I will open this up now to members of the audience, do any of you have a question for our panel. Yes, you in the back?

QUESTION –  This is a question for anyone. What’s going on at Marvel and DC for gay comics. I notice especially at Marvel they are killing-off a lot of gay characters. That seems to be going backwards to me, and I wonder if there may or may not be an edict from the company heads to kill them.

ABBY – When I was at San Diego Con, I got all kinds of questions like that. And it’s funny because, I mean there were many questions especially about Batwoman, and I don’t know about anybody else here but I only write for DC on the Cartoon Network books, so I’m totally not in the loop about other books, but I think that DC has kind of in the long term been known to be more gay-friendly in a way, but it also does seem that in the mainstream comics, there are so many people involved and it’s very committee-driven, and sales-driven and a book can come out and be cancelled right away if it doesn’t sell, so any decision they make, it’s very hard to make a radical decision stick. They’re all behind it for the press they’ll get, and as soon as someone says “I don’t know if it’ll work out” it’ll be gone. No one can really predict long-term what’ll happen with the big two. It’s just more like; “what are they doing this month?”

CRAIG –  With Marvel, I don’t know if there’s an official or unofficial policy, but they try not to have major gay characters in their books, they are all sort of minor characters. It’s somewhat publically that way. But minor characters of any kind tend to be there to be killed anyway.

TONY – Hey Rhino, I always hoped in the Legion of Super Heroes that Ultra Boy was gay, but I guess not? I guess Brainiac is the gay one? What do you think?

RHINO / ALEC -   Element Lad is the ambiguously gay one. He has a pink costume and very short shorts.  Actually, they had the first male/male kiss a few years ago, but they twisted it around to make it just a ‘friendly’ kiss. But it was cool. In a way even cooler than it being a gay kiss because it showed there can be affection between males without it being gay, but some people thought it was a cop-out.  

ABBY – Probably a good resource for questions like that is to go to Gay League.com, they always have all the up-to-date information on all the mainstream comics. If I need to know something, I can always look it up. And also Prism Comics. That’s P-R-I-S-M, because I know when I say it, it sounds like “prison!”  But it’s Prism, like…the rainbow. That’s a really good resource for any gay comic information you might be looking for.

RUSS- I would like to interject something, not about Prism, but about prison; don’t put your address in the back of your comics because you’ll letters from prisoners.

RHINO / ALEC – What’s wrong with that?

RUSS – Okay I’m forward Bubba’s emails to you.

ABBY -  When I was first running Tough Love in XY magazine, it didn’t really say what gender I was, and there was no photo…   

TONY – Oh that’s right. And Abby could be a male.

ABBY – So I lot a lot of gay boys asking for dates, asking things like; “do you look like your character?” I also got one email from a fan in ....England.... who sent me a picture of himself in his underwear, and I was like…”um, by the way, I’m female,” and he was like; “that’s okay, I’m bisexual.” 

Tape ran out….

Abby, I’ve interviewed you before, and when I asked why you wanted to write the story of gay karate boys in love, you answered; “who wouldn’t love to tell the story of gay karate boys in love?” (audience laughter.) But it’s actually Kung Fu boys.

ABBY: It’s Kung Fu boys,

TONY: But no one else before you did it, so what quality unique to you brought this story out of you, and onto the comic book page?

ABBY:  Well I think that there’s various things. One is I liked comics a lot and I was studying illustration at Parson’s school of design when I did it. And I was getting into Manga, back in…

TONY: Explain for the audience what Manga is.

ABBY: It’s Japanese comics, which probably by now everyone knows because it’s finally come to the forefront of American publishing and the comics industry these days. But, um, the uh…sorry…uh so I was getting into Manga, and I saw at a convention something called Shonen-ai Yawi Manga, which is now available also, and it’s kinda like gay comics about gay teen boys but they’re usually actually written  and drawn by girls in Japan for a female audience, so they’re not really realistic in any way. But I thought I liked the concept and I thought it was pretty original to what was going on in American comics. Because I wanted to do a romance comic, but I thought it would be a little pat to do a straight romance comic, so then when I saw that I said; “Hey, no one’s doing this here, and I wanna do a story like that.” The other thing is, I wasn’t raised in a homophobic environment, so I think it’s a little bit of an activist story, even though it not really (inaudible.)  I’m not exactly trying to be like…be political, I mean when I was writing it—but then in hindsight I realized it was political.      

TONY:  Can you describe how you came to think of the title “Tough Love?”

ABBY: It just came to me. I don’t really have a good way of saying it. It just happened. It dawned on me light a giant light-bulb over my head. I thought…”Romance!”  And there’s difficulties in romance, so…

TONY: When you learned your comic strip would be run in a relatively mainstream gay magazine, did you ever feel any concern about ‘selling out’ the underground zine world? In what way, if any, did it feel different from your work on mainstream comics like Powerpuff Girls, or Josie & The Pussycats?

ABBY: Not too much. What happened is I originally made it as a mini-comic. If people have the mini-comics,  they’re pretty rare I guess. I don’t know if anyone ever saw them on Ebay, but they were rare little mini-comics that I put out first, and I sent a copy to XY, and I inquired in my letter if they wanted to review it, or maybe run it as a strip, which I totally didn’t expect in any way that they would do that. I remember it was hand-written on a torn up note – it wasn’t like a professional submission, um but then the editor called me and said he wanted to run it as a regular! And I was like: “WHA?!”  

TONY: Was having this published  in some way, instrumental in getting you  to write strips for more mainstream comics like Josie & The Pussycats?

ABBY: I think so, definitely. Because I was studying illustration in school, and I hadn’t really gotten into writing for comics until I did Tough Love, and then when I was finishing up with school I went to do some interviews at DC Comics to try and get some jobs, and I was then able to interview with Heidi MacDonald, and she said “Hey, there’s going to be a PowerPuff Girls comic book and you should submit pitches for it.”  She was familiar with my work, because I knew her from Friends of Lulu, which is a women’s comics group for promoting female participation in comics. She knew that, because it was in XY and she read it, she knew that I could write and could meet deadlines. Because every month, or whenever they needed it, I had a comic in there and I was steady for two years. So even  if was nothing like the PowerPuff Girls, she knew at least that I was professional and I was doing something published, and she knew I could tell a story.

 TONY:  How did it happen that this anthology of Tough Love strips come to be collected in this book?

From the Boy Trouble bio :  Rhino (real name, Alec) is a Legion Of Super Heroes fanatic living in Hell’s Kitchen. His stuff has appeared in Holy Titclamps, Strange Looking Exile, Honcho, In Touch, Paper, and the ....Philadelphia.... Inquirer.  His own zines are Amputease, Asshole, and Porny. He’s currently working on Trunk Obsessive Sketchbook.

TONY - In 1996 ..Robert Kirby.., the co-editor of Boy Trouble, illustrated your Story “Curious Behavior.” That story dates from 1984 and therefore it predates the comic strip. Can you explain the circumstances how your story came to be this comic strip? 

RHINO / ALEC - 

TONY - Were you pleased by the way the illustrations turned out, or did you have misgivings that perhaps the cute cartoons would detract from your matter-of-fact words?

RHINO / ALEC –

TONY - The story you tell seems somewhat unapologetic about having homosexual sex while on illegal narcotics.  Should readers be alarmed by this?

TONY- When you read a story like this, it is sometimes difficult for readers to tell whether it is fictional, autobiographical, or some combination of both. What are your your feelings about this being unclear?

RHINO / ALEC - 

TONY – Do you feel you have more stores that might lend themselves to the comics medium, which you might want to collaborate with Robert or someone else on?

[The tape resumed almost right before Craig’s interview section.]

Craig Bostick is an illustrator, designer, and photographer living in ....Boston..... He currently writes and draws Go Go Girl, an ongoing comic book series about the lighter side of heavy drinking. He’s also the creator of Crash: The Life and Death of a Germ, Fuchsia Galactica Summer Special, and several stories that appeared in the 10^th anniversary of Boy Trouble. His illustrations have appeared in various publications including the book Bazaar Bizarre published by Viking-Penguin. Craig is currently working on compiling the Go Go Girl stories into one sobriety-defying volume. He writes songs and gets loud in Spoilsport, the band he started in 2001 with his boyfriend, now husband, Jon.

TONY  -  You have six contributions in The Boy Trouble anthology, including two collaborations with the book’s other co-editor, David Kelly. How did your collaborations with David for “Boys On The Beach” and “Hair Today, Gone Tomorrow” come about?

TONY – The remainder of your contributions feature your own illustrations. Please describe the process by which you developed your distinctive approach to illustrating comics. How did you come to create your own I individual style?

CRAIG-  Um. I don’t know.

ABBY- Tony, that question’s too hard!

TONY- Really? Okay, I’ll ask more softball questions I guess.  Like Russ, who features skaters in his comic strip, two of your strips in Boy Trouble also depict skateboarding. Is skating something you do?

CRAIG- Um, no actually, not anymore. Before I moved to ....Boston.... I had my skateboard but I forgot to put it in the truck. It’s still in my parent’s garage and I haven’t skated since. That was ten years ago.

TONY- Why did you choose it as a theme for the two stories here?

CRAIG- Sometimes I just remember things that happened back when I was a skater hanging out with skaters, and although the stories aren’t true, or not at least one-hundred percent accurate, it’s just like jumping off of things that happened when I was around skaters.

TONY – I’d say the strips collected here, at first seem to be short little vignettes, but also strive to do more than just recount events. They appear to strive to express of some sort of intangible feeling about one’s own “identity”. Or would you say I reading too much into it?

CRAIG – No. It all goes together for an idea for an atmosphere, or a felling and the story is only there to reinforce that. I just have a certain feeling about something that happened, some ‘time’ that I’m remembering, and I’ll just start thinking ‘what if this happened instead?’ They are combinations of event that somehow come together.   

Brett Hopkins, a graphic designer and illustrator living in New York City, loves you all. He contributed to and co-edited Young Bottoms In Love (at popimage.com), and his stories have been collected in two handsome, full-color comic book volumes. He is also the illustrator and co-creator of the ongoing comic book series, Two Shy Guys. His favorite word is sus-urr-us.

TONY-  Your artwork has a quality of looking like snapshots to me, in their composition. Would you say your illustrative style is inspired by photography? Why or why not?

BRETT – Not in a direct way, but I strive for a certain kind of realism because the thing is, I’m not usually drawing from a photographic reference, it just comes from out-of-my-head, but I try to play on some poses that look true to life, and my vision of what looks true to life is dominated by photography. It’s not entirely conscious, no.  

TONY-  I think the storyline in your piece “Country Home”, which takes place during a Thanksgiving family reunion, depicts a young gay man’s feelings of ambivalence or perhaps even alienation from his own family and relatives. Do you think there’s something about that, unique to gay people, or is it universal for most family get-togethers?

BRETT – I think that anyone who comes home after living far away for a long period of time comes back a lot different because everyone changes and grows and you don’t quite belong there the way you used to. In that way everyone feels that kind of alienation which is both a good thing and a bad thing. For gay kids, and gay adults and older adults as well there’s an extra tinge of emotion because one would assume you’re alienated to begin with. It’s certainly been there every time I’ve gone back to visit my family, and although I love my family, but, you know, I tried to inject a lot of that feeling into this.

TONY – What do you hope to convey through the re-acquaintance of the characters of Matt & Amos to each other?

BRETT- Well I wanted there to be a sense of connection underneath the obvious sense of alienation from the whole area. I’m from ..Texas.., so this is of course where it all takes place, and although I didn’t base this on particular people exactly, but the story is kind of about my feelings about ....Texas.... and belonging there and not belonging there, and I wanted him to go in there expecting to feel alienated, and then meeting his old friend…

TONY – Was he an old friend? I couldn’t really tell if he was a friend, a cousin…

BRETT – It wasn’t… I didn’t develop the characters to the point where I knew exactly where this all started or where it was going, but in my head, your know, this isn’t even where…you’ll notice Matt’s parents aren’t even in the picture here…and you notice he’s driving there from the airport in Dallas and this is not where he grew up, which is far from where the rest of his family is, and so this is someone that he maybe saw every once in a while and didn’t realize he had this connection with.  

TONY – What do you hope sets your work apart from other artists writing and illustrating gay-themed comics and what do you hope you contribute to the field that other comics artists don’t? 

BRETT – That’s a good question. It’s not something that I try to think about actually, because I don’t want to be seeing it as a competition. That in itself is kind of alienation to me. I find I’m much more comfortable creating this stuff when I’m thinking about it purely in term of what I want to do here, rather than what I’m bringing to the table for other people. I guess what characterizes what I do, I think in some was it’s that I’m undeveloped. I haven’t been creating long enough to know what the heart and soul of my art is. The first comic I did was in 2003, so I’m really just finding what it is that sets me apart.  

TONY- What exactly  IS sus-urr-us??

BRETT – a whispering sound. (PART TWO SOON)

Thanks to my pal Dan (AKA: Deke) there's now an excerpt from Green Pubes, my 1995 animated queercore movie, on youtube.  Check it out if you care to:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vVO5rjJi9G8

Coming soon, THE LOLLIPOP GENERATION a film by G.B. Jones, will have it's New York City debut on TUESDAY, DECEMBER 16th, 2008 at Light Industry, 55 33rd Street, (between 2nd and 3rd Avenue), 3rd Floor BROOKLYN, NY. The film stars Jena Von Brucker, Jane Danger, Vaginal Davis, K.C. Klass, and Mark Ewert, and features Joel Gibb, Calvin Johnson, Jen Smith, Scott Treleaven, Andrew Cecil, Becky Palov, Mitchell Watkins, Rachel Peffer, Torry Colichio, D.D. Donato, Paul P., Gary Fembot, Ian Phillips, Steveo, Christy Cameron, and more, including...me, Anonymous Boy. In addition, I also contributed a song entitled "Lollipop Generation" for the wonderful soundtrack, which also includes music by The Hidden Cameras, Bunny & The Lakers, The Swishin' Duds, Jane Danger, and Mariae Nascenti.

Tickets $6.00 at the door, for more information visit www.lightindustry.com

G.B. Jones, the Toronto filmaker extrordinaire, is expected to be there for the screening and she will converse with K8 HARDY afterwards. I also shall be there!

You can see a gallery of selected images from the film in the photos section of this myspace page, and look for a new issue of my zine Homopunk World, featuring an interview with director G.B. Jones! I hope to have the zine finished in time for the screening!

Come see the long awaited feature film THE LOLLIPOP GENERATION by G.B. JONES!  It is an incredible movie that I'm extraordinarily proud to be a part of.

In California, voters overturned same-sex marriage rights with "Proposition 8" which established marriage as a union between a man and a woman. It passed with 52.1% of the vote, against 47.9% opposed, (as of this writing, 94.6 of the precincts have reported.) It's a major victory for religious conservatives seeking to ban gay marriage in other states, and a crippling setback for the recognition of the equal rights for gay people, nationwide. The proposition changes the California State constitution to define marriage as only between a man and a woman. The over-18 thousand same-sex marriages that have been performed in California will now be nullified.

So what can be done about it?  It seems to me the last time a Constitution was amended to alienate people from their rights happened when the Federal Constitution was amended for prohibition which was passed in order to ban Americans from their right to drink alchoholic beverages.  The only reason that ridiculous ban was overturned was the fact that the country erupted in such total chaos, the public realized the ban of alchohol caused more problems than it solved.

That is why I urge all gay, lesbian and otherwise queer Californians, (as well as any heterosexual Californians of conscience) to do.  CREATE CHAOS!  

Make it so that the public, who voted to alienate gay people from their equal rights will be so frustrated by what you do they'll be the ones begging to have gay marriage back.

From now on, here's what you do whenever you go to a wedding, when they say: "If anyone here knows of any reason why this marriage should not take place speak now or forever hold your peace."  You should STAND UP and register your protest!  Say: "YES! I protest this marriage because in a country where our rights are unalienable, I AM BEING ALIENATED FROM MY EQUAL RIGHT TO PURSUE HAPPINESS!"  Let them know: "As long as homosexuals cannot marry, heterosexuals should also be denied the right in the interest of fairness and justice!"

Make every heterosexual wedding an event for you to protest.

If heterosexuals are allowed to have "special rights" that homosexuals can never hope to have, then why shouldn't we ruin their "special day?"

MAKE THIS BAN CAUSE MORE PROBLEMS THAN IT SOLVES!

Turn every heterosexual wedding into a spectacle! Scan the newspapers for wedding notices and show up to any and every wedding. Do this until it will be all the parents of all the brides out there who are crying to their legislators: "Please DO SOMETHING! Overturn the ban, because my daughter is getting married soon, and these people are showing up everywhere, and they'll ruin by daughter's wedding day!"

I do not advocate 'disorderly conduct,' nor 'disturbing the peace,' nor breaking any laws. I am not calling on you to throw ink on a wedding dress or light stink bombs during the ceremony. A protest can be done in a dignified and respectful way, but nevertheless it should be done, and done in a way that makes our displeasure and our denial of rights, THEIR problem!  

FORCE HETEROSEXUALS to be the ones to start calling upon their legislators to put another Proposition on the ballot to overturn this disgusting violation of our equal rights.  Protest every wedding until it happens.

Remember: The only thing that will overturn the gay marriage ban is to make the ban itself the CAUSE of the problem. They'll have to be the ones BEGGING their legislators to reverse it!  They have to be made understand that we won't just roll over and take their bullying lying down. They have to be forced to understand that what they did, by passing Prop 8, will have unforseen consequences for THEM!

They do not live in their own little bubble-world. WE live in their world too. Make your displeasure known. Register your discontent!

At last: A real reason to show up to Church!  Now, go out and ruin someone's wedding day. Obviously, they hate us already, so we might as well give them a darn good reason to.

As Bette Davis once said: "You have to have the guts to be hated. That's the hardest part."

There will be an exhibition of queer zines at the NY Art Book Fair (nyartbookfair. com), which will probably include some of my Anonymous Boy, Homopunk World and Straight & Narrow zines in the display.  The exhibit is called, QUEER ZINES and it's for Printed Matter's annual fair of contemporary art books, art catalogs, artists' books, art periodicals, and 'zines.

LOCATION
Phillips de Pury & Company
450 West 15th Street at 10th Avenue, 3rd floor, NYC

FAIR HOURS
Friday/Saturday, October 24 & 25, 2008, 11am - 7pm
Sunday, October 26, 2008, 11am - 5pm

Admission to the NY Art Book Fair is free

QUEER ZINES: From Straight to Hell to BUTT Magazine, an inclusive historical survey of over 100 publications that examines the continuing transgressive potential of queer and punk zines. Curated by Philip Aarons and AA Bronson, with Alex Gartenfeld. A comprehensive catalogue is available for purchase.

http://www.amazon.com/Book-Boy-Trouble-2/dp/1931160651/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=