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….