Lawrence D. Mass

Firstly, I really want to apologize for the lack of articles this month (Pride month of all months!), my job has been insanely busy lately and, unfortunately — I’m sure you’ve all noticed and are probably upset by this too — queer people still have to work in June. So, while I was really trying to get this post up three weeks ago….I’m doing the best I can right now. (And honestly, this could have — maybe should have — been a lot longer but…life is getting in my way.)

Anyways, you all probably noticed earlier this month a lot of attention being paid to the 40th anniversary of the official beginning of the AIDS crisis in the United States. And while its certainly true that June 5th was when the CDC published its first report, it wasn’t the first time the growing epidemic had been publicly written about. Dr. Lawrence D. Mass had covered it nearly a month earlier.

Lawrence D. Mass was born in Macon, Georgia on June 11, 1946. I can’t really find anything about his childhood, so I assume it was pretty uneventful — which is pretty good considering he was growing up gay and Jewish in Georgia in the late 1940’s and 50’s. He graduated from the University of California at Berkley in 1969 with a B.A. and then attended the Abraham Lincoln School of Medicine at the University of Illinois, graduating with his M.D. in 1973. Following that, in association with Harvard Medical School, he completed a residency in anesthesiology at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston.

In 1973, the American Psychiatry Association changed its classification of homosexuality, so it was no longer considered a mental illness. Unfortunately, that didn’t change the homophobia of many of the people practicing psychiatry at the time. Mass went up for a residency in psychiatry in Chicago, but mentioned in the interview that he was gay — and the response was, well, not good. It was the first of multiple interviews over several years where this happened. So Mass changed his whole career trajectory — he moved into activism and journalism. (And, not to be grateful for a bunch of homophobic jerks in Chicago or anything, but that turns out to have been a good thing for all of us.)

With homosexuality’s declassification as a mental illness, that did mean that gay practitioners could come out of the closet. Before long, the Gay Caucus of Members of the American Psychiatric Association was formed (now called the Caucus of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender & Questioning/Queer Psychiatrists.) Lawrence Mass became the editor of their newsletter. He was not afraid to feature politically charged articles in that newsletter — the first issue featured the article “Psychoanalytic Statute Prevents Legal Entry of Gay Aliens,” which exposed public policies that relied on out of date theories for justification. At the same time, he began contributing to a number of newspapers and magazines catering to the LGBTQIA+ community — using his expertise in medical fields to better inform his writing. His first piece was published in Boston’s Gay Community News.

Using his medical background and his insight into the American Psychiatric Association (through the caucus), Mass became — as he would put it — “a chronicler of a critical shift in scientific thinking about sexuality.” But he wasn’t just looking at how psychiatry was viewing homosexuality, he was watching shifts in a whole bunch of fields — not just medical science, but social science and political science. He interviewed a lot of leaders in the shift occurring across numerous fields of research, including Judd Marmor, Mary Calderone, John Boswell, Martin Duberman, and many others. Most of these interviews would go on to be compiled in his Dialogues of the Sexual Revolution collections. They provide important insight into the major cultural shift that was taking place in the USA in the decade following the Stonewall Uprising.

Mass also brought his medical background to discussions about sexual health in the gay community during the 1970’s in these same publications, covering the spread of STDs and even topics concerning fetish and kink — like 1979’s “Coming to Grips With Sado-Masochism” in The Advocate.

After a few years of that, it’s little wonder that rumors about an unusual illness afflicting gay men were brought to him. His best efforts to investigate met with little success — he’d talked to a friend who worked in a New York City emergency room, and learned of eleven cases (albeit only five or six of the patients were gay men). While that was promising, both the New York State Health Department and the Center for Disease Control assured him the rumors he was pursuing were baseless. Though he didn’t have all the information he was looking for, Mass went to print — hoping that laying out the facts as he had learned them would help keep his community informed and keep the rumors from starting any kind of panic. On May 18, 1981 his article “Disease Rumors Largely Unfounded” appeared in the pages of The New York Native which was, at the time, the most influential gay newspaper in the country. Although no one knew it at the time, it was the first published document about AIDS (at least in the US — though I haven’t found anything published earlier anywhere else either). The story would get picked up by the L.A. Times in June, with hardly any more answers that Mass had already gotten (as the L.A. Times article was published the same day as the CDC’s report.)

Mass’ article stressed that there was no reason to believe that whatever was (or was not happening) was linked to the gay community. One theory put forth in his research was that it was a new virulent strain of a fairly common microscopic organism, and such a thing obviously wouldn’t be tied to just one community. As Mass continued to publish articles as the epidemic unfolded, he stood by this — it was not a gay illness. While it certainly had a profound impact on the gay community, it’s true that we were not the only ones afflicted. Diseases don’t discriminate, and Mass was well aware of that.

By 1982, it was becoming increasingly clear as HIV/AIDS was found in more people than just gay men. Nevertheless, he joined Larry Kramer, Edmund White, Paul Rapoport, Paul Popham, and Nathan Fain in formally founding Gay Men’s Health Crisis (or GMHC) he was the last hold out on the organization’s name — insisting it was not a gay disease. He was overruled, something for which he later said he was grateful because the name works for the organization, even if it isn’t just a gay man’s disease. To this day GMHC remains one of the biggest and most important AIDS organizations in the world. Mass wrote all four editions of GMHC’s Medical Answers About AIDS.

Mass committed himself to providing up to date and accurate information about the AIDS epidemic and combatting AIDS denialism, but early in his research he was confronted with an incident of overt anti-Semitism — the first he’d experienced as an adult. The event was traumatic, and led him to realize that he’d been surrounded by anti-Semitism his whole life, and even internalized a lot of it. Ultimately, this led to his publishing an autobiographical collection of essays in 1994, entitled Confessions of a Jewish Wagnerite. (“Wagnerite” because Mass was a big fan of Wilhelm Richard Wagner, the German composer. As Mass began to broach more subjects in his writing during the 90’s, his love of music became one of his chosen topics.)

The years of research into anti-Semitism helped give Mass a unique insight into the subject of his next major publication: We Must Love One Another or Die: The Life and Legacy of Larry Kramer, published in 1997. Mass was an editor for the book, taking contributions from notables like Anthony Fauci and Tony Kushner, but his own contribution — at the beginning of the book and entitled “Larry vs. Larry” — details a tumultuous friendship, but also recalls how inspiring Mass found Kramer’s personal voice in his writing was.

About that time, the late 90’s, Mass also found himself writing regular articles for gay publications about public health issues facing the gay community other than HIV/AIDS — crystal meth addiction, anal cancer. As the decade came to a close, he began writing specifically regarding bear subculture, publishing articles in American Bear Magazine and in A Bear’s Life Magazine.

Much of Lawrence Mass’ work has been collected and archived by the New York Public Library. That said, Mass is still listed as a contributor on the Huffington Post, but all of his most recent writings have been on Medium. He is presently living in New York City with his partner, activist Arnie Kantrowitz. Sounds like a happy ending, and after everything he (and Arnie, but that’s another story) have done for our community, I think that’s very well deserved.

Queers in Comics, Pt 2: The Bronze Age

So, last time we talked about the Golden Age of Comics and the subsequent Silver Age of Comics — the era ruled over by the Comics Code Authority. When the Code loosened up in 1971, the world of comic books entered a new era: the Bronze Age of Comics. (I don’t know who decided that all these periods needed to be named like this, but…it’s getting to be a bit much, isn’t it?) The Code was still not ready for LGBTQ+ people to appear in the pages of comic books…but the people making underground comics did not care. They were ready to go for it — and queer artists, emboldened by the growing gay rights movement — were ready to push the envelope even farther.

Basically the only panels of this that I can let my mom see

In October of 1971, artist Rand Holmes tackled the homophobia in the book Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Sex* (*But Were Afraid to Ask) — which we will some day talk about in greater detail some day when I tackle the sordid history of conversion therapy — stating that it sets psychiatry back by 50 years, and going so far as to have the lead character of his “The Continuing Adventures of Harold Hedd” engage in explicit oral sex with another man before blatantly calling out the book’s author David Reuben M.D. by saying “you are rilly fucked up man.” I’m not sure if word ever got back to David Reuben but the whole thing was a pretty fantastic call out.

The following year, the feminist comic book Wimmens Comix began its run — being published initially by Last Gasp though it would change hands over the years. As if to exemplify how much they did not care about the status quo, the first issue included a story called “Sandy Comes Out” by Trina Robbins — featuring the first openly lesbian character in comics. Despite breaking new ground, the comic was not especially well received by the LGBTQ+ community — in part because Trina Robbins is a straight woman, but mainly because it simplified the complexities of coming out. And so in 1974, Mary Wings entered the world of underground comix by self-publishing the entirely lesbian-focused book Come Out Comix.

1974 was also the year that Steve Glanzman’s story “Toro” was published — one of his U.S.S. Stevens stories that were printed in Our Fighting Forces by DC. Toro is a tragic story — and ostensibly a true on (as all of Glanzman’s war comics are believed to be), but there’s little question that the character it is about is not a straight man. Being published by a mainstream publisher, this was toeing the line of what the Code would allow. It managed to eke out a Code seal by never really going farther than referring to the character as a “fairy” in a way that might have implied that he was magic rather than gay.

Though 1975 was something of a quiet year — with the exception of a lesbian being introduced in the second issue of Further Fattening Adventures of Pudge, Girl Blimp by Lee Marrs, and the character Pudge getting almost arrested at a gay rights rally. Howver, 1976 was a banner year for gay comics. It kicked off in February with the first recurring openly gay character in mainstream comics — comic strips, that is — when Garry Trudeau introduced the character of Andy Lippincott to his daily strip Doonesbury.

Andy Lippincott comes out — and makes history

That same year Howard Cruse had the continuing character of Headrack come out in the second issue of Barefootz Funnies. Headrack, while not the central character, was the best friend of the central character and so was a continuous presence in the series. Which meant, officially, the first gay recurring character had appeared in comic strip and comic book format. Pretty important, but there was more ahead for 1976. Roberta Gregory — one of the contributors to Wimmen’s Comix — began self-publishing her own work, centered around lesbian characters, called Dynamite Damsels and Larry Fuller put together an anthology series featuring all gay male characters called Gay Heart Throbs. All of these, of course, were underground comic that did not need to meet the Code’s standards and intentionally did not. So, despite the fact that 1976 was a pretty impressive, groundbreaking year….most of the United States only knew about Andy Lippincott.

In 1977, Gerard Donelan (often just called “Donelan”) — a fan of Joe Johnson‘s cartoons — submitted work to The Advocate, disappointed that they weren’t continuing to run Johnson’s work. After they ran his first cartoon, they hired him to create a regular strip called “It’s a Gay Life” — which would run for 15 years. This, perhaps, was the inspiration Rupert Kinnard needed to begin creating “Cathartic Comics” for Cornell College’s student newspaper, which featured the Brown Bomber and Diva Touché Flambé — the first gay and lesbian (respectively) black characters in comics. This is often overlooked, because there’s no actual crime fighting or supervillains in the strips, but Brown Bomber is also the first gay superhero — he transforms into his superheroic identity through the power of magic hiccups. Of course.

The 200th strip of Cathartic Comics. This honestly could have been published yesterday.

The following year, a book of gay cartoons from the magazine Christopher Street was released. It was advertised as “The World’s First Gay Cartoon Book!” which, as we’ve seen, was not strictly speaking true. But I’m including it in this article primarily because the title of the book makes me laugh every time I see it: And God Bless Uncle Harry and His Roommate Jack Who We’re Not Supposed to Talk About. Other gay magazines, such as In Touch For Men would also soon release their own cartoon collections in 1978. But without the funny titles.

Meanwhile, still in 1978, DC was working hard to counteract various rumors about some of their characters being gay. To that end, they introduced a woman named Shvaughn Erin — an officer of the Science Police, very capable woman — to be the love interest of Element Lad who had been continuously subjected to rumors of being gay since his creation. Despite this, the rumors persisted. It’s like the people at DC had never heard of a beard before.

Element Lad and Shvaughn Erin in a desperate attempt to seem heterosexual

Anyways, with queer cartoonists taking the lead in telling queer stories with underground comix, Denis Kitchen decided his publishing company, Kitchen Sink Press, could help get those stories out there even more. In 1979, he asked Howard Cruse to help him put together Gay Comix — an anthology series exclusively featuring LGBTQ+ stories by openly LGBTQ+ artists. Gay Comix would run for 26 issues, ending its run in 1998. It would go on to feature Jerry Mills‘ series “Poppers,” and so many others I could probably write a whole article just on it.

By 1980, the Code itself had lost much of its sway. Major publishers were starting to get books sold at comic book stores without with the CCA seal, simply by marketing them as “for mature audiences”, and the CCA was putting its stamp on books that would never have been allowed before. Eclipse Comics published the graphic novel Detectives Inc.: A Remembrance of Threatening Green (by Don McGregor), which featured lesbian characters and Stewart the Rat (by Steve Gerber) which also featured a little bit of queer content. Even Marvel, I guess, tried to dabble in queer content. Kind of. It was a deeply offensive story (especially if its your first time having gay men in a story) called “A Personal Hell” from Hulk! #23, written by Jim Shooter. Again, deeply offensive, so we’re going to breeze on past it. I wish we could pretend it never happened but….we’re not done with Jim Shooter yet.

A panel from *Detective Inc: A Remembrance of Threatening Green*

Kitchen Sink Press and Eclipse Comics both, apparently, discovered they could make money from unabashedly presenting queer characters. In 1981, Kitchen Sink Press introduced a recurring strip called “Omaha, the Cat Dancer” in its anthology series Bizarre Sex. Several characters engaged in homosexual activities throughout the course of the strip, but it kicked off with the openly bisexual character Shelley Hine in that very first strip.

Also in 1982, Marvel comics tried the whole “gay characters” thing again, with much more success. They introduced the character Arnie Roth, who had been friends with Steve Rogers before he became a superhero, defending him from neighborhood bullies. Arnie ran into Captain America, revealing that he had long ago guessed Cap’s secret identity. Captain America and Arnie set off on an adventure to rescue Arnie’s “roommate” Michael Bech. When they succeed and Arnie and Michael are reunited, Captain America figures out pretty quickly that they’re actually a couple. It’s a sweet little story, and gives Arnie Roth the distinction of being Marvel’s first gay character. And, because he’s a minor character and he’s not shown kissing, and because Michael is consistently called his “roommate”…he also has the distinction of being the first gay character to have his story told with a CCA seal of approval. (Marvel made a recent announcement regarding Captain America while I was researching this…which I found particularly interesting because of this…but that’s for the end of this series. If I talked about it while it was news, it wouldn’t be history, right?)

Not the point here, but Tristan and Isolde are total style icons as well.

DC began publishing stories without the CCA seal — marketing them as being for “mature readers.” These included Camelot 3000, in which the Knights of the Round Table are reincarnated in the year 3000 AD. The knight Sir Tristan, when his memories awaken, finds he has been reincarnated in the body of a woman named Amber. Tristan gets more upset when he discovers Isolde, his great love, has also been reincarnated…also as a woman. Isolde helps Tristan come to terms with the situation and the two become lovers again. Despite the fact that Tristan has kind of medieval attitudes about sex, gender, and sexuality (which is kind of understandable since Tristan is from that time period) it’s actually like pretty good transgender representation. A gigantic leap forward since the last major transgender representation in comics was decades earlier and was….oh right….a bored guy on Mars.

Also in 1982, something new and important happened very quietly in the underground comix scene. Gay Comix #3 incuded a story entitled “I’m Me!” by David Kottler appeared, his only credited work in comics of any kind, at least under that name (as far as I’ve found). The story is a brief one about his transition. David seems to have been the first openly transgender comic creator and the first to tell a story about an actually transgender person (not some wacky sci-fi/fantasy genderbending hijinks) in that format.

Not to be outdone, in December of that year, Eclipse Comics series SABRE by Don McGregor introduced two gay characters, named Deuces Wild and Summer Ice, who were presented as lovers basically as soon as they appeared. A year later, the same series featured the first gay kiss in mass-produced comics — by the same characters, unsurprisingly. Underground comix had, of course, had plenty of gay kisses by this point, but those were not mass produced by any definition. Eclipse Comics was operating somewhere between underground and mainstream — they were able to mass produce comics but, obviously, did not care at all about the Code. Their books would sell anyways.

1983 was also the year that Alison Bechdel began publishing her comic strip series “Dykes to Watch Out For” in the magazine Womannews. If Bechdel’s name sounds familiar, that’s either because you already know her work, you love the Broadway musical Fun Home, or because the Bechdel Test is widely used to sort of gauge the quality of female representation in pieces of media. The test — if you haven’t heard of it — is basically, are there two named female characters who speak about something other than a man. That test is named after her, despite her crediting her friend Liz Wallace for the idea, because it was first described in — you probably guessed this already — the strip “Dykes to Watch Out For.” (But not until 1985, at which point Bechdel was self-syndicating the strip.) The strip would run continuously until 2008, at which point Bechdel decided to retire it, except for occasional special ones like the “Postcards from the Edge” story she published in 2017 for the “Ides of Trump” campaign.

Bechdel was not the only queer artist putting out new, gay work in 1983, however. In the UK, David Shenton published his first graphic novel, Stanley and the Mask of Mystery. Howard Cruse, though still producing Gay Comix began publishing a strip called “Wendel” in issues of The Advocate, and the series “Jayson” by Jeff Krell began appearing in Philadelphia Gay News (it would later be published in Gay Comix and Meatmen as well.)

Also in 1983, was the first issue of Alpha Flight — a Marvel comic book series about a Canadian superhero team. They’d been introduced as enemies of the X-Men back in 1979, but now they were getting their own series. And one of their founding members was Northstar. Now, one of the problems with taking bad guys from a single comic book issue four years prior and making them stars of their own book series was….you had to make up backstories for them. Creator John Byrne was convinced that Northstar was a closeted Olympic athlete — and also secretly a superhero, and was determined to tell that story. Now, the Code and also executives at Marvel — primarily editor-in-chief Jim Shooter (I told you we weren’t done with him) — prevented him from telling it as plainly as he’d have liked. It’s been said that Shooter was determined to have “no gays in Marvel Comics.” The comics were full of hints about how Jean-Paul Beaubier (that’s Northstar’s secret identity) was too busy with Olympic training to be interested in girls, how he would ignore his throngs of female fans, etc. Like, it wasn’t spelled out but it was hard to miss. But outside of the pages of the comic, Byrne would tell pretty much anyone that Northstar was gay. As a result, Northstar is pretty widely considered to be the first gay superhero from a mainstream comic book publisher (despite not actually be out in the comic book).

But one thing Marvel did manage to do in this year without any concern about the Code was to use the word “gay” — meaning homosexual — for the first time in a mainstream comic book. It’s a subtle little thing — a bit of dialogue I’m sure many straight women will have lived through themselves. It appears in Fantastic Four #251, when the characters of Julie D’Angelo and Sharon Selleck are discussing their new friend Grey Landers (whom Julie is all about) right before Johnny Storm — the Human Torch — comes over to ask her out. They’re setting up a whole love……some sort of geometric shape….but, alas, a purely heterosexual one.

The next year, in Vigilante #5 DC introduced the freelance mercenaries Henry Cannon and Marschall Saber (or simple, Cannon and Saber). Although their being a gay couple was presented as like a minor detail that didn’t matter, probably to sneak it by the Code, really the whole plotline wouldn’t work if they were not. Despite the subtlety, they didn’t get this approved by the Code. The story is, basically, that a D.A. has arranged for them to go into witness protection together if they kill each other’s bosses. They do so, but before they can be entered into Witness Protection, they get attacked in their home by the Vigilante. In the ensuing fight, Cannon and Saber were actually winning until the fight was interrupted by the Electrocutioner. The story almost managed to get a CCA seal, primarily because the gay characters were villains but their relationship is actually pretty wholesome — they work as a team, they protect each other over anything else, and they support each other’s goals. There are good guy gay couples in the media now that don’t have relationships this healthy.

Marvel, meanwhile, revealed that their character Cloud was transgender…..uhm….kind of. You see, they introduced a plotline wherein Cloud was falling in love with Moondragon, one of her female teammates on the Defenders…..so she began shapeshifting into a man. This story did not get approved by the Code, but still managed to get sold in stores. Some stores, anyways. It would later turn out that Cloud was actually a nebula from space that had taken on human form, lost their memories, and become a superhero. The Marvel Database officially lists Cloud as “genderfluid” and, in this sense, that’s pretty literal. Still don’t think this storyline was quite up to par with the one in Camelot 3000 but that’s not up to me, is it?

There was a bit of a minor shakeup in the comic book world, as two new publishing companies were trying to make room for themselves in the industry. One of them was Megaton Comics — who we’ll follow up with later — and the other was First Comics. Among the various hurdles First Comics was dealing with was their own unwillingness to abide by the rules of the Code. For example, in Sable (vol 1) #15, the lead character Jon Sable assured Grey Adler, his love interest’s best friend, that he didn’t judge homosexuals. Grey would become a major recurring character, leading Sable into various adventures pertaining to issues facing the gay community.

Though Marvel and DC were just beginning to put their toes into the big LGBTQ+ representation pool, the underground comics scene was really getting the hang of it. 1984 was the year that Tim Barela debuted his strip “Leonard & Larry” in Gay Comix. The strip would later also be published in The Advocate and Frontiers — and it would run in Frontiers until 2002! The strip featured a wide variety of characters, all falling under the LGBTQ+ umbrella, and was praised for its depiction of queer families and for the fact that the characters in it aged realistically over the years.

By the end of 1984, there had been at least one queer character introduced in virtually every area of comics — there was still a long, long, long way to go between where we were then and where we are now (and where we still need to go!). And we’ll go over more of that journey in the exciting next episode!

Queers in Comics: The Code

I don’t know about the rest of you, but I have spent a whole lot of time this past year of lockdown enjoying some nice escapism in fictional worlds with fictional people. A lot of what I’ve delved into has been comic book shows — catching up on those Arrowverse shows on the CW, and — of course — watching Wandavision. And while those universes aren’t real and the people in them aren’t real, the representation of queer people in those universes is very real. So I’ve decided to do a series on the history of queer representation in the media — starting with comics. (As a disclaimer, comic books exist all over the world, and they all have histories as they relate to our community. For the purposes of this post, at least, I’m focusing on the United States.)

So, when comic books really began to be a thing in the United States, they were just collections of strips that had been run in newspapers. As a result, pretty much all comic books were kind of mainstream — and that meant any queerness was only going to be implied. The exception to that was the Tijuana bibles which were small, illegal books which depicted major comic characters (we’re talking Donald Duck, Betty Boop, Dick Tracy, Popeye, etc) in explicit sexual situations of every kind — including homosexual ones. These started appearing in the early 1930’s — incorrectly believed to be smuggled in from Mexico (hence the name). While these were the not hiding any homosexual activity in them, the characters weren’t actually queer characters — they weren’t even characters belonging to the people who made these books. It was basically just erotic fanart.

Meanwhile, the Golden Age of Comics was taking off for the mainstream comic world. And although it was sometimes tough to see, a handful of actual queer characters were hiding in plain sight — like we’ve done everywhere else throughout history, right? One particular strip, Terry and the Pirates by Milton Caniff, featured a cross-dressing villainous French woman named Sanjak — who was pretty heavily implied to interested in the protagonist’s girlfriend April. Though the strip began running in 1934, Sanjak didn’t show up until the strip published on February 12, 1939. She’s widely considered the first lesbian in comics even though it was never blatantly stated.

While transgender representation was utterly nonexistent, comics discovered that they loved to tell stories about crossdressing or genderswapping, genderbending, etc. In 1940, the crimefighting Madam Fatal was introduced in Crack Comics #1 — her alter ego was a man named Richard Stranton. This appears to be the first time comics did something like this, but they sure jumped on the bandwagon. Months later, an ongoing supporting cast member from All-American Comics and the comedy series Scribbly — Mrs. Abigail Mathilda “Ma” Hunkel began cross-dressing as the parody superhero Red Tornado. (Later, more serious, incarnations of Red Tornado would go on to be quite successful — Ma Hunkel’s incarnation is mostly forgotten despite possibly being the first female superhero.) That same year, Superman’s enemy the Ultra-Humanite — typical mad scientist type — had his brain transplanted into a woman’s body. A movie star, actually, so that worked out really well for him. (And then his brain was transplanted into an albino gorilla, of course.) It wouldn’t be comic books if there wasn’t something ridiculous like that happening, right? Even Wonder Woman had her own gender-reveal plot twist in 1946 when her enemy Blue Snowman turned out to be a woman. They really learned to love this trope but still managed to have no transgender characters.

The closest that comics actually got to an actual transgender character was in Space Adventures #3, published by Charlton Comics in 1953. This issue included a story called “Transformation,” said to be inspired by Christine Jorgensen, in which a Dr. Lars Kranston and his girlfriend/assistant Betty crash on the planet Mars. They’re separated, and each thinks they are the only survivor. Dr. Lars, thinking he’s going to go insane without something to occupy his time, goes digging through the wreckage of the ship and discovers and experimental gender reassignment process. Which he undergoes to irreversibly become a woman…because — and I cannot stress enough that this is the actual reason in the story — because he needs something to do with his time or he will lose his mind from boredom. Let me repeat that: Dr. Lars Kranston transitions to life as a woman to avoid being bored. Meanwhile, Betty fights her way through the hostile terrain of this inhospitable desert planet to get back to the ship only to discover that her lover became a woman instead of looking for her. Someone thought this was a good story to tell. Someone thought this was how people we would want to read about would behave. Someone thought this story wouldn’t make me shout obscenities at my computer screen while I was researching this post. Someone was deeply mistaken. I’m still shouting.

Anyways, there’s no need to worry about comics latching onto this “become a woman so you won’t be bored” thing — there was no time. See, while all of this was going down, a man/possible real life supervillain named Dr. Frederic Wertham was campaigning against the comic book industry. He had a whole bunch of, ahem, “research” to prove that they were corrupting the young people of the country, that they were leading to the moral degradation of the United States of America, that Batman and Robin were homosexual lovers, Wonder Woman was a lesbian (though to be fair, early Wonder Woman books had a lot of bondage imagery between women), and — most importantly — that the comic book industry were such fascists that they made Adolf Hitler look like an amateur. I know that’s offensive, and I wish I was exaggerating but he actually said that. And, honestly, I think it’s important that we all know he was that outlandish and that people still believed him. A lot of people. People actually believed that Captain America — Nazi-punching Captain America — was a tool for fascist propaganda. And Dr. Wertham put this all in a book called Seduction of the Innocent which came out in 1954. (As a side note, in 2013 Professor Carol Tilley went through Wertham’s research and found that almost none of it was up to scientific standards and a whole bunch of it was straight up falsified. Utterly unsurprising, if you ask me. But no one knew that yet.) He was promptly called before the Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency who he managed to convince of his findings. They said, basically, that the comic book industry could regulate themselves to get their “morality” on track… or the government would step in and do it for them.

And so the major comic book publishers banded together and created the Comic Code Authority (CCA) — or, as it was more often called: The Code. Now, the Code was not some authoritative set of rules that publishers were obligated to follow — but comic book stores would not sell books that did not bear the CCA stamp of approval. And this is an era before the Internet — you couldn’t download a book from the publisher’s web site. You had to go somewhere to get it. So even though the Code didn’t have any real legal authority of any kind, it was absolutely in the best interests of publishers to adhere to it if they wanted to make money.

That was easier said than done, of course. The Code was SO over the top — like SO SO SO over the top. First and foremost, virtually anything sexual was out. Anything outside of the strict gender binary was out. No more cross-dressing Red Tornado (although Jimmy Olsen was allowed in drag on a couple of occasions in the 60’s, but I don’t know the details of how that was permissible.) No more lesbian pirates. But also, no more sympathetic villains — this is why the “moustache-twirling evil villains” became such a thing in comic books — and no villains that were sexy or glamorized being a criminal. So, that meant….bye bye Catwoman! (They may have had a point there — I mean, have you ever seen a Catwoman you didn’t want to be?) There could be no swears or bad language and words like “flick” (where the ink from the “L” and the “I” might run together to make it look like a “U” to accidentally create a naughty word) were also completely forbidden. Love interests for heroes had to be wholesome, of the opposite sex, and model citizens. Romances were meant to “emphasize the value of home and the sanctity of marriage.” And there were so so so so so so many more rules, even stating what could and could not appear in titles — and they also had a rule stating that anything they found was not in the spirit of the Code could be prohibited at their discretion. Here is a good list of the entire Code if you’re interested.

And thus ended the Golden Age of Comics.

Ace the Bat-Hound….in the mask that protects his secret identity…..of Ace…the dog…

Mainstream publishers like DC Comics were working hard to undo the damage Wertham had caused, and so characters were axed and new ones were created. While getting rid of Catwoman certainly helped with some things, she was the female love interest for Batman….who was already being accused of being too gay. First, they gave him a dog to make him more family friendly — Ace the Bat-Hound. It wasn’t enough to curb the rumors. And so, a year later, in 1956, Kathy Kane came on the scene — acting as his sidekick and love interest Batwoman! Her neice Betty Kane became the first Batgirl and a love interest for Robin. And so they became the official Bat Family. (A term still used for Batman and his cohorts — who I promise we’ll get back to later on!) This didn’t stop speculation — particularly about new characters. The character Element Lad, created in 1963, spent decades having fans interpret him as gay despite the best efforts of his creators. We’ll talk more about him later on too.

The point I’m trying to get to here, really, is that the Code wasn’t just bad for queer representation is was bad for comic books in general. But, yeah, it was also really bad for queer representation….unless you weren’t particularly concerned about profit. The Code also created an entire underground or alternative comic book industry — known colloquially as “underground comix.” Small independent publishers, or independent people just publishing their own work and passing it around or selling them in stores that weren’t actually comic book retailers — like smoke shops. These comics often explored complex social issues and political issues. But sometimes they were just erotic or trying to thumb their nose at Code itself. Queer artists like Tom of Finland and Bill Ward were relegated to drawing pictures for bodybuilding magazines like Physique Pictorial — a good way to show off homoerotic art, but not a great venue to tell a story in. Queer artist Joe Brainard self published two anthology books entitled C Comics — the first in 1964 and the second the following year — but neither featured any overtly queer characters or content. I’m inclined to think, because of this, that even in underground comics it was believed that LGBTQ+ content simply wouldn’t have an audience.

As a result, comics were pretty much devoid of queer content until 1964 with the introduction of Harry Chess, created by Allen J. Shapiro. Harry was introduced in a one-shot comic appearing in Drum, a magazine for gay men. For months later, Shapiro began publishing a strip in each issue of Drum entitled “Harry Chess: That Man From A.U.N.T.I.E.” The comic strip was spoof of the popular The Man from U.N.C.L.E. series, but also parodied political issues of the time and dealt with serious issues facing the gay community. These strips only lasted until 1966. While Drum was running those strips, The Advocate attempted to get some strips of their own running — their first effort was with Joe Johnson penning strips about his characters Miss Thing and Big Dick.

The success of these characters seemed to make it a little bit more acceptable to start having homosexual content in comics. In 1968, Zap Comix #3 included a story by Steve Clay Wilson called — and I swear I’m not making this up — “Captain Pissgums and His Pervert Pirates” which included explicit homosexual sex scenes in an effort to make underground comic artists deal with more culturally taboo topics — which, after all, was the entire purpose behind underground comics! Ultimately, it wasn’t Captain Pissigums that spurred underground artists into creating gay content but it was about to happen.

It was actually the Code itself. By 1971, the Stonewall riots had come and gone and virtually every area of LGBTQ+ culture had changed as a direct result — we were inspired to start standing up for ourselves, being loud, taking up space. But not in comics, not yet. Due primarily to mainstream publisher’s pushing the envelope in the late 60’s, the Code was revised in 1971. Some of the restrictions were loosened up, a few were done away with entirely. This spelled the beginning of the end for the Code — and the actual beginning for queer comic books.

Stay tuned for the explosive next chapter!

Ken Togo

Togo Takeshi — better known as Ken Togo — was born on June 10, 1932 in Kakogawa City in the Hyogo Prefecture of Japan. He came from a highly political, very high profile family. After graduating from Kwansei Gakuin University in 1955, he worked a series of jobs ranging from chicken farm manager to bank clerk. In 1963, he caused a huge scandal for his family, when he left his respectable bank job and wife and children, openly proclaimed his homosexuality and began managing a gay bar in Himjei City. Under his management, he actually pushed the bar’s finances out of the red and it began to turn a profit — nevertheless, it closed two years after he took it over due to problems with employees and the administration. In 1968, Togo opened up a new gay bar in Tokyo which he called “Togoken” — although this bar was also destined for financial ruin.

Soon, Togo became heavily involved in politics with a political platform based around the radical queer politics — this was revolutionary in a global way. In the early ’70s in New York City and San Francisco, most queer activists were trying to get the LGBTQ+ community accepted into the “respectable” mainstream, Togo was rejecting the heteronormative mainstream culture entirely. He advocated against discrimination towards sexual minorities — not just homosexual and bisexual people, but also the BDSM community and sex workers. He advocated for gender equality — for women, and for transgender people. (Although, controversially, he did not believe that transgender people working in entertainment should get gender reassignment surgery in a train of thought that basically amounts to “artists need tension in their lives to create good art.”) He also advocated for other minorities often ostracized by Japanese society — including disabled people, children born out of wedlock. He also fully believed that capitalism was inherently bad for the disenfranchised and loudly proclaimed himself a socialist. He fashioned himself as “the okama Togo Ken” (which translates roughly to “the faggot Ken Togo”), formed a political party called “the Miscellaneous People’s Association” in 1971 and began to run for office. Between 1971 and 1995, Togo ran for office nearly a dozen times — though he was never elected. During the ’80s, Togo also included AIDS activism as a major part of platform.

Togo’s radical politics garnered him international attention — though not always of the positive kind. (Although his only English-language interview was with The Advocate in 1983.) He lost every election he ran for — not only because of rampant homophobia and because of his radical positions — but because he, essentially, made a mockery of the Emperor. He likened the coming out experience of queer people to the end of World War II — when the Emperor declared (at the behest of Allied forces) that he was not divine, but was now human. The Japanese people accepted this pronouncement, and Togo was certain it should be easier to accept when someone comes out as gay or transgender than when someone comes out as no-longer-a-god. He also named his cat “Chin” to mock a word for “we” reserved for use by the Emperor and liken it to slang for the penis. This did not make him a favorite person of many people in Japan.

22560911 — The cover of Ken Togo’s first album

Togo also released a couple of albums, the first in 1972, with a focus on queer-themed music. He also worked occasionally as an actor, director, and occasional pornographer — always with a political bent, bringing awareness and attention to his radical views. He also began publishing a magazine called The Ken — highly political, but also flagrantly defying Japan’s censorship laws (which Togo was opposed to) through the publication of pornographic images.

For several years, he was on friendly terms with the Japan Socialist Party — until 1978. In that year, Itsuro Kosaka published a statement in the Shukan Post that decried homosexuality as a disease and Togo publicly cut all ties with the party. Around this time, much of the rest of the queer community began to feel animosity with Togo because of his publicly effeminate appearance (he frequently wore makeup and dressed quite outlandishly) and his efforts to reclaim the term “okama“. Nevertheless, when he rebranded The Ken into The Gay in 1978, it became exceedingly popular. He began holding public photoshoots of his models.

In 1987, returning to Japan from San Francisco, Togo became embroiled in scandal because, upon searching his bags, customs found numerous videos and publications that were not permitted under Japan’s censorship laws. The items were confiscated, but Togo was additionally fined under charges that he intended to distribute the items. Togo fought the charges, going to court and claiming they were for his private use. Initially, he lost the court fight — but on appeals, the court found in his favor. Unfortunately, customs appealed further and the legal battle made it all the way to Japan’s Supreme Court — which found in favor of customs, and forced Togo to pay the fine and all of the (considerable) court costs.

By 2002, Togo’s effeminate image and radical positions had set him apart from most of the queer community in Japan. At a meeting regarding the discriminatory language regarding AIDS in the media, a number of Japanese LGBTQ+ activists including Hasegawa Hiroshi and Ōtsuka Takashi spoke about how they did not feel represented by Togo’s presentation of the gay identity. Togo remained a prominent figure to many in Japan’s transgender community, however, including Miyazaki Rumiko.

Although he was less politically active in his later years, he continued to espouse his views from his small bar (BAR Togo Ken — I have no idea when he established it) every night until 2011. He passed away on April 1, 2012. His children held a small, private funeral for him — but his friends and customers held a large celebration of his life at Togo’s bar the following July 1.

Black Cat Riot

The Black Cat Tavern Blackcattavern was a gay bar at 3909 W Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles (which, according to my Google maps, is now a restaurant called Black Cat so that’s awesome). It had been around for about five minutes before it got raided by the LAPD. I mean, it was established in November of 1966 and on January 1 of 1967, a bunch of plain-clothes police officers entered the club. Not actually surprisingly, there were people in the bar celebrating the new year by kissing. I know, le gasp, right? The police responded by beating some of the partiers in the bar and arrested fourteen people for “public lewdness”. One of the bar’s patrons was repeatedly hit over the head with a pool cue — this was textbook police brutality.

Black-Cat-2 And so there was a riot. Not like a Stonewall sized riot that lasted days and had hundreds and hundreds of rioters, but big enough that it spread into the bar across the street and the police beat up two of the bartenders there as well. The riot did dissipate, but instead of just going away, the LGBTQ+ community of Los Angeles came together and organized a protest. Saturday, February 11, 1967 they had simultaneous protests all across L.A. These protests, of course, were met with armed police but managed to stay peaceful. The demonstrations were organized by a group called PRIDE — Personal Rights In Defense and Education. After these events, PRIDE set up a newspaper called The Advocate — if that name sounds familiar, that’s because that’s the same The Advocate that’s still around publishing articles for the LGBTQ+ community today. This riot was also part of the inspiration for the founding of the Metropolitan Community Church, who have actually been a huge, influential part of our queer history since 1968.

(Adapted from this Facebook post.)