At an Ally Conference workshop a few weeks ago, the question was asked how one can make it known that a space is safe for Trans people, and more generally for queer people. The response was "We look for rainbows." Hence the flag up there.
I recently went to the opening night of the Fairytales Queer Film Festival here in Calgary. My good friend James heads the team that runs this festival, and it's an amazing, week-long celebration and remembrance of all things queer. The highlight, I think, of this year's festival, is a film that was produced by the festival itself called Outliers: Calgary's Queer History, a fantastic documentary chronicling the struggles of the community from the 1960s through to the 2010s. James, in introducing this film, rightly called those interviewed, some of whom were in attendance, heroes of the community. And I was struck by the appropriateness of that label. I think a lot about heroes, how we not only define who is or is not a hero, but why we do it, what need it fills within us to see individuals as somehow bigger than life. Perhaps it's that we like to imagine that in the right circumstances, we could all rise to be heroes. Much as these people did over the last 50 years.
Leaving the theater, I was inspired. The result (or one of them) is this month-long project of reading, thinking about, and blogging, some comics that either explicitly or implicitly explore ideas of queerness. I was chatting with my wife yesterday about the ways our criteria for attractiveness are formed by media exposure (you know, just a breezy little afternoon chat), and we at some point started talking about queerness, and how we can think about the process of queering. I tried to boil it down to the deconstructive practice of dismantling binaries. And though the term queer is most often associated with ideas surrounding non-heteronormative practices, we can queer just about anything. It's all about that deconstruction of binary opposition, and the introduction of ideas and practices outside of that dichotomy. So this is how I'm approaching the comics I'll be reading this month - as comics that introduce a queerness to an art form that has become a very important vehicle nowadays for queer voices.
The oldest comic I'll be looking at this month is an issue of Real Girl from 1992. We'll start in the indies, where there's a much longer history of queerness, but then get straight (see what I did there?) into the mainstream of the 90s, a moment when explorations of gender and sexuality were being presented in a fairly high-quality format. Peter Milligan and Duncan Fegredo's Enigma, from Vertigo Comics in 1993 and also on the reading list this month, is a great example of this. Grant Morrison's Doom Patrol, and his glorious follow-up The Invisibles, are explicitly queer, bringing this perspective, through Doom Patrol, to the larger DCU, though it would take a couple more decades for this queerness to touch much more than the DP's strange corner. And we also shouldn't forget the tale of Northstar, a gay man right from the get go, but one who was not only closeted in his narrative, but also narratively closeted, in that the story never explicity says "Northstar is Gay!" At least, not for about 100 issues of Alpha Flight.
Time allowing, I'm also hoping to get a few other bits of writing up this month that aren't specifically reviews for the 40 Years project. I'm not sure what they'll be about yet. Perhaps just some thoughts on my own experiences of queer comics, how they've inflected and changed my own collecting and reading practices. But Summer is Summer, and it is always very busy. No promises!
I went back through the entries of my "40 Years of Comics Project" to look at the previous posts that have touched on ideas of queerness. Given the scope of the collection, there's not that many, though perhaps more than I might have expected. You can have a look at them all here, though fair warning that some of the posts only touch on the queerness in the comic briefly. In my posts this month, I'll attempt to be more eloquent.
And if you have any thoughts on what you read here, I'd love to hear from you. Talking about comics is absolutely one of my favourite things in the world to do (my superpower is stating the obvious), so please, chime in if you'd like.
Happy Pride, all. Let's read some comics.
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