“Be Gay, Do Comics” opens with a comic by Joey Alison Sayers about the ultimate “gender reveal party gone wrong,” which is my favorite genre of videos on YouTube. It’s followed by Kendra Wells giving a few less-fatal, but not wholly nonfatal, options for a gender reveal party. The point is, in a world where many people won’t identify their gender till later in life, these parties are inane.
“Be Gay, Do Comics” dives heavily into queer history, biographies, and culture, and is loaded with soul-searching questions of whether queer culture is even right for all people who identify as queer. A couple comics gently mocking sorting-hat gender reveal parties is a nicely light-hearted introduction to a very heavy book.
Edited by Matt Bors, Matt Lubchansky, Sarah Mirk and Eleri Harris
Compiled by The NibThe dream of a queer separatist town. The life of a gay Jewish Nazi fighter. A gender reveal party that tears apart reality. These are the just some of the comics you’ll find in this massive queer comics anthology from The Nib.
Be Gay, Do Comics is filled with dozens of comics about LGBTQIA experiences, ranging from personal stories to queer history to cutting satire about pronoun panic and brands desperate to co-opt pride. Brimming with resilience, inspiration, and humor, an incredible lineup of top indie cartoonists takes you from the American Revolution through Stonewall to today’s fights for equality and representation.
Featuring more than 30 cartoonists including Hazel Newlevant, Joey Alison Sayers, Maia Kobabe, Matt Lubchansky, Breena Nuñez, Sasha Velour, Shing Yin Khor, Levi Hastings, Mady G, Bianca Xunise, Kazimir Lee, and many many more!
Be Gay Do Comics is an anthology from the award-winning online comics publication, The Nib. It was Kickstarted late last year, and then, quite impressively, printed and shipped in the middle of the pandemic.
I love anthologies for two reasons. One) I’m introduced to a bevy of new creators, and two) the combined mood and repeated topics add up to an insightful window into our current culture. If I read an undated science fiction anthology I could put by finger on the exact decade it was produced, regardless of style, just based on the fears and conversations happening in the stories. Be Gay Do Comics is a product of today. It doesn’t feature dozens of stories of coming out of the closet, but it does have quite a few on what happens after.
“Queerness Has Always Been Part of Life”
There’s been a fun conversation happening online, through memes and historian subreddits, where we’re collectively reexamining famous people in history and saying, “he never said he was queer, but needless to say he shared his home with other men, and happily embraced men in public.” From Achilles to Alexander the Great. Josh Trujillo and Levi Hastings follows in that fine tradition of opening our eyes to another member of that unspoken cabal with “The American Revolution’s Greatest Leader Was Openly Gay,” a story about Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben, a Prussian-born adopted father of the American Revolution.
The fact that queerness has always existed is one of the major themes of this book. When new political or religious movements appear, they always need to create a long historical legacy by inserting themselves in the fabric of history, to give their new movement a legitimacy. But queer culture doesn’t need to fabricate anything, and part of this anthology is devoted to proving that. To paraphrase one anonymous creator, “Queerness Has Always Been Part of Life.”
There are around fifty comics in this book, and probably a dozen of them are devoted to showing that not only have queer people have always existed, but that our current widespread miasma of homophobia is a historically recent phenomenon.
This simple fact was on full display in another comic anthology, “No Straight Lines: Four Decades of Queer Comics.” It’s telling that between forty contributors here and eighty contributors there, I only found two people who have contributions in both, Joey Alison Sayers and Dylan Edwards. And there’s no crossover at all with the Eisner-nominated “Massive: Gay Erotic Manga and the Men Who Make It.” Queer individuals and comic creators is not a new or small group.
Continued belowBut if a quarter of this anthology is devoted to talking about the omnipresence of queer culture, another quarter asks the question: do all queer people belong in it?
“Am I Queer Enough?”
JB Brager created a comic about their personal history in coming to understand themself, “LiveJournal Made Me Gay.” They joined a popular community called Birls, for people who didn’t fit neatly and exclusively into boy or girl genders. A positive space. But at the same time, Brager writes how it featured and enforced some of the same troublesome beauty standards that plague the rest of the world. “Birls was deeply flawed, but foundational,” Dr. Brager writes.
If one theme of “Be Gay, Do Comics” is the hugely diverse and welcoming queer community, another asks who is being excluded.
Quite a few comics talk about the need to present as queer, through hair, dress, or nails. Jason Michael and Mady G call it a passport in “Am I Queer Enough?”
In, “Sometimes I Call Myself Queer. Sometimes I Feel Like a Liar,”Nero O’Reilly talks about how he lacks the shared experiences of queer community. He quotes other people who lack them too, one talks about bi-erasure and says, “Part of me doesn’t feel like I ‘get’ to call myself queer.”
“I’m not gay as in equal but queer as in better.”
“Be Gay, Do Comics” has a lot of history, and many personal reflections, but there’s one piece in particular that looks at the future.
Sam Wallman’s “A Covert Gaze at Conservative Gays,” asks if queer culture is just outright setting its sights too low. This comic is ostensibly about the Log Cabin Republicans, the old LGBT-advocacy Republican organization, who often feel alienated from the LGBT community they try to represent. But Wallman turns this into a conversation about what it means when the homosexual agenda “wins.” He quotes a few thinkers to bring up point that all the victories and all the successes are have been to make gay people an equal part of a heteronormative world. But is that the right path? Could that world have instead been made better?
Wallman doesn’t have a clear answer. The comic closes with a shrug.
Me
When I was a teenager I was influenced by a 1960s modification to the English language called E-Prime. The theory is that you stop using the verb “to be” and then your life gets better. It forces you to describe what you do instead of what you are. It sounds silly, but for some people the difference between thinking, “I am a criminal” and, “I committed a crime,” can change the course of their life. I don’t treat E-Prime as a sacred commandment, but I try to be careful in choosing my identities. I haven’t used “I am” to describe my own sexuality in decades.
For many reasons, I’m on the outside of queer culture. That’s why I love books like this.
I’m often the last one to pick a comic to review for Multiversity, and this time I waited a little bit longer to see if any insiders wanted this one. I don’t have any special insight into queer culture or the stories of “Be Gay, Do Comics,” but the audience for this comic is definitely not just people inside of LGBT culture. The audience is everyone.
