LGBTQ themes in comics

[2] The 11 July 1984 installment of Bloom County had the strip's main characters staying at Bob & Ernie's Castro Street Hotel, run by a gay S&M couple.

[13] One example is Greg Fox's Kyle's Bed & Breakfast, a series focusing on a group of gay friends who live together and face realistic problems associated with their sexualities, including relationship troubles and being closeted.

[citation needed] Other noted LGBT-themed comic strips have included Doc and Raider, The Chosen Family, Chelsea Boys and The Mostly Unfabulous Social Life of Ethan Green.

[19] “Captain Pissgums and His Pervert Pirates” by S. Clay Wilson in Zap Comix #3 (1968) featured explicit sexual homosexual acts and was instrumental in making other underground cartoonists approach taboo subjects.

[24] Tom of Finland was a prolific fetish artist, specializing in images of men with exaggerated primary and secondary sex traits, such as extreme muscularity and improbably large penises.

[27] Comic strip style educational material about AIDS dates back to a chart in the French magazine Liberation from 1986, which used simple figures to explain unsafe practices.

[citation needed] Such educational comics have been criticised for ignoring the special relevance the subject has to the LGBT community, with homosexuality marginalized in favour of depicting HIV as a threat to conventional heterosexual relationships.

[citation needed] No Straight Lines, a 2012 anthology published by Fantagraphics Books edited by Justin Hall, presented an overview of comics by and about lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people since the 1960s.

The CCA itself came into being in response to Fredric Wertham's Seduction of the Innocent, in which comic book creators were accused of attempting to negatively influence children with images of violence and sexuality, including subliminal homosexuality.

[34] Critics have made accusations that comics are attempting to subvert readers into a "gay lifestyle", trying to "lure young American boys into the kinky web of homosexuality and AIDS".

[42] Psychologist Fredric Wertham, who in Seduction of the Innocent asserted that "Batman stories are psychologically homosexual," claimed to find a "subtle atmosphere of homoeroticism which pervades the adventures of the mature 'Batman' and his young friend 'Robin.

[46] The first obviously gay character featured by DC was Extraño, an effeminate Peruvian man whose name means "strange" in Spanish, created by Steve Englehart and Joe Staton, and appeared in Millennium and New Guardians in 1987.

Several characters, including the Enchantress (describing them as "filthy disgusting men") and a police helicopter pilot named Ed (screaming about "fags") are influenced into attempting to crush the rally by a seven-headed spirit.

[52] Notable storylines featuring LGBT themes include the coming out of Kyle Rayner's assistant Terry Berg and an arc about his "gay bashing" in Green Lantern.

[58][59][60][61][62] The number of minor DC characters being identified as LGBT continues to increase, and includes the bisexual superheroes Sarah Rainmaker[63] and Icemaiden,[63] and the reformed gay villain Pied Piper.

In 2021, coinciding with Infinite Frontier, several high-profile male characters came out as LGBT in canon: original Green Lantern Alan Scott came out to his children as gay; Robin (Tim Drake) began dating a man after acknowledging he has feelings for both men and women; and the junior Superman, Jonathan Kent, came out as bisexual.

[53] In X-Factor (Vol 3) #45 (August 2009), written by Peter David, depowered mutant Rictor and his longtime friend Shatterstar (with whom he'd had an ambiguous relationship)[n 6] were shown in an on-panel kiss.

She was shown sharing a bed with a chubby boyfriend named Bernard Drabble in The Legion of Night (October 1991), which was written by her creator, Steve Gerber (later writer of the GLAAD Award-nominated Hard Time), who thought making her related to both Ghost Riders was bad writing, saying that Marvel should change its name to DC for "Deliverance Comics" for being so inbred (he did not read the issues in question, nor was he told of Jennifer's newfound lesbianism).

[108] In 2017, Iceman received his first ongoing solo series, which focused on the adult Bobby Drake coming to terms with life as an out gay man, his Omega-level superpowers, his legacy as a hero and fighting some of the biggest villains in the Marvel Universe.

[citation needed] As widely considered traditional, predictable, and wholesome publishers to the nth degree for generations, Archie Comics' open recognition of homosexuality through the addition of Kevin Keller came as a surprise to many readers.

[63] Colleen Doran's A Distant Soil, dating back to the black-and-white independent movement of the 1980s, and published by Image since 1996, featured openly gay characters as the romantic leads that gained the series a Gaylactic Spectrum Award nomination.

[126] At the beginning of the 20th century, French and Belgian comic strips ("Bande Dessinée") had become regarded as a medium for children – this restricted their inclusion of adult and sexual themes, and lasted until at least the 1960s.

[134] Strips in the 1960s strove to break taboos, but were still censored by a law passed in 1949 that assumed comics were for children, which prevented the inclusion of explicit sexual themes, as in Barbarella album (1964), which had to be redrawn to remove nudity.

[135][136] The late 1960s saw greater acceptance of comic strips as a mature artform, and their use as social commentary and satire was established in mainstream newspapers by the 1970s, although some anthologies continued to be banned as "pornographic".

Volumes one and three focus on the author's homosexuality and status as a struggling gay artist in French small-town life: One story arc covered Neaud's unrequited love for a male friend.

[142] In Comme s'il en Pleuvait (2001), the same character finds that the assumption that he is gay, due to a close male friendship, is to his benefit when in fashionable literary groups, where he is seen as more interesting and trendy.

Waugh was created by writer John Smith and artist Sean Phillips and his character's homosexuality is frequently referenced in the strip; in his first story he attempts to seduce one of the men he is rescuing.

Much of Gengoroh Tagame's early work was published in the magazine G-men, which was founded in 1994 to cater to gay men who preferred "macho fantasy", as opposed to the sleeker, yaoi-inspired styles popular in the 1980s.

[182] Pornographic manga and anime for men, frequently called hentai in the West, often contains depictions of lesbianism for the titillation of male readers, examples being Demon Beast Invasion (1994) and Twin Angels (1995).

[citation needed] The Lambda Literary Foundation, recognizing notable literature for LGBT themes with their "Lammys" awards since 1988, created a new category in 2014 for graphic works.