Gittendowne,[1] is an American cartoonist who created the first ongoing gay/lesbian-identified African-American comic-strip characters: the Brown Bomber (a teenage superhero) and Diva Touché Flambé (his ageless lesbian partner).
[5] He graduated from college in 1979, and moved to Portland, Oregon, where he began working for alternative newspaper Willamette Week, eventually as associate art director.
[1] In April 1996, Kinnard was involved in an automobile accident that left him paralyzed from the waist down, a day after attending his grandmother's funeral just outside of Jonestown, Mississippi.
He and his partner Scott Stapley were among the plaintiffs in Martinez vs. Kulongoski, an unsuccessful 2008 court challenge to 2004's Oregon Ballot Measure 36, which defined marriage narrowly as the union of a man and a woman.
[citation needed] Kinnard's writings, illustrations, and cartoons have been published in Meatmen: An Anthology of Gay Male Comics; A Queer Sense of Humor; The Indelible Alison Bechdel: Confessions, Comix, and Miscellaneous Dykes to Watch Out For; Juicy Mother; No Straight Lines; and in LGBTQ publications such as Portland's Just Out, Bay Area Reporter, Chicago's Windy City Times, and the literary lesbian and gay journal Out/Look magazine.
The Brown Bomber and Diva Touché Flambé were portrayed on stage in 1994, in Out of the Inkwell, a Theater Rhinoceros production in San Francisco, also featuring characters from Doonesbury.
In 1997, Kinnard took part in A Tip of the Nib, the nation's first Lesbian and Gay Cartoonist conference, at Oberlin College, which also included artists Howard Cruse and Allison Bechdel.
[9] In 2013, he received a "Standing on the Shoulders" Lifetime Achievement Award from the World Arts Foundation, which stated that his "artistic talent and leadership to reach out to the LGBTQ community honors the legacy of the Rev.