StreetLaughter

Nunc Dimittis

2010-04-27T17:11:00.000-07:00

Play us out, if you will, please, Mr Music.

382: Gay Star Wars 1

2010-03-25T13:53:00.000-07:00

"Star Spats"
By Laurence Gonzales
in "Playboy", December 1977

Back to the soul-sinking chronicle of fag jokes. I am Ixion. This is my wheel. If only I knew how to quit it.

The next few examples wouldn’t exist without Anthony Daniels’s performance as the android C3PO in “Star Wars”. A heritage of gay robot jokes is not quite the legacy any actor might hope to leave behind. Although George Lucas’s casting vision has to take some blame. Actually I was greatly tempted to give the following selections the overall title of “FAAAGS IN SPAAAAAAAACE!!!”, but that would be demeaning - to my childhood delight in the Muppets.

This parody is in the same vein as Harvard Lampoon’s “Bored of the Rings” and subsequent film parody franchises. Puns, heavy-handed sex jokes and contemporary life style references laboriously transposed into a science-fictionalised setting, while also deprecating the storytelling shortcomings of the original. Simply to cut down on space I left out all the Jewish and Yiddish jokes, though fans of Mel Brooks’s “Spaceballs” may feel deprived. The one atrocious racist joke I’ve left in for comparison.

Unsubtle probably best describes the overall impression. The title and picture pretty much let you know what to expect. Sissy gays don’t have wars, they have spats. I’m surprised they didn’t try to make Darth’s helmet look more like a penis, but then there are stories of Hefner getting weird about cartoons of penises in “Playboy”.

Discos, drugs, bitchy queens, s/m fashions, and hairdressers (“Mr” often being the title of choice for hairdressers). This is the contemporary Studio 54 lifestyle that the readers are expected to pick up on. With a “The Boys in the Band” allusion for those who can remember: “Who do you have to fuck....”

Suffice it to say this has never been collected in any anthology of gay science fiction.

----------------

STAR SPATS

Will Luke rescue Princess Orgasma?

Can a gay android find happiness in a bit part?

Will the universe be saved?

Does anybody have a valium?

Funny you should ask?

The erratic course of the galactic cruiser as it blasted through the constellation Tsooris was hardly intentional. Its captain had been hard by the Jack Daniel's for three days running. Coincidentally, this course was avoiding the long streaks of energy striking out from the Imperial cruiser. One of the beams touched the staggering, lurching ship and blew away its curb feelers and fender skirts. Then another distant explosion shook the ship and peeled away a layer of red-flocked wallpaper in the corridor - but it certainly didn't feel distant to Little Bo Peepio, the gay android, and his side-kick Panchoo DeeToo. To look at those two, you would have thought Little Bo Peepio, the tall, wispy machine wearing nothing but a necklace that said BITCH and a Porsche chronometer, was master of Panchoo DeeToo, the stubby, swarthy pistolero robot in the Two Fingers Tequila T-shirt; but while Bo Peepio might have thrown an absolute snit at the suggestion, they were actually equals in everything except that Bo Peepio gave better head and Panchoo DeeToo was the only Panchoo unit in the constellation of Tsooris that was running off a turquoise-and beaten-silver laser system.

Other explosions rocked the galactic cruiser. The low humming note that had been giving Bo Peepio a splitting headache suddenly stopped. Finally. Bo Peepio spoke:

"Who do you have to fuck to get a valium around here?" he asked.

Panchoo did not comment immediately. His barrel torso tilted backward, his three powerful hand-tooled leather cowboy boot gripping the deck. The meter-high Mexicano droid was suffering from severe postnasal drip sustained while sniffing some Peruvian graphite dust earlier in the flight, A series of short, chirping Spanish invectives issued from his speaker. To even a sensitive ear they would have sounded like just so much Third World gibberish, but to Bo Peepio they formed words as dear as a tequila sunrise.

"This butch captain of ours is definitely on a macho trip,' Bo Peepio said in a testy voice, thrusting out his metallic hips petulantly and patting down his chromium skullplate. "We're fucked for sure now.”

Suddenly a band of Imperial Storm Troopers appeared and began firing their weapons. One blast of energy threw Bo Peepio into a jumble of shredded cables, where dozens of currents turned him into a jerking, mincing, limp-wristed display of acrobatics.

"Help!" he screamed. "My servopelvic Accu-Jac!"

As Panchoo extended his switchblade mechanism to try to help cut away the cables, Bo Peepio's tone turned ultra-bitchy:

"This is all your fault! I should have known better than to trust the logic of an albino graphite-snorting, hand-held half-breed vibrator!"

Panchoo cut loose with a series of searching Spanish curses usually reserved for those who gang-rape your mother. One of them made an allusion to Bo Peepio's ancestral link to the Water Pik.

Then a violent explosion shook the corridor.

Two meters tall. Bipedal. Flowing black robes and a simple string of cultured pearls. Hair by Sassoon. Face forever masked by a black Tiffany breathing creation stunningly punctuated by pear diamond and rough-cut emeralds. A Dark Lord of Sith was a daunting shape as it snapped its tight little buns back and forth, heading down the corridors, glancing self-consciously at its reflection in the mirrored walls. Solidly into S/M, it normally sported heavy leather-and-chrome manacles and a set of expensive Spanish handcuffs. Once-resolute rebel crew members ceased resisting at the sight and threw themselves al its feet, crying:

"Where did you get your hair done?"

As it turned down another passageway, they could hear Mr. Darth's heavy breathing through the Tiffany mask. But who could resist?

Elsewhere, Bo Peepio and Panchoo were entering the lifeboat hatch. The explosive bolts fired after a loud warning and the pod ejected from the crippled fighter, sending the two droids to the surface of the planet below. Like much of the Promised Land, it was pretty grim compared with Fire Island.

Soon after Luke Starfucker had come into possession of Bo Peepio and Panchoo - and for no explainable reason - they were all fast friends, as if they'd known one another for eons. While Luke was valiantly trying to repair Panchoo, however, the little Latin pervert became horny and began showing dirty movies with his silver turquoise laser.

Luke who was only 20 years old, had lived a sheltered life and, consequently, was watching with rapt attention as Panchoo, who was a bit weirded out on some unnamed droid crystals, unabashedly flashed holographic movies of a beautiful young girl and her trusty exercise 'droid. She kept mumbling something about somebody's Kenobish.

"Boy," Luke said in awe, "look at the Kenobish on that dude."

Panchoo mumbled something in Spanish and kept showing the dirty loops.

"Oh, help me," the girl pleaded. "Slip me some Kenobish, Ben!"

"Who is that?” Luke asked Bo Peepio.

"I really don't know. She was a passenger on our last voyage. Had her own dressing room. A movie star of some importance, I think. Bitchin' wardrobe."

"Some movies," Luke allowed. Then suddenly, Panchoo ended the performance. "What kind of shit is that?" Luke asked angrily, jumping up.

Panchoo screeched and bleeped in incomprehensible but dearly obscene Latin aphorisms. Bo Peepio winced and translated some of them.

"He says before she got into heavy S/M movies like this, she used to co-star with the stud of the entire constellation of Tsooris, one of the last surviving Jewish Knights, Bennie Wadd Kenobish. He also says you can pay him fifty Imperial monetary units for an instant re¬play or else blow it out your Imperial ass."

"Bennie Wadd Kenobish," Luke said with a puzzled expression. "He's an old man now. He couldn't possibly get it up. And what in blazes is a Jewish Knight?"

"Don't ask me, deary,” Bo Peepio said, rolling his eyes seductively, "but if you know this Wadd character, I think I'd like to tag along."

Inside the bowels of the Imperial battle station, Princess Orgasma – intergalactically famous porn star - was being treated to the thrill of her life with a set of chromium molybdenum shackles by Mr. Darth.

"Tighter, Darth! Tighter!" she moaned, as one or Darth's minions moved forward to increase the pressure of the shackles on her pale wrists.

"You are my prisoner," Mr. Darth said, swirling his cape and fingering his strand of pearls. "I think what you need is a Farrah Fawcett cut."

"No, not that! Anything but that!" Princess Orgasma cried.

“How about a Linda Ronstadt?"

(omitted assorted Jewish stereotype jokes........)

Without even asking for any trouble from these Jewish Knights and gay robots, Luke suddenly found it in the middle of a real mess. He was out; riding toward Moishe Eisley Spaceport, a pretty nasty place according to Kenobish. It was imperative that they not be suspected by the Imperial Storm Troopers while searching the spaceport a pilot who could take them to rescue Princess Orgasma. But, as Kenobish had explained, the Force would be with them if they got into trouble.

(omitted Jewish Force jokes.........)

.

"Double Shirley Temple," Luke said across the bar.

They had entered the underground cantina and while Kenobish was scouting around for a pilot, Luke busied himself surveying the clientele. It was a sight like none he had ever seen. Lined against the bar three deep were men in hideous Palm Beach and Brooks Brothers suits. some of them with lethal-looking Bell System beepers attached to their alligator belts in case the hospital called for an emergency Caesarean section. Others carried American Tourister attaché cases. And all of them were knocking back deadly martinis without blinking an eye.

The bartender looked at him strangely when he placed his order but served it up anyway. Suddenly. Luke noticed that he was the subject of some unwanted attention. It must be these beige robes, he thought, and tried to ignore the stares. Something shoved him roughly nearly knocking him over. He turned angrily and then stopped in astonishment. It a little, stooped-over Polish janitor, myopically pushing a broom, trying to clean up some of the cigarette butts and peanut shells left behind by the rowdy business lunch crowd. Luke motioned to Kenobish and the wily old Jewish Knight deftly whipped out his sacred shotgun and blew the pushy little fucker into a thousand pieces, splattering brain and bone across the cantina floor.

Acting as if nothing had happened, Kenobish ushered Luke over to a table where an enormous monkey was sitting with a young man who was somewhat older than Luke.

"Who's the shvartzer?” Kenobish asked the man, indicating the monkey, as they approached the table.

"That's my monkey," the man said. "Leave him alone or I'll have him pull your head off. I'm Solo."

"And I'm Hetero:' Luke snapped.

"Listen. you little starfucker," Solo said, reaching across the table, "if you want to get to diddle the princess, you'd better watch your star mouth or you're going to be in for some star difficulties."

However, in spite of that thorny first encounter, the entire entourage - Kenobish, Luke, Bo Peepio, Panchoo, Solo and one big fullback type badly in need of a haircut - took off for a rendezvous with the Death Disco, a planet-size night spot that even now housed the Imperial cruiser commanded by Mr. Darth and a large number of rotating punk-rock groups.

Once cruising in Solo's speedy starship, the Millennium Chicken, in the calm of hyperspace and free of pursuing Imperial cruisers, Kenobish had a chance to give Luke some lessons with his newly found sacred weapon. "Pull!" Luke called and a clay bird flew out of the trap and smashed against the interior walls of the intergalactic cruiser before he could shoulder the shotgun.

"No, no, no," Kenobish was saying in disgust.”Here, put this on," he said, taking a large trash can from nearby and placing it over Luke's head.

"Mrgf! Gnlt butlts hbthblwsh!" Luke's Screams were unintelligible from inside the container.

"See,” Kenobish said, "You're already learning a new language. Ah, the Force."

Luke called for another bird and began firing wildly, scattering hot leaden revolutionary death all over the interior of the ship and sending everyone diving under tables and chain.

Having counted on the eternally inferior intelligence of people who wear Tiffany breathing devices and their armies and strategists in much the same way Pentagon generals counted on what they referred to in private as "gook stupidity," the star entourage entered the Death Disco and rescued Princess Orgasma by tantalizing her with her favorite sexual foreplay: a group grope in a warm garbage bath. Then, having hidden the architectural plans for the Death Disco - somewhere on her person - they headed back to the Millennium Chicken, using the “ancient Eskimo" plan of escape. This calls for taking an elderly member of the tribe and setting him on an ice floe until the polar bears are distracted and eat him, thus saving everyone else. In this case, alas, it was the noble Jewish Knight, Bennie Wadd Kenobish, who was attacked by Mr. Darth and chafed to death by Spanish handcuffs.

Luke hung back at a safe distance while fighter after fighter was chewed into molecular bits by Imperial energy weapons. As a matter of honor, he let his best friends go first. And even though they were getting dusted by the score, they were doing serious damage to the Death Disco, and finally Mr. Darth, seeing that Luke was coming in for the kill, boarded his own combat fighter to chase him down and, as he put it, “slap that bitch’s wrists but good.”

But once Luke's friends were all dead, he knew one thing for sure and no limp-wristed hairdresser was going to stop him. Visions of that first pornographic hologram of Princess Orgasma swam in his head as he homed in on the planetoid. Back at command center, Orgasma was hunched over the radar screen, watching Luke's progress. He was confident of the Force that he wasn't even using his computer aiming device. He just placed a trash can over his head, as Kenobish had taught him.

"Don't worry”' Orgasma’s voice came over the radio, "Solo has returned and he’s, um, right behind me," she panted, hunching more eagerly over the radar consol.

"That's right, kid," Luke heard Solo say, “I had a change of heart. And I'll keep things warm back here while you shoot your load."

And then, in unison, Luke could hear their voices cheenng, "Go, go. go, deeper, deeper, put it in, ye, “ until – trash can totally obscuring his vision - Luke made a slight miscalculation in his steering and rammed a gun tower, disintegrating into microscopic silvery fragments.

"Tough shit, kid," Solo said.

END

Ronald Searle 3

2010-02-20T04:40:00.002-08:00

Largely unknown to the general public, Searle had been making extreme investigations into how far he could go in abstract representations of human beings. In 1962-63, he had worked on a series of ink and wash compositions he titled “Anatomies and Decapitations”. Exhibited in only a few galleries, they disturbed many of Searle’s firmest admirers and have never been published. They are the most abstract work Searle has ever done. They almost all either huge heads or a few distracted skeletal figures reminiscent of late period Picassos. Some are just splayed slashes of lines, others are circular or oval stains with blotches or sequences of scratches for features. A rejection of his apparently perfected professional style, they resemble nothing Searle had done before. Yet in each Searle is able to find a means of presenting a figure who looks beatific, moronic, anxious, prim, or explosive. It is tempting to detect the influence of Andre Francois in these works (as Francois’s work in “Punch” was a similarly intense influence on emerging graphic artists like Ralph Steadman, Gerald Scarfe, and Quentin Blake). In 1960, Searle’s Perpetua Press had published a collection of Francois’s work, “The Biting Eye”. Francois drawing style was scratchy, messy, blotchy. His deliberately rudimentary and scribbly figures were not the standard blocky cartoony figures. Despite being highly non-representative, Francois’s work captured something essential about humans and their behaviour. Likewise, “Anatomies and Decapitations” shows Searle discovering how he could convey complex emotions freed of the restraints of human particularity or the contexts of social customs.

The first real product of these investigations intended for a popular audience was Searle’s Cats (1967). Searle had previously worked with animals, illustrating Geoffrey Willans’s The Dog’s Ear Book (1958), but those had been cartoonish animals, akin to the trotting figures of the Molesworth books, shaggy human actors in human situations with human responses. Searle’s cats would be much more abstract in composition. As Searle’s humans become less figuratively real, so he uses his cats to represent human states without relying on reductive realism. Luckily there is always an audience to be exploited in the public’s affections for cats. In his cats Searle found a “convenient currency” and international success before Kliban and Edward Bond discovered their respective felines. Searle’s cats are preposterous, yet though them Searle is accepting though still pungent about human weakness. He gives these works titles like “A retarded cat trying to grasp a simple fact”, “Unusually repulsive cat startled by a gesture of affection”, “Circus cat rehearsing Hamlet”, or “Acrobatic cat suddenly discovering quite unexpectedly that it is too old for the game”. Devoid of any background, through the shape of the cats’ bodies and arrangement of the minimum of facial elements, Searle embodies mournful, complacent, persevering, avaricious, or aghast expressions to match his titles. Searle would later redraw many of the works in his first Cat book, but in the earliest edition, their origin in “Anatomies and Decapitations” is apparent. These were much messier creations in blobby inks, with rather splashy harsh gray washes like the blotchy faces of “Anatomies and Decapitations” spread out to occupy a theoretical cat-space with slashes for whiskers.

His most public works in the late 1960s, his animated titles for “Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines”, “Monte Carlo or Bust” and “Scrooge” could mislead one into thinking Searle was as comforting as ever. Nostalgic excursions in comic catastrophe to match the films themselves, Searle’s designs captured the ludicrous and pompous costumes of the period (his style being less than ideal for sleek modern fashions), and Searle was to spend many years of work on a Gilbert and Sullivan animated feature “Dick Deadeye” (1975). In only one respect were these animated features representative of his current private work, since they withdrew from an explicit engagement with contemporary social manners and trends. Yet the sudden profusion of books at the end of the 1960s exploring unnerving and provocative material might be seen as Searle’s response to the upheavals and opportunities for artistic liberation that marked this period: The Square Egg (1968), Take One Toad (1968), Hello – Where Did All the People Go?, The Second Coming of Toulouse-Lautrec (1969), Secret Sketchbooks: The Back Streets of Hamburg (1969) and The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (1969).

Their contents were neither respectable nor wholesome, and often intensely irrational. They collected troublingly ambiguous jokes about the torments of the flesh. When he explores the more distant past, Searle’s characters are rotting, deformed and diseased. Similarly, there is an interest in ripe female sexuality and nudity. The blubber-lipped dwarf Toulouse-Lautrec eagerly frolics with and subordinates himself to broad-hipped jutting-buttocked giantesses naked save for their stockings and high-heeled boots (as though Searle is channelling R. Crumb’s fetishes). The Secret Sketchbooks record the bodies on display in German brothels, and confront fleshly taboos beyond the normal artistic nude study. In Take One Toad: A Book of Ancient Remedies Searle illustrates maladies and agonies and the consequent infliction of torturous quack cures, but there is a delight in man’s casual cruelty, of violence in the service of man’s insufficient knowledge, that outstrips the gymslip horrors of St Trinians in their depiction of the weaknesses of the flesh. So too, the eruptions of irrational in the cartoons collected in The Square Egg go further in confronting death and disability, as cripples of all kinds lash out at statuary representing their defective anatomy.

Searle becomes more concerned about the nature and quality of representation. The drawings in Hello – Where Did All the People Go? explore, almost compulsively, every method of extrapolating snails into every conceivable medium and form. The innate disgust snails evoke is almost immaterial in these formalist exercises proclaiming the transformative vision of the artists. Snails are reconstituted in metal, vegetables, cloth, fur, bones, buildings, clouds, birds, sexual females, mother animals, and assorted artistic pastiches. His snail giving suck to piglets will not be easily forgotten, nor his paradisical Fragonard-scape of snails on swings. The scenery of The Adventures of Baron Munchausen are typical of Searle but Searle’s figure of the Baron is an abstract bristling detonation of ink. For all that his facial features present a recognisable goggle-eyed, manic grinning buffoon, his body is an almost indecipherable sequence of blobs, dribbles, slashes and angles – yet evidently tightly conceived and executed since the figure is always consistently recognisable in each illustration. By the late 1960s, Searle’s generic people have lost a little more of their humanity. They become a little more distorted, their torsos a little more swollen and limp, their faces a little more contorted, sagging and haggard. It is worth wondering whether Searle has grown tired or even disgusted with people and his burden of drawing them. Likewise, Searles’ concern for the overall appearance of his work on the page changes as his use of ink has become messier. This period marks the beginning of Searle’s work becoming ink-spattered. If Steadman and Scarfe generously scatter blobs and blotches across their pages, Searle’s are more like concentrated effusions of spores and rot. For the next decade or so, Searle will often lay down an intermittent but enormously thicker line for parts of his outlines, in some ways reminiscent of Toulouse-Lautrec, so that his forms seem further distended on the page.

Searle’s major work in the 1970s was an outpouring of hundreds of colour lithographs in which he established his own set of conventions. This work would be collected in his two large retrospectives, Ronald Searle (1978) and Ronald Searle in Perspective (1984). The colour in his 1960s travel pieces had been striking, but the intent of this new work was to go further with bold and fantastic effects exploring a surrealism that would only gradually be accepted by commercial magazines. The irrationality depicted in The Square Egg explodes all over these pages. Searle’s scenes are all set on great plains stretching away to distant horizons which, to quote J.G. Ballard, are “the deepest horizon lines since Dali”, although they may be reminiscent of Cambridge’s “low fenland skies”. Searle foregrounds on this stage his repertory cast of cats, other animals, occasional birds and humans, with backdrops of scrubby vegetation or else towering cityscapes. There now is less use of line so that the colour is more emphatic. Since his figures are less detailed, his intermittent thickening of line may have been a new development to suggest a physical complexity. His ascending tower blocks gradually become sketchier, until as intersecting cross-hatches in the sky they are no longer realistic but figurative shapes pressing in on one another to suggest some implacable metropolis that dwarfs his characters. It is the use of colours that is striking, particularly in the case of his skies which sometimes occupy over half the page: bright pinks and yellows, eye-popping reds and purples, and pale blues. Their frankly psychedelic impact has left critics unsure whether Searle is revelling in his new exploitation of colour, whether they are intended to be purely beautiful (and if so, does it reveal a previously unsuspected tweeness) or whether he is more ambiguous and possibly satirising our assumptions about colour.

The lithographs are distinctive for not being immediately explicated like some editorial cartoon. They exhibit concern over pollution, ecology, overpopulation and dehumanisation. But Searle’s development of a personal yet satirical format, his international language, with its appealing colours, cartoonish men, and affectionate animals, walks an ambiguous line between charm and satire. As fantastic metaphors, his rainbows, butterflies and flowers can be almost too extreme, like an incursion from some earlier hippy agitprop poster insistent on the purity of the child’s imagination. It is that reduction of abstract ideas into simple figurative encapsulations with connotations of sentimental whimsy which make some bemoan the loss of the social miniaturist of the 1950s. It is the correlating attention to grey colours, his inks spatters suggesting smog, urban filth and casual litter, and the almost unapprehended details such as tiny piles of discarded cans or foliage, which often offset and contain the lurid colours, revealing the greater controlling artistic vision and technique. His titles add a further dimension, for like his Toulouse Lautrec drawings whose titles alluded to biblical and classical scenes, they are often more suggestive and surprising than descriptive. There is an occasional recurrence of a large graphic ballooony question mark in his lithographs; as though to provoke questions about the meaning of meaning is one of the purposes of these works.

His human figures in the lithographs are purely satirical. They cannot help but seem ugly, wretched and squalid in comparison to Searle’s lurid swashes of colours. They have become subhuman, fraudulent Piltdown men. The slashes marking their facial features make them ravaged and gaunt spectres and ghouls. Eyes once so capable of expressing cunning, lust, sorrowful frustration and even occasional joy are now lost in brooding self-absorption. Their bodies have developed a curvature of the spine so they are now unfinished slug-like masses borne upon their long curvy legs. In his lithographs Searle only uses human figures when they can bear the brunt of his criticism. His travel pieces suggested a growing concern on Searle’s part about the cost and impact of humanity’s pleasures upon itself and the world. Often besuited in pinstripes (possibly unconsciously recalling his “Tribune” cartoons) his humans are either oblivious to the world through which they pass or else horrified when its irrational spectacles can no longer be ignored.

While his humans have become abject objects of judgment, delight and all the positive qualities and actions of mankind have been transposed onto his animals. Curiously, his cats have acquired the same shape as his human torsos – that same trapezoidal or pyramidal blob, but with two perky ears at the top. At first it approximated the impression of a cat when sat, but Searle gradually employed the same shape no matter what the cat was doing. His cat faces hover above their undefined abdomens like furry humpty-dumpties. Unlike his first series of cats in Searle’s Cats, these are not solitary figures in a void. They participate in Searle’s scenery, they interact with each other, ride bicycles and horses, romance and seduce one another, even retire to a comfortable urban home life. In this respect they are a return to the anthropomorphic creations in The Dog’s Ear Book. It is these cats which appealed most strongly to the public, made Searle famous again for his covers on “The New Yorker”, and are collected in More Cats (1975) and The Big Fat Cat Book (1982)

His works at the turn of the decade were varied character studies in anthropomorphic animals. Searle extends the lesson of his cat art, which is that that no matter how wonky or sagging these creatures are, anthropomorphism is charming in itself. As with St Trinians, an immediately beguiling appearance can function as the satirist’s Trojan Horse. Searle’s subtler colouring, with its internal visual rhymes between its characters and their minimal settings entices his audience rather than assaults them with satiric disgust. A charming stone is dropped in the observer’s mind with ever extending ripples of subversions. Rather than attempt grand statements as in the lithographs, Searle employs his animals to depict individuals stricken by personal malaise. Anthropomorphism allows him to delineate human weakness and folly without distractions of setting. Searle uses his animals as either fantastic metaphors or as bestiaries of befuddlement and deflated pretension, by employing all the symbolic connotations animals have in the popular imagination. In Zoodiac (1977) Searle gives us animals in usual humanised habits, a housemaid mouse, a suited bull putting the move on a cow in evening gown, or two lions as Charles II and Nell Gwyn. The creatures in The King of Beasts (1980) (published under the alternate title The Situation is Hopeless) are animals in their natural environment, whose human commentary is found in their dazed and delusionary correlation to Searle’s titles. “American bald eagle suddenly realising that its leanings are basically Marxist”. “Feeble-minded circus lion basking in the belief that it’s the King of Beasts”. In almost all instances these defective cases are solitary figures, and with the ink-splotched art these figures are situated in non-urban squalor. Ostensibly a manner a million miles from The Big City, these are Searle’s statements about the human condition, not the specific anomie of salesmen, prostitutes and refugees.

The 1980s saw assorted retrospectives and reissues and Searle continued to produce personal and commercial work in abundance. The vast corpus of his commissioned commercial work is uncatalogued and uncollected, but it is worth recalling that it is work for which Searle was employed specifically because of his talent to charm and amuse. The art collected in The Illustrated Winespeak: Ronald Searle’s Wicked World of Winetasting (1983), Something in the Cellar (1986) and Ozzie Winespeak (1987) show him rediscovering some of the pleasures of purely humorous drawing in a series conceived to promote particular vineyards. In the case of “Searle’s Cats” and “The King of Beasts” it is impossible to know whether image or title has creative precedence, but in his Winespeak art Searle is inspired to interpret common phrases used to describe wines. From trite commonplaces like “full-bodied, with great character”, or “unpretentious” to pretentious evocations like “a little forward in character” or “fullish body, but beginning to fade”, Searle summons forth a metaphor in human form with glass or bottle in hand. They are ingenious deflationary literalisations of the original inept snobbish metaphor. Each is captured in situ. “Dry, nervous, vigorous” is an hysterical woman swinging over her head a large corkscrew embedded in a bottle. “Healthy but a bit sweaty” is an exhausted-looking gymnast in leotard doing a headstand over her glass.

They are a return to engagement with human figures, and since he is not presenting particular people Searle further develops his shorthand form. Their purpose is to present specific yet comic states: surprise, greed, confusion, smugness, lust, and so Searle establishes a strict abstract form which has served him to the current day. Their heads are either lozenges or ovals. His noses have become long, drooping proboscises, like a flaccid finger, at the top of which are placed two boggle-eyes, one usually significantly higher than the other, particularly when in profile (a last homage to Picasso?). Their outline is relatively simple, so Searle can work in his colours. He rarely makes this human format much more detailed even when intended just to be in black and white, so they are broad expanses of negative space contained by his messy lines. These lumpen creatures, which have largely moved beyond any representative associations of human ugliness, are the deterministic creations of human language, of casual meaning reflected in human form. As language has been used so haphazardly, so they are equally misshapen but boldly oblivious to their personal and physical shortcomings. Ronald Searle’s Non-Sexist Dictionary (1988)and Slightly Foxed, But Desirable: Ronald Searle’s Wicked World of Book Collecting (1989) continued to mine this whimsical vein of verbal fantasia. “Mad Magazine” regularly runs its own series of metaphorical menageries, but instead of “Mad”’s cliches as zany monsters, something pathetically or frenziedly human is apprehended in Searle’s application of visual wit to the pursuits of the nicer classes (a path Ralph Steadman would similarly follow to Oddbins).

Literary and high cultural symbolism were the spur for Searle’s series of “Crossed Paths” cartoons for the “New Yorker” in the early 1990s, collected in Marquis de Sade Meets Goody Two-Shoes (1994). All the hopes, allusions and pretensions of high art, music and literatures are fixed on this pages. In an earlier series, “Mislaid Masterpieces”, Searle had presented such fantasies as “Swine Lake” (pigs performing ballet) or Toulouse Lautrec painting a version of “The Raft of the Medusa” stacked with scantily-clad jolies femmes. “Crossed Paths” are fantasies of mortification and chagrin, about the ultimate incompatibility of great spirits, of a mankind driven to perpetual psychic warfare. Rembrandt is driven to despair trying to paint a minimalist Thurber-cartoon man. Omar Khyam tries to protect his loaf of bread, jug of wine and thou from the sandstorm kicked up by a triumphant Lawrence of Arabia riding past on horseback. Futile collisions between quintessential characters, they are the slapstick wit of a connoisseur. A deaf Beethoven at clavier cupping his hand to his ear and straining to hear Edward Munch whose own hands are clutched to his screaming face made me fall off my bed laughing. Searle’s proto-human style is just as capable of depicting a Hemingway shooting Poe’s raven, as his draughtsmanship of decades past, but now each character has its own special touch of dementia. These drawings demonstrate the same impulse to disruption, perturbation, and confrontation as Searle struggled to exploit in his ‘Orrible Albert cartoons of the late 1940s. But where they were an undirected, unsure flailing about, here the target isn’t a few irate adults but the entirety of western culture rendered absurd.

In 1995 Searle was invited to contribute editorial cartoons to the French newspaper “le Monde”. It was a further indication of Searle’s acceptance by his transplanted homeland. He has already had shows, been awarded honours, and been commissioned to execute a series of medals for the French Mint honouring the great cartoonists, caricaturists, and satirical artists. In the late 1950s “Punch” had allotted Searle a few editorial cartoons, in which Searle had satisfied his brief with Khrushchevs and Kenniedies in allegorical situations. Illingworth was “Punch”’s house political cartoonist at that time, and his dense executions in this mode admirably continued the tradition of Tenniel. Only one of Searle’s cartoons, a sketch of the African continent within whose confines one miserable African is hunched over demonstrates the power of Searle’s imagination expressed in a pure visual concept. Searle’s cartoons for “le Monde” are purely satirical images. There are few topical caricatures, slogans or tags to indicate what is being referred to. He discards his repertoire of personal images, save for his stage-like sets which emphasises the figurativeness of these cartoons. A rare appearance of the editorial cartoonist’s mainstay, a topical figure fitted out in conceptual costumer, with Saddam Hussein as Alfred Jarry’s Pere Ubu, is a reminder that absurdism is not whimsy but a rapacious and irrational humour deliberately undermining and disassembling the ignoble reason that conforms to the literary world of horror, brutality and venality. Instead of merely featuring political figures in dress-up to make his point, it is as though parading across his stage are not actors but embodiments of human concepts themselves. Commonplace concepts about greed, bureaucracy and warmongering are revivified by his decades of graphic experience in a sophisticated clash of symbols. Searle employs a pared selection of archetypes. Clichés such as thuggish soldiers, angels, doves, bureaucrats, women and children are engaged in duels, walking tightropes or posed on tottering pedestals. His rough brutish figures are comment in themselves. Often his scenes have a stark, ugly quality. Instead of using wash, Searle fills in part of his otherwise bare scenes with blotches of messy, scratchy cross-hatching, now more masterly and significant than his attempts in the 1940s. What may have originally accompanied a particular war or scandal, has been deliberately executed by Searle to ascend to a level of universal commentary. These are condemnations of violence, consumerism, inequality and human failure, yet leavened by his characteristic wry and gleeful humour.

Since the turn of the millennium, Searle’s public output has lessened dramatically. He has illustrated books for private commissions like Jeffrey Archer’s Cat O’Nine Tails (2006) and Robert Forbes’s Beastly Feasts: A Mischievous Menagerie in Rhyme (2007). There have been a number of extensive gallery retrospectives and documentaries. As a result of his longevity it would almost be as rewarding to host an exhibition of every graphic artist who has followed and learnt from him. Yet, with every development in his style, even as it has bred imitators, Searle has then moved on, leaving them behind to exhaust his discoveries. Interviews reveal that everyday Searle still finds himself compelled to exercise himself at the drawing board in his home of thirty years in Haute-Provence. As he wrote in a 1969 profile, “To me line is something which one can explore endlessly, and which keeps me in a constant feeling of excitement and adventure. I know I shall never live long enough to say and do all I want in line.”

Ronald Searle 2

2010-02-20T04:39:00.005-08:00

In his work of the 1950s Searle was employed to delineate all the multitudinous classes of Britain in all their unmistakeable manners and style. Thousands of faces in all attitudes would be traced in caricatures, reportage, cartoons and anatomies of society. It is a decade of intense work and almost all of it worthwhile anyone’s attention. By the beginning of the 1950s Searle was irrefutably himself and in possession of what is identifiable as his ever-maturing individual style. His earlier tremulous line has been condensed. His outlines are ever so slightly thicker which gives his characters a greater density of presence on the page. But it is the stuttering, rickety quality of Searle’s line which is striking. Previously, Searle drew in long freehand lines like loose strings laid on the page. Now Searle reduces the length of individual line strokes, so what was previously cascading and tremulous is now a stammer in ink on the page. Searle still has the overall simple flowing impression of form, but the effect of so many lines encroaching upon each other, with the slight flicked thickening as they abut and zigzag bestows an arresting subliminal complexity and control to his outlines (a discovery also made by Arnold Roth in the mid-60s). Furthermore, the element of action and motion, of vibrant immediacy and spontaneity trapped in this line suggest a new kind of motion on the page. From not knowing how much detail to put into a drawing, now the information of detail is conveyed through the technique of his line. The shabbiness, dilapidation, confusion and wariness of his people is conveyed in a frayed, bristling, ragged, rumpled, yet artistically controlled shapelessness. Searle no longer has to wrestle with detail, as he captures it eloquently in baroque curves, frills and waves.

The 1950s are largely remembered as the period of Searle’s work for “Punch”. Searle’s two and a half year stint (1949-51) as the pocket cartoonist for the socialist journal “Tribune” is largely forgotten. Some critics have analysed the St Trinians cartoons as an attack on the polite, decent traditions of a class-bound Britain by a cynical war-shaken soldier determined to breakdown the taboos of an outdated society. Other than a few editorial cartoons for “Punch” when Leslie Illingworth was on holiday and then the symbolic tableaux of “le Monde” in the 1990s, Searle has eschewed explicit political commentary in his work. Searle’s pocket cartoons for “Tribune” therefore constitute the largest body of forthright contemporary political commentary he has attempted. The pocket cartoon format typically eschews topical figures, instead offering gag situations in which the ordinary citizenry comment on the events of the day. Osbert Lancaster was the petit-maitre of the pocket cartoon, but he wrote from an absolute assumption of upper class mores. Searle’s cartoons relish the privations and indignities that a post-war Britain inflicts upon its toffs: haughty moustachioed plutocrats and cigar-smoking Tories in pinstripes or morning suits, whose spindly legs improbably support swag-bellies of barrage balloon proportions. Pondering too much about the political allegiances of a commercial artist can lead one down dead-ends, since 1951 also saw Searle contribute to the right-wing “Sunday Express”. The larger lesson Searle probably learnt from this work is that since it is in the nature of this humorous work to be dependent on current political ephemera, these cartoons are then equally ephemeral and consequently rendered almost indecipherable when that historical knowledge is forgotten. Since it lay within his power to embody and capture the contemporary scene in all its presentness, rather than merely executing a gag on some topical reference, his rendered artistic observations would in themselves be a sufficient criticism on the age and a more reliable and lasting achievement.

The early 1950s also revealed that if Searle wanted to develop his skills and diversify, he was not prepared to cravenly limit himself to his established audience’s expectations. For all that St Trinians brought him fame, it was of a limited sort and the monthly cartoon had become a chore. With his 1953 collection, Souls in Torment, Searle definitively killed off St Trinians in an atomic blast. This was to be the first indication that Searle’s artistic impulses would compel him to escape the treadmills of success for a more solitary path. His immediate obligations to his publisher did lead to a particularly fruitful collaboration which further exploited the humour to be found in the English public school, the “Molesworth” books in which Geoffrey Willans records the orthographically and grammatically idiosyncratic cynical diaries and observations of nigel molesworth the curse of st custards. Down with Skool! (1953), How to be Topp (1954), Whizz for Atomms (1956), and Back in the Jug Agane (1959) have become classics enchanting subsequent generations ever since (even introducing the world to Hogwarts). Searle’s figure of Molesworth is instantly recognisable, his cynical, jaded eyes lowering in his pug-like face. In St Trinians, Searle’s imagination had been constrained to malign or rowdy japes with rudimentary figure for the girls. In all the varieties of cartoonish attitudes to complement molesworth’s enumerations of schoolboy life, Searle could indulge himself in generous galleries of faces of fellow pupils, brothers, mothers, and school masters. His style also serves admirably for the historical, science-fictional or revenge fantasies of the young schoolboy.

This mastery of broad cartoonish expressiveness had been learnt during Searle’s employment as the caricaturist for “Punch”’s theatre column. Searle’s appointment had been a slightly unusual decision since Searle did not consider himself a natural caricaturist. Yet it served as an effective way of strengthening Searle’s ties to the magazine and was a function he was to perform from 1949 until 1961, accompanying Eric Keown’s theatre reviews, and so incidentally recording many of the great British actors and performances of that turbulent decade. Rather than employing the realistic physiognomical detail of his reportage, Searle learnt to essay human faces in a simplified cartoonish style all his own. He only ever offers a couple of the prominent actors in costume, bare of any setting. Again the upper torso is still dominant, so that these compressed figures come to resemble trotting dwarves. These faces are bolder and more simplistic for maximum effect, given his limited space. The emphasis is on the faces, with curving cheekbones or ballooning chins. The lines of his outsized heads swerve and swoop, yet Searle not only limns their features but also captures something of the nature of the performance and interpretation of the role.

The most lavish products of Searle’s exercises in caricature were his series of portraits, “Heroes of Our Time” for “Punch”. Appearing from September 1956 to March 1957, they were a follow-up to Searle’s Rake’s Progress, and his opportunity to record the most prominent British figures of the period. Centre-fold colour portraits, they have been largely forgotten, beyond the means of easy inclusion in his contemporary collections, and subsequently omitted from Searle’s lavish retrospectives of the 1970s and 1980s. Each was a famous person: an actor, a bishop, a lord, a judge, a conductor, a politician, Bertrand Russell, Princess Margaret, T. .S. Eliot. As selections they probably say more about the taste and concerns of “Punch” and its readership. Aside from his “Punch” covers, they were Searle’s only opportunity to work in colour, and he employs subtle, muted colours with an attention to depth and textures that will not feature in his later colour lithographs. Each is executed in a traditional formal portrait manner: torso and head with suitable attention to costume. Each comes with a mildly deprecating verse from the editorial table, but it is Searle’s faces which are arrestingly ambiguous. Searle’s caricatures are neither extravagantly distorted nor vicious, but Searle’s thrusting noses and buckled-up chins when executed in a portraitist’s pomp acquire a new unsettling dimension of realism. Arresting though they may seem, as stand alone images they suffer the same fate as his “Tribune” cartoons, hostages to the specificity of a forgotten history.

It is Searle’s attempts at exploring and capturing the stereotypes and manners of contemporary society which have proved more enduring. The title “Morbid Anatomies” would seem to play off the ghoulish humour for which he had become famous, but are really a series in which the clichés of a given profession are all collated into one big visual pun parodying its jargon and pretences, i.e., The Journalist with his “eye for the news”, “his finger for the pulse of the public”, “his coat for turning”. As a means of compiling social commentary it indicated a new explicitly satirical direction for Searle. Searle was trying to find a satirical/comic way of looking at people which would effectively bring different types and attitudes together. Searle had compiled cavalcades of classes and ages of Britons in varied pursuits: the reading public, on holiday, enjoying the arts, suffering the weather, etc., but they were too disparate and were only ever connected by their gag topic. Searle exhumed a format in Hogarth’s 18th century “Rake’s Progress” that would allow him to both concentrate his attack, while also broadening the material he could fit into a cartoon realism. Each “Rake’s Progress” typifies the career of a particular profession in one figure: doctor, poet, general, M.P., etc, within six tightly constructed narrative panels: Advent, Emergence, Success, Triumph, Temptation, Ruin. Appearing in 1954 and 1955, each “Rake’s Progress” lets Searle trace British history and culture from the turn of the century, including choice allusions and caricatures of the famous of the period. Taken in their entirety the “Rake’s Progress” constitute possibly the finest satirical panorama of the 1950s, from the humble to the famous, rising from home life and public venues to the private conclaves of the elect, everything that that the propriety of “Punch” can encompass is featured.

Searle was still dedicated to catching all the ephemera of British life in all its relevant quotidian detail. Look at London (1953) collected the best of his illustrative reportage for “News Chronicle”. They are his finest works of draughtsmanship, displaying absolute control, fully finished, and exceptional in terms of compositional arrangement and power of recording (possibly emphasised by the newspaper’s need for reproductive clarity). From crowded scenes at the tourist attractions to portraits of forgotten tradesmen in dens surrounded by their tools and bric-a-brac, each drawing has just the necessary degree of density of lines or white space to leap from the page and communicate a personal affect.Not only does he capture the character of the people of London, but also of the city itself, for as the critic George Melly noted, Searle has a “feeling for the personality of architecture”. Searle’s sympathy is caught in the lines and jowls of his subjects’ lived in features, as his hesitant line outfits their apparel with the frayed dignity of their labours. Even as Searle demonstrates his mastery of the individual human face, these drawings constitute his farewell to such pure portraiture.

The 1950s saw Searle stamp his imprimatur on London, but his people were now to be less verisimilitudinous, in differing degrees the more cartoonish figures of his imagination. Partly this may stem from the fact that many are the result of collaborations with other writers. His art is not intended as pure journalism in itself but to illustrate observations about the varied types inhabiting modern London. Bedsitters, prostitutes, teddy boys, office workers, salesmen, entertainers and their audiences, intellectuals, children and the new class of teenagers, a list as large as the population of London. But his figures are still distinctive, not merely humorous social types, but impressed by the wearying and melancholy effect of living London, yet still drawing upon and projecting reserves of pride and attitude: Modern Types with Geoffrey Gorer (1955) and The Big City, or the New Mayhew with Alex Atkinson (1958) both appeared originally in "Punch"; Mr Rothman’s New Guide to London (1958), an exercise in 1890s nostalgia; numerous illustrations of Charles Dickens; and The Shell Junior Guide to Exploring London (1965), a farewell to the fantasies and delights of historical London; all attest to Searle’s fascination with the capital. Ben Shahn, another social realist chronicler, wrote of Searle’s “infinite toleration and sympathy for the human condition…for all those crotchety, mal-shapen well-intentioned persons, labouring earnestly, arduously and with infinite difficulty through the barbed-wire entanglements of life, but never questioning their duty to go on”.

Even as Searle exhausted himself in the riches of the specific, his last major collaboration at “Punch” was to offer him a commercial and creative lifeline for later. USA for Beginner: By Rocking Chair Across America (1959) and its sequel Russia for Beginners (1960) were both written by Alex Atkinson as comedic travelogues employing all the clichés and commonplaces about the country under investigation without the burden of ever having to visit it. It was travel as a fantasia, a confection whipped up from the froth of the common imagination. Searle’s illustrations happily caricaturing American stereotypes were the perfect complement. Without the need for research and study Searle could draw comic cowboys, Manhattanites, prospectors, tourists, Southern generals and New Orleans jazzmen exhibited in a free and playful humour. Beside the central joke of each illustration, there was a new cartoonish exuberance in his drawings of Manhattan, Washington, D.C., forests and shacks, yet nearly as detailed as his serious reportage. It was a new mode of asserting his humour while addressing the world. Furthermore, it grounded his growing taste for the surreal and gave it expression within the main populist body of his work.

Such pure gag and joke cartoons as Searle had been drawing at this time had been increasing self-referential, an artistic turning in upon himself, examining the irrationality of representation in art. If he wasn’t alluding to other contemporary artists, or eliding the barriers between the work of art and its audience, then his people were finding themselves assaulted by signs and notations. Cartoons about the unrealistic nature of cartooning have always been a staple of the medium, but there was a glazed intensity reminiscent of the dislocated cartoons Howard Shoemaker was also producing during this period. Eyes, legs and other features are paradoxically separated from his characters’ bodies. Throughout the 1950s Searle paid semi-regular homages to Picasso, which at the time appearing in “Punch” were more likely interpreted as complacent humour at Picasso’s expense, but in retrospect suggest Searle’s own admiration and his Modernist inclinations in his later and bolder use of line, form and colour. When discussing his work, it is to the likes of Modigliani and Giacometti that Searle is most likely to refer, with talk of taking a line for a walk and the struggle to realise on paper the feel of the image in his head.

Despite breaking free of the prison of St Trinians, the career Searle had built for himself only served to immure him in further and greater demands. Searle had signed a contract with “Punch” whereby all his work published in England would only appear in its pages. However it had now reached a point where “Punch” was no longer certain what Searle could do for it, only that it wanted more of the same. It had neither the means nor the inclination to encourage his best work, whatever that might prove to be. Commissions were now coming from America, but they followed the pattern of work he had done for English audiences. Searle had latterly discovered American markets which would commission him to survey Germany, France and America itself. These efforts, collected in Which Way Did He Go (1961), were not humorous, and were slightly sketchier in manner than his “News Chronicle” works, yet his relish for all the garish urban spectacle of vertiginous signs and advertising is evident as his lines criss-cross in perspectives of boulevards, city-blocks, markets, pubs and arrondissements. The framing and perspective lines were now visible through the grids and baroque curves of his observations like fleeting thoughts caught on paper. This style is probably best employed in the series of spare ghost-like drawings evoking the isolation of refugee camps for a U.N campaign, the becalmed refugees almost transparent and spectral against their confines. He reported for “Life” magazine on the Nixon-Kennedy presidential campaign and the Adolf Eichmann trial. >He was in demand for film animation designs (and note the belated Searle influence in the Disney films of the early 1960s). He had even been forced to anonymously contribute to British propaganda during the 1956 Suez War. His facility was prodigious, capable of executing a densely detailed comic illustration of an old Bailey trial in barely six hours. Simply because he could do it, it did not mean that the doing constituted an opportunity. To judge that his style was perfect meant he had completed his development, and consigned him to nothing more than a career recapitulating his own clichés.

In September 1961, Searle made the most definite and slashing change in his life. Just as a collection of his work stated that “mid-century Britain is a Searle-haunted land”, Searle was preparing to abandon it. He left his family, moving from London to be with his new lover Monica in Paris. It was as importantly a liberation from the confining domestication of his art, and he would rarely visit England ever again. Instead of tailoring his art to the demands of his life, he would tailor his life to the demands of his art. Searle also saw Paris as the centre of a new movement in graphic art. Searle’s intention was to find ways of making his art more international. Firstly, this meant taking more foreign reportage assignments which could pay him to travel the world. Secondly, it meant developing an art that would dispense with purely parochial references and concerns, and by analysing his methods of representation could communicate universally.

His last sequence of works for “Punch” signify Searle’s growing prioritisation of his imagination over painstaking realism. Removed from the facts of England, he offered a series of caricatures of famous people, “The Searle’s Eye Views: as the imagination sees them”. He deliberately rejected any attempt at capturing a literal likeness or physical features. Instead, they were fantasies on the subject’s character and reputation, comic exaggerations of stereotypes like his “Rocking Chair” illustrations. Walt Disney is a fat, aged, bewhiskered Mickey lost in satisfied reverie. Ingmar Bergman is a gaunt skeletal face hidden behind a rickety fence, with one immense eye staring through a gap in the slats. Writers are portrayed as projections of their work’s subject matter: Robert Graves is an heroically-thewed and bearded Greek, C.S. Forester is a pipe-smoking, peg-legged sailor.
More conceptual are Angus Wilson as a lofty brain surgeon delving his instruments into the flip-top head of a bored suburban matron, Aldous Huxley as a man whose head, an immense latitude-lined globe marked with worry, is clasped in concern, or John Betjeman as an Edwardian fighting a rearguard retreat with his umbrella-cum-rifle. As in his theatrical caricatures, Searle eschews almost any background scenery, except in the case of some of the absurdist writers like Samuel Beckett and Ionesco. These he places on stages whose boards extending into a far distant horizon are the first use of what would become a trademark setting.

It is a similar insistence on his powers of creative invention that would vivify his reportage work for commercial magazines. Where his drawings of Paris, Las Vegas, New York and San Francisco had been scrupulously detailed, now he became to execute his commissions as explorations in fantasy. Americans had been flattered and charmed by the imaginative manner of his “Rocking Chair” illustrations, and in 1960 he had been voted Cartoonist of the Year by the National Cartoonist Society, the first non-American to receive that honour. Continuing in that vein, applying humour to his capacity for painstaking observation of scenarios would be the foundation of some of his finest achievements. Rather than just being an amusing illustration to accompany an amusing article, Searle’s works would be commentary in their own right. Inadvertently, it was also a necessary commercial development, as magazines’ ability to reproduce lavish colour photography meant pictorial journalists were about to find themselves outmoded. Searle’s humour, however, meant he possessed a unique selling point and was therefore able to compete with the camera’s eye. Furthermore, lucrative assignments for American magazines meant he could also finally extend himself in colour work. It was this mode of humorous transformation of the real world that would be his characteristic commercial style for the next decade, as he found himself in demand at “Holiday” magazine and “TV Guide”.

The best of this work is collected From Frozen North to Filthy Lucre (1964) and Haven’t We Met Before Somewhere? (1966). The full-page work is as detailed as before but now it has a two-fold purpose – to accurately represent each new venue, and also to support the gag which Searle has envisioned. Some compositions are gags contrasting the humans with their scenery. Against the splendour of the Library of Congress, a teenager is engrossed in his comic book. Some are humorous situations: on a Provincetown pier, an artist fights off the flock of birds intent on his painting of a fish. Some are visual puns: a spectral bear and bull waltz together over the stock exchange, or a modernist building is drawn to resemble a crocodile about to snap shut on its tourists. Some are wholly figurative: dollar bills overlie the towering cityscape of Wall Street. At the same time there is some loss of human individuality. The human figures are there to contribute to the scene and the gag, but not to distract from it. So many of the sights he visits are largely populated by the older, affluent population of Europe and America, tourists and businessmen. Searle develops a generic cartoony face composed of descending bulges and curves to represent jowls and protuberant heads with rolls of fat on the neck, with scratchy vertical lines for facial wrinkles.

Ronald Searle 1

2010-02-20T04:39:00.004-08:00

“If there is a common thread, it is certainly that of the explorative, probing line, a line of much hesitation, sensual pleasure, exorcism and occasionally hate, lurking behind the predatory bite of the steel nib, like a greedy crow behind the plough. The uncompromising brutality of black on white violates a virgin sheet of paper”. – Ronald Searle’s preface to “Carnet de croquis: le Plaisir du trait”, La Nompareille, 1992

“The eye may select, but the brain must revaluate. A drawing does not dribble through the eye, down through the fingers, and out onto the paper. Thought and a point-of-view make the artist. . . The simple sketch turns swiftly before your eyes into a personal comment and the moment is uniquely pinned down.” – Ronald Searle’s introduction to “Creative Pencil Drawing”, by Paul Hogarth, Studio Vista, 1964

Beloved in England, honoured by his peers in America, eminent throughout Europe, with well over a hundred books to his credit, Ronald Searle has built an international career spanning almost seventy years. Easy as it is to be awed by his accomplishments, his skill and his wit, it can prove more of a task to follow and understand his prolific career. Particularly, when Searle’s development has been impelled by his need to challenge his formidable technique. Searle has always drawn with a distinctive line, which over the years has proven capable of nearly everything. Stuttering, querulous, sometimes wobbly, deceptively doubtful when actually determined and accomplished, his line attests to a unique observation and interpretation of the world reflected in his ever-mutating manner of depicting humanity.

His career describes in miniature a transition from realism through impressionism to his own brand of modernism. The first half of his career seemed to chase after an ever more skilful and refined realism. Barely out of art school, he was thrust into World War II, then taken as a POW in Singapore where he recorded savagery and death in art both harrowing and restrained. When Searle returned to England his career progressed at first by alternating between simplistic yet morbid cartoons and straight reportage. But Searle achieved his most strikingly accomplished results when he applied traditional detailed realism to his aptitude for humour. Even before he developed into the last of the great “Punch” cartoonists he was already famous for his St Trinian’s cartoon, and would become a favourite of American magazines for his illustrations of Paris, London and America. Yet, at the height of his acclaim, in 1961 he gave up the career he had worked so hard to build, afraid of sacrificing his potential for easy lionisation by pandering reassuring conventional humour.The second half of his career would be spent developing a manner of abstraction, surrealism, whimsy, and satirical and observational fantasy. Yet throughout his entire career, his figures whether foregrounded in camps, cities, cameos or on surreal stages are often solitary, as Searle himself has also proven a solitary survivor escaping the scene of his latest success.

Ronald William Fordham Searle was born 3 March, 1920 in Cambridge, England, the son of a railwayman. He was educated at the Boys’ Central School. He wanted to be an artist and showed talent at a very early age, despite prejudices against his left-handedness. He was an avid book collector and the second-hand volumes he bought spurred his ambitions to become an artist. As Searle developed, his artistic heroes and influences included Picasso, Rowlandson, Toulouse-Lautrec and George Grosz. One of his first acquisitions was Spielmann’s “History of Punch”, fostering an ambition to become a “Punch” cartoonist. He left school in 1935 to start employment. He began studying in the evenings at Cambridge School of Art and then full-time from 1935 to 1939. His studies were in “the fiercely academic tradition of Tonks and the Slade, that of unremitting toil combined with minute surgical observation”. He paid for his classes by contributing weekly cartoons to the “Cambridge Daily News” when the previous cartoonist quit the paper. His first cartoon appeared on 26 Oct 1935, imitative of H.M. Bateman’s style. Searle would produce 195 weekly cartoons, which if they had little bearing on his later work, at least taught him to draw for reproduction. In 1938, Searle made sorties to London to approach newspapers, but nothing resulted, though he had become a major contributor to “Granta”, Cambridge University’s respected student journal.

In 1939 Searle received his Ministry of Education Drawing Diploma. He also illustrated his first book, “Co-Operation in a University Town” by W. Henry Brown. He enlisted in the Territorial Army in anticipation of the forthcoming war as an Architectural Draughtsman, and was mobilised in September 1939. He was posted around England, engaged in camouflage work. His final stationing in Britain was at Kirkcudbright, Scotland, where he encountered evacuees from St Trinnean’s, an Edinburgh progressive girl’s school. Searle continued to submit drawings and cartoons to newspapers and magazines for the next two years, including the prototype St Trinian's cartoon which appeared in “Lilliput” in October 1941. That same month Searle sailed with the 18th Division from Scotland, reaching Singapore on 13 January 1942. While in transit Searle sketched everything he saw, and sent them back Cambridge. These drawings were exhibited in 1942, prompting a critic to note the influence of Picasso and Epstein. As soon as they disembarked at Singapore the troops immediately found themselves in combat with the advancing Japanese Imperial Guard. The British were untrained and unequipped for jungle warfare. One month after he arrived, on 15 Feb 1942, the British surrendered Singapore unconditionally to the Japanese and Searle spent the rest of the war as a prisoner. It was while he was under fire in February that Searle chanced upon a copy of the October 1941 “Lilliput” discarded in the street that proved he was now a professional cartoonist.

The Japanese assumed that a soldier would die before being captured, and that soldiers who surrendered were without honour. The British prisoners-of-war consequently found themselves treated pitilessly, held in the Changi area as mere captives not conventional prisoners of war. The POWs were issued armbands reading “One who has been captured in battle and is to be beheaded or castrated at the will of the Emperor”. They were kept in conditions of squalor and suffered great brutality at their captors’ hands, as near-starvation and dreadful living conditions soon reduced the POWs to living skeletons. Casual punishments and beatings were meted out at the whim of the guards. For their amusement, guards might force a prisoner to hold heavy rocks over his head at spear-point. A guard once stuck a pickaxe in Searle’s back, almost penetrating his spine, leaving his legs temporarily paralysed. Filth, malnutrition and insects ravaged the men with disease: enteritis, gastritis, dysentery, ulceration, beri-beri, jaundice, dengue fever, and malaria. Despite, and indeed, because of all this, Searle was determined to continue his work recording his war, and throughout his captivity he kept a record of the prisoners’ sufferings in his drawings. At great risk and aware of the punishment awaiting him if his work was discovered, he drew his fellow soldiers, the forced work detachments, the neglect and torture by the guards, and his dying comrades. He scrounged and salvaged every available scrap of paper, even bartering with the guards. It was, in Searle’s words, “the graffiti of a condemned man, intending to leave a rough witness of his passing through, but who found himself – to his surprise and delight – among the reprieved”

In May 1943 Searle was selected as one of the forced labourers who would construct the Burma-Siam railway for the Japanese. Searle thinks he was assigned by British officers as a means of keeping perceived troublemakers out of the way. He and two other inmates had begun producing a magazine, “The Survivor”, to boost the morale of the prisoners which had upset the conservative attitudes of the internal British camp administration. He was one of 3,270 men assigned to march 160 kilometres through jungle to cut a railway through mountains and dense forest. Already debilitated by fever and exhaustion, the POWs also struggled with the terrible heat and monsoons. Many died before they ever reached the worksite of the “Death Railway”. Searle has condemned any “romantic” notions of purpose and achievement in constructing the railway from “The Bridge on the River Kwai” as movie “nonsense”. Malnourished, suffering from innumerable diseases, beaten by their guards, and further shamed at assisting their enemies, personal survival was the prisoners’ only objective. Two thirds of Searle’s group would die before the end of the year. In all, the Japanese employed about 180,000 Asians and 60,000 Allied prisoners of war as forced labour, of whom 90,000 Asian labourers and 16,000 Allied POWs died. The saying went “that a man died for every sleeper laid”.

The railway was completed in October 1943 and in 1944 there a wholesale transfer of the surviving men to Changi Gaol, Singapore. The prison had been built by the British in 1936 to hold 600 men. The Japanese would make it hold 10,000 men. Searle’s health continued to suffer like everyone else’s amidst the surrounding horror. “In a tent which housed the dying I think I reached rock bottom. Between bouts of fever I came round one morning to find the men on each side of me were dead, and as I tried to prop myself up to get away from them, I saw that there was a snake coiled under the bundle on which I had been resting my head.” Searle nearly died, with colleagues able to do little more for him except take him into the sun to dry out. His fellow internee Russell Braddon remembered, “If you can imagine something that weighs six stone or so, is on the point of death and has no qualities of the human condition that aren’t revolting, calmly lying there with a pencil and a scrap of paper, drawing, you have some idea of the difference of temperament that this man had from the ordinary human being.” Searle would hide his sketches around the camp, but found that they were most safely placed with cholera victims, since the Japanese guards’ extreme fear of cholera meant they would not search sufferers. When Singapore surrendered on 4 September 1945, three hundred pieces of artwork had survived for Searle to take back home with him.

As a body of work his sketches are a testament to the horrors of war. To say they are evidence and Searle bears witness is to suggest something of these works’ calm, detached quality. Goya’s “Disasters of War” also confront the atrocities of war, but Goya represent its aftermath, expressed in almost every conceivable variation of human dismemberment. Goya’s prints are intended as intense condemnations. Searle’s are composed in the belly of the beast by one suffering what he records, yet his sketches are calm and objective. He is not just the detached observer but one of the victims, yet even in this most abject condition there is no anger at what humans can make each other suffer. His art is neither exaggerated nor sensationalised. The implacable recording of his experiences and observations is too important. To speak of style might be almost gratuitous or unseemly in such circumstances. They are as “finished” as conditions allowed. If not masterworks, they are effective. Where Goya executes dark, dense infernos, Searle’s sketches are typically loose and open, yet the content is vivid. Speedily completed from memory, often before or after 16 hour work assignments, when Searle does emphasise shadow and darkness, it partakes of the intensity and fervour which characterised the apocalyptic Neo-Romantic art of the 1940s. His curving strokes define negative space. At their sparest, Searle captures gaunt figures recumbent and dying, and then the necessary minimalism is devastating. Other figures are smooth and rounded with more finish. His bland, satisfied and casual Japanese soldiers are rarely menacing, but such bored, yet substantive figures are telling in comparison to his POWS. Having seen humans at their emaciated worst, this apprehension of distorted human anatomy perhaps carries over into his figures of the 1950s.

As unique as his pictorial record of captivity is, it was not to prove any practical starting point for his career. Searle’s internment and his artistic compulsion to record has always been newsworthy and made for good journalistic copy throughout his career, but the images remained unavailable to the public for a long period. After he returned to England in October 1945 there was one exhibition of them at the Cambridge School of Art in December, and then a selection in Forty Drawings (1946), his first book. Searle’s work was complimented by several critics for its unexpected beauty. Other than a few reproductions in memoirs of other Changi survivors, Searle’s war sketches went uncollected until shortly after Searle donated them to the War Museum. In To the Kwai and Back (1986) Searle illuminates his art as he recounts his experiences with forbearance and dry sarcasm. Curiously, his work never made him retrospectively eligible for the official status of War Artist.

Searle may have put aside his war work, deriving from his self-appointed sense of mission, because of the contemporary feeling that the British public was eager to put the war behind it and concentrate on the work of the future. Searle was likewise intent on beginning a career as a successful working artist, and to obsess over his past works would not be helpful or productive. Searle soon made the acquaintance of his cartoon editor at “Lilliput”, Kaye Webb. Webb not only gave him a network of contacts but would also soon become his wife. There was a wide variety of publications looking for cartoons and illustrative art, and Searle essayed various styles to satisfy their requirements and prove his commercial versatility. Even before his discharge from the army in June 1946 his work was appearing in all the mid-range popular publications: “John Bull”, “Printer’s Pie”, “Lilliput”, “Reynold’s News”, as well as “Punch”. The late 40s were to prove a working apprenticeship as Searle mastered his skills and discovered his own particular style. His work readily diverges into two separate categories. There would be Searle the cartoonist and Searle the detailed draughtsman and recording artist.

While Searle was a POW he had unknowingly become established as a young cartoonist to watch for. Works which he had dispatched to “Lilliput” and “London Opinion” prior to departing from UK had been slowly eeked out over the following years. This backlog had been sufficiently noteworthy that at one point it had earned him inclusion in the “Twelve Best Cartoonists of the Year”. Even while he was in Changi, Searle worked on a notebook of gag cartoons, and these ideas were soon put to work upon his return.

Searle starts off drawing cartoons in a style which is intended to be recognisably cartoonish. His line is happy to merely encompass the outline of his figures without sophistication, content to be only slightly better than amateurish (as indeed a certain casual amateurishness of effect was the essence of ffolkes and Osbert Lancaster). Many of them are standard gag cartoons. They are populated by spivs, forgers, dukes, matrons and little children, all the stock social and cartoon types of the period. The two strongest influences in both conception and handling may be Arno and Anton. Searle is just discovering his distinctive bodies, long spindly legs dwindling from the jutting haunches, hips and overhanging buttocks. His upper torsos loom forth, but he is unsure what to do with his faces. They are still generically cartoony. Enlivened by a prominent nose or a moustache, they resemble Rowland Emmett’s faces, but otherwise bear no resemblance to Searle’s own realistic drawings of observed people. He has a tendency to stretch and contort bodies, as though a slightly zany physical aspect will help sell the joke, and this is complemented by backgrounds which are similarly, twisted, spun and warped. The reliance on vertical figures with sharp features caught against sharp scratchy angles and heavily scribbled shading to suggest their settings evoke Anton. There is also a strong tendency to unreality and the wholly imaginary, with devils, witches, and talking animals, rather than merely fantastical exaggerations of real observations. These are all standard cartoons, and it is probably of some significance that Searle largely exhausted himself in this obvious vein within his first few years, and that none of it approaches his best work.

Searle’s St Trinians cartoons, despite his own misgivings, have been Searle’s longest-lasting contribution to pure gag cartooning. His sadistic murderous schoolgirls, later familiar from numerous films, struck a chord which continues to resound. There will always be a large element of the public for whom Searle will always be known only for Those Girls. In the fiendish delights of innocent girls as violent thugs, Searle discovered a milieu for macabre “black humour” to match Charles Addams. Where American values inhere in the family, the British Establishment learns theirs at their public schools. The revered humorist and caricaturist Max Beerbohm complimented Searle on his “power of converting the macabre into the most pleasurable of frolics”. Searle was intent, after his war experiences, on introducing some new disturbing element of horror and misery into humour. It was genius on Searle’s part to execute the tantrums and sulks of young girls as murderous vengeance. Searle had attempted a short-lived series of cartoons featuring a scapegrace boy, ‘Orrible Albert, whose destructive mischief intentionally provokes all the adults, but this nuisance was no “Dennis the Menace”. St Trinians was a grander conceit, a self-contained world, rather than mere knock-about comic irritation. St Trinians drew into itself all the worst in the popular imagination - gangsters, guns, alcohol, cigarettes, medieval punishment and tortures, black magic and diabolism. There was a casual relishing of cruelty and violence, recognising there is a worse world of human relations and behaviour. The cartoons survive because Searle’s use of young girls surprises us with cruelty in an unexpected venue but also domesticates that cruelty by returning to it again and again until it becomes a school code of behaviour. Searle admitted a St Trinians girl “would be sadistic, cunning, dissolute, crooked, sordid, lacking morals of any sort, and capable of any excess. She would also be well-spoken, even well mannered and polite. Sardonic, witty and very amusing. She would be good company. In short: typically human, and despite everything, endearing.” In retrospect, some of the cartoons replay for laughs the abuses suffered under the Japanese.

Though the humour is distinctive, Searle has always been in danger of being remembered for some of his least distinctive art. The hockey sticks, pigtails, boaters and uniforms are probably better known from the film adaptations. The St Trinians cartoons do at least benefit from Searle’s artistic development. He had eventually dispensed with black dots for eyes, with the discovery that compressed ovals were ideal as more sophisticated and slitted eyes, capable of encompassing a range of pensive, leery, suspicious and avaricious expressions. Originally his girls’ faces had resembled spring onions, but eventually their frequently bespectacled features benefitted from these new sinister slit eyes. In predatory profile their jutting noses above broad curved grins suggest a shark rising from the sea. What St Trinian’s demonstrated was that in following his own vein of fantasy, his vision could prove startlingly successful.

While his cartoons exercised his imagination humorously, Searle was also engaged in a broad array of realistic illustration and reportage for books and newspapers. Since many publications still had problems reproducing photos effectively on cheap paper, the 1940s and ‘50s were the last heyday of illustration, of fine and commercial art. Searle would prove equal to this golden age of Paul Hogarth, Fritz Wegner, Susan Einzig, and Edward Ardizzone. Upon his return to England, Searle would even have a studio in the same building as John Minton. Searle’s illustrations and reportage record his determination to capture the details of observed reality and organise them on the page. They also record his development from the sketchiness of his Changi drawings. Unlike the strong outlines of his cartoons, here Searle builds outlines with lengthy lines, picking up his nib then continuing by overlaying at the end of the line. At this stage in his career it gives his illustrations a slightly tremulous quality, and in the case of buildings make them look particularly wavy. Often the outlines of his people, when done so scratchily, encompassing a space of white with his slightly etiolated forearms and legs, gives his humans a spidery appearance. The thinness of his lines, sometimes undistinguished and the unsurety of his wash in attempting rough shading gives them a slightly gloomy cobwebby look. It all attests though to a growing power of observation and mastery of fact. Yet the detail of creases in clothes, ornaments, architectures, as plumes of curves blossom and intersect bestow a solidity on his representations, though individual features and objects are sometimes imprecisely captured. Ultimately, one is struck by the mass of individual lines working to appropriately fill the page. Each page is a vista, with the people imbedded as but one element of staffage.

This was refined by the work he did for the “Radio Times”. Under the art editorship of R. D. Usherwood, the “Radio Times” was a patron of “Fine, Commercial Art”. Artists were carefully selected to illustrate the listings of forthcoming programmes. The illustrations were wholly imaginary, drawing upon the artist’s observations and draughtsmanship. This art shows Searle learning to foreground his characters so as to stand out from the scenery, and to embody dramatic actions and attitudes not merely poses. Even when a noted actor was performing in a role, the artist would draw the character, never the actor’s likeness. It was always an independent and imaginary representation of a scene from the drama or documentary broadcast portrayed with all due verisimilitude as if copied from the life. They also demonstrate Searle’s growing confidence in contrasting black forms and employing heavier outlines against white spaces for theatrical effect, as he discovers the discipline of clarity, since clutter would be wasted in the limited space available.

By the late 1940s Searle had started to bring together his cartooning and his illustrative skills together to create a more realistically arranged style of humorous illustration and cartooning. He was still producing his St Trinian’s cartoons. Rationed at a rate of one a month for “Lilliput”, they chart his development, as the backgrounds become more realistic and the characters also more solid. He no longer has to rely so heavily on the brute fact of the gag. The blatant yet rudimentary cartoony funny figures vitiated the humour, whereas when executed with a greater degree of character, the effect and power of gag are both more lasting as well as distinctive and unusual. The overwhelming presence of a lifelike hippopotamus being led through cobbled corridors by a little girl elevates the gag leaving a much more formidable impression.

His ability to effect a corresponding comic style of illustration is demonstrated by his work to accompany the humorous journalism of Patrick Campbell. Campbell’s anecdotes presented himself as a somewhat hapless figure often caught in situations of befuddlement and farce. Searle employs compositional skills developed at “The Radio Times” to execute comic scenes which get the most out of Campbell’s situations. There is the now to-be-expected attention to detail, but his figures are now cartoony. Searle’s stretches his realistic human forms into a deliberately cartoony figure, which allowing for comic exaggeration, is as expressive in attitudes and action, deportment and features as any actual person. In his Campbell illustrations, one can finally point to characters who are recognisable as Searle’s people, as he establishes and elaborates upon the model for his cartoon humans.

The figure Searle devised for his Patrick Campbell figure would be the archetypal Searle man. There is a spindly quality with every extremity slightly extended. The foreshortened flattened head with low brow slopes into the nose looming from the face like a third, lost foot. Most conspicuous is the stalactite chin and jaw dropping over the collar. An expectedly lengthy torso dwindles into the hips from which extend lanky, spindly, rigidly angular legs, concluding in his trademark winkle-picker feet. It only required the addition of a moustache for this creation to become famous throughout Britain in the 1950s as the figure of a successful advertising campaign for Lemon Hart Rum. In a period when most English cartoons employed a simple, smooth blocky style, Searle’s art was distinctive. Not always to everyone’s tastes though, as a letter from one magazine reader complained of “a nauseous feeling just glancing at Ronald Searle’s ridiculous illustrations. Who on earth ever saw people with such large bodies, thin legs, tiny feet and elongated shoulders as those he depicts each week?” Except in the case of his fatties whose jowls billow out from lip to chest, Searle’s men are distinguished for their chins which his women almost never possess. His women come in a variety of distinct styles: haughty matrons, etiolated spinsters, gamines, schoolgirls and overripe ingénues. Yet when attired in assorted costumes and class signifiers, his women have an almost infinite variety.

381: Golden Chestnuts III

2010-02-20T04:36:00.000-08:00

Another long-running English joke.
“Heaven” is the gay London nightclub, established in 1979. The name is obviously a bit cheeky, and so provokes jokes. More mark of its success must be that it has crossed over into heterosexual awareness.
How many people would be expected to know the name of a gay nightclub in the early 1980s? Well here’s a demonstration.

From "Not 1983" calendar

And so for about thirty years, there have been, cartoons sketches, and bits and banter of the like:

Obviously gay man (preferable clone-style so no one is oblivious) says to vicar: See you in Heaven.

Or :

First figure: My friend’s gone to Heaven.
Second figure: (condolences) Oh I’m so sorry to hear that.
First figure: No, the club

380: Golden Chestnuts II

2010-02-15T08:24:00.000-08:00

Oh please, Dr Freud, I enquire in a faux-naif fashion as a perfectly normal macho man, please tell me what my incessant dreams of phallic objects can mean?

From “Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex (Aren't You Sorry You Asked?)” by John Boni
in “National Lampoon”, July 1971

from “Not 1983” calendar

The latter one I include merely because over three years since the Jeremy Thorpe case and people are still making Liberal Party = Gay jokes (Clement Freud was a prominent Liberal MP, and need I explain Jeremy T?). This is what life was like before 24 hour constant media bombardment.

379: Golden Chestnuts I

2010-02-14T11:09:00.000-08:00

A small selection of jokes which will stand in for all the other occasions when cartoonists and humorists have used the same joke. Not that they’re employing the same joke because they’re necessarily plagiarising each other, or because it’s a simple cliché. But because certain themes and phrases provoke the same reaction, and hence the same joke crops up. So these are intended to be early examples of jokes which are relatively flogged to death over the succeeding decades, since each time the perpetrator thought he was having some ingenious new comic idea. But there is little that is new under the sun.

from “Shel Silverstein in London”
in “Playboy” June 1967

This is the earliest instance of a recurring English joke. And it’s in “Playboy”, an American magazine. Here it has a certain freshness, because it’s contemporary with the subject of the joke, homosexual legalisation in the UK in 1967.

The joke, in its most common form:
A man is emigrating from England. He’s asked why he’s leaving. He replies, “At one time homosexuality was illegal, then it became tolerated, now it’s legal. Blimey, I’m leaving before it becomes compulsory!”

Normally it’s used by slightly bigoted people, and had some frequency in the ‘70s and ‘80s. Trotted out for slightly nostalgic effect nowadays. Here, in just about the earliest instances I can find in print, Silverstein puts it in the mouth of a gay man, which rather heightens the militant effect of the joke.

378: Father Riley's a what?

2010-02-13T06:30:00.000-08:00

And what opinion did American humorists who’d grown up Catholic have of the servants of Holy Mother church? Well, once you discount all of the sentimental, acceptable sitcom-style guff, then it was that the Catholic brotherhood was a haven of predatory perverts.

from “The Seven Sacraments: A ‘Milstone’ Pamphlet for Little Catholics” by Bro. “Al” Andrien
In “National Lampoon, December 1974

from “An Irish Market Place” by Ted Mann
in “National Lampoon, January 1976

From a general grab-bag of jokes about Irish culture: the I.R.A, G.B. Shaw’s collected works, the ghost of W.B. Yeats, and alcoholism. And then there’s this. “Alternate Birth Control”, indeed, with altar boys. And this some thirty years before revelations were made public about what was going on when it come to Brotherly Care in Ireland. Although there were scandals in the early ‘80s, too, if I remember correctly.

And of course there’s Frank Zappa’s throwaway line in his 1979 song, “Catholic Girls” that “Father Riley's a fairy / But that don’t bother Mary”.

377: Thoughts on the Announcement of the Pope's Visit to Britain

2010-02-02T04:50:00.000-08:00

Ken Pyne in "Punch" 18 April 1979
Having worked in a diocesan office, this is particularly true. A number of the Church of England priests who object to the ordination of women do so, not merely because of outright misogyny, but because of that specific gay misogyny which does not want to see women encroach on their own little gayified world. So by the Pope inviting those objectors to female ordination to cross over to the Catholic side, there's likely to be a significant homosexual contingent. If the Pope wants gay priests he's already got enough in his own without poaching ours.

Manfred Deix

Manfred Deix

Gerhard Haderer

When it comes to being objectionable about the Catholic Church, people who gre up Catholic are so much better at than us. Deix and Haderer deserve to be better known to western cartoon and satire enthusiasts. Not only are they satirically sharp but they have real art chops which add a horrible verisimilitude to their human grotesques.

Gay Men in Underground Comix

2010-01-24T06:31:00.001-08:00

Well I’ve ploughed my way through all manner of magazines in the course of all this. But I’ve not got around to the underground comix of the late ‘60s and ‘1970s before. Supposedly breaking new ground in humour for the counterculture, the underground comix proved to be a hotbed of jokes about fucking. Not least this is because they are produced independent of the Comics Code Authority Standards, which monitored all the product of the mainstream comics companies. Just like the Hayes Code which censored American films during the mid-part of the 20th century, the Comics Code Authority Standards forbade representations of “sexual abnormality” and “sex perversion”. So the underground cartoonists run riot, thumbing their noses at ideas of accepted good taste and subject matter, drawing all manner of fucking, taboo-breaking, and the occasional descent into actual depravity. It was this that would ultimately hobble the movement when a 1973 judgement made the headshops which sold them liable to local standards of decency.

So, underground commix are rightly remembered for featuring in different forms, deliberately cartoonish or grotesque, staggering amounts of cartoon sex. But there’s precious little about gay men or gay sex. Is it a matter of politeness, discomfort, political sensitivity, or were they just too wrapped up in all the fun of getting their own heterosexual fantasies down on paper? These are comix drawn by people who are supposedly raising their consciousness, overturning the old social order, engaging with all sorts of different “lib” movements. These cartoons are supposed to reflect the new society they’re making for themselves. We’re not like the older generation, we can laugh at all manner of things, and not feel ashamed, even as we betray our assorted neuroses and hang-ups. But are there any homosexuals in sight? Nope. But then the underground comix community is probably at least 90% male. They have enough difficulties trying to depict women as rounded characters or taking female points of view or feelings into consideration.

Even for all the deliberate grossness and enjoyment of depicting the weirdest sexual acts imaginable, homosexuality barely rates at all. How much aren’t homosexuals in underground comix? I’ve read between 150-200 issues. Each issue usually has between 8-20 stories by different artists. At a low estimate that comes out at 2000 stories. I’ve found 20 instances over the better part of a decade that in some way or other touch on homosexuality. That’s 1%. Right up to the end of my search, representations of homosexuality were running neck and neck with depictions of bestiality, paedophilia, incest, or stuffing a fat penis into an empty eye socket (really, it’s not uncommon). In the end, homosexuality wins out, but only just. Whether it’s pure gross-out or comic inappropriateness homosexuality homosexuality never seems to occur – which may be a good thing. Of course from this you could argue that either a) homosexuality is not transgressive enough, or b) that it’s just a little too realistic and therefore artists don’t quite want to wave it about for fear of what others might think. If there’s sexual exploration, it’s not in any bisexual direction. The only really trangressive depictions of homosexuality with aggressive sodomy are from the 60s, still pre-Stonewall, just as the underground comix scene is starting out, and when homosexuality is still something rather alien. And as it happens, S. Clay Wilson’s “Captain Pissgums” is instrumental in initiating that taboo-fouling tendency of the underground comix. I will give pretty much everyone here credit. There are more cocks, and men lavishing attention on other men’s cocks, on show here than in the entirety of this website put together.

Once you dismiss the transgressive aspect of homosexuality, how does homosexuality fare in the comix when it does infrequently appear? As homosexuality is very slowly making some social acceptance, how are a younger cadre of cartoonists incorporating it as a subject matter? Well, not with any great degree of enlightenment has to be the final judgement. A few of them do address oppression and Gay Lib. And a few present something that is historically recognisable as bearing relation to the homosexual scene of the time. But most lack any real topical quality which might validate them as satire. Most of them have homosexuals as being asked to fit into the artist’s pre-existing comic strip style. And so most of them are just silly comedy homos, clichés embraced and confirmed. (And comix contemporary Terry Gilliam’s work throughout the sixties and up to his “Monty Python” animations is also dotted with cliché gays). Because of the omnipresent heterosexual horniness and other locker room attitudes which these cartoons comically embody and occasionally undermine, quite a few of these strips would not look out of place in “Playboy” - which by the by the 70s is not denigratory towards gays but neither does it suggest cutting edge content.

And this is why “Gay Heart Throbs” comics in the late ‘70s, and then “Gay Comix” in the 80s proved so necessary.

Thanks to Howard Cruse for hints and feedback.

-----------------------

(Is there a relevant Robert Crumb piece? Other than a few domineering feminist lesbians I couldn’t find a gay man in his works from this period)

1 S.Clay Wilson – early works 1967-1969

2 S. Clay Wilson – Captain Pissgums and His Pervert Pirates, 1968

3 Jim Osborne – Paul & Marlon in Bottoms Up, 1969

4 Skip Williamson - The Voice of Doom, 1970

5 Rand Holmes - The Continuing Adventures of Harold Hedd, 1971

6 Vaughn Bodé and Berni Wrightson – Purple Pictography, 1971 - 1972

7 Ted Richards - Dopin Dan, 1972

8 Bobby London - Merton meets Yiddie Yippie, 1972

9 Bobby London - Artie Schnopp the Friendly Cop, 1972

10 Bill Griffiths – Real Live Dolls, 1973

11 Gilbert Shelton – I Led Nine Lives, 1973

12 Gary King – Boys will be Boys, 1973

13 Art Spiegelman – Real Dream, 1974

14 Trina Robbins – I was a Fag Hag, 1974

15 Willy Murphy – Once More, With or Without Feeling, 1975

16 Maurice Escutchier – Dungsbury, 1975?

17 Gary Hallgren - Tom Comes Out, 76

18 John Pound - Macho Motors , 1976

19 Sharry Flenniken - “Child of Divorce” in 'National Lampoon', May 1980
Flenniken found a home at “National Lampoon” in the early/mid 70s at about the moment that the underground comix scene hit the distribution wall

20 Alan Moore, “The Hot Slot”, in “American Flagg” #21, June 1985
Moore revisits the satirical sexual ethos of underground comix

376: John Pound - Macho Motors

2010-01-24T06:17:00.000-08:00

"Macho Motors" by John Pound
in "Comix Book" #5, July 1976

These are the first pages of a longer story. Flip the Bird is a crass, sleazy con artist and usually gets his comeuppance later in strip. Ho-hum, it’s those deceptive trannies again, making for comic “Playboy” fodder. Although the coarse gay slur is further than “Playboy” lets its jokes by this time go. Both this story and the Hallgren had both hanging around for a year due to publisher problems. The underground commix scene was pretty comatose by this point, so this is the last instance I find. But in April 1976 there is the first issue of “Gay Heart Throbs”, gay commix content for gay readers. Which in one way or another will eventually point us to the upland fields of “Dykes to Watch Out For” and Howard Cruse’s properly gay cartoons.

375: Gary Hallgren - Tom Comes Out

2010-01-24T06:14:00.000-08:00

"Tom Comes Out" by Gary Hallgren - "Comix Book" #5, July 76

Tom’s a farly pathetic and unsympathetic character but then why should everyone have to be. As far as the gay character goes, the leather jacket and bandana look bears some relation to reality, and as always there’s the lisping, pursed lips and fluttery eyes. Actually on average I would have to say that there are more lisping stereotypes in the underground commix than pretty much anywhere else. So not a success on that front. Then the rest of the strip is a series of failed heterosexual attempts, constantly reinforced with gay slurs on his masculinity, mistakenly leading to the horrified punchline that Tom to think he’s gay. Although at least, unlike in the original film of MASH, that’s not cause for suicide.

374: Maurice Escutchier - Dungsbury

2010-01-24T06:10:00.000-08:00

Dungsbury (1975? Guessing from the Trudeau style being parodied)
by Maurice Escutchier
Reprinted in “Illustrated Checklist To Underground Comix”, 1979

Escutchier was important enough to be interviewed in the “Illustrated Checklist” but that would now seem to be the only record remaining that he had a career.
“It’s worse when you’re queer” – what, it’s harder to find men, or it’s just worse being queer? Since it’s delivered in the slightly oblique Trudeau manner, it’s deliberately ambivalent.

373: Willy Murphy - Once More, With or Without Feeling

2010-01-24T06:08:00.001-08:00

"Once More, With or Without Feeling" by Willy Murphy
in "Arcade" #1 spring 75

Murphy regularly employed broad stereotypes for his humour. In his Arnold Peck the Human Wreck strips, Arnold was usually just an observer to some scene of fashionable hysteria. And so we get these extreme over-dramatic queens. If it had been drawn around 1969-1971 I’d give this a pass ,that no one would be expected to know much better. But since it dates from 1974-1975 and was drawn by someone living in San Francisco at the time, Murphy is fairly wilful about what he wants a funny homosexual to be. Which surprisingly, don’t approach the usual comic fag clichés either, but may actually be worse. There’s much comic mileage to be got out of the high drama of the emergent gay scene in San Francisco. This isn’t it.

372: Trina Robbins - I Was a Fag Hag

2010-01-24T06:05:00.001-08:00

"I was a Fag Hag" by Trina Robbins
in "Manhunt Comix" #2 1974

The romance comics were another subgenre of the commercial comics scene often plumbed for satire and parody by the underground comix.
The woman falling for a friend who turns out to be gay was pretty much the de facto plot used by sitcoms for temporarily injecting a homosexual character into a one-off special episode. But it’s a satirical plotline you’d never had before in early romance comics.
Unlike almost all every other of the comix I’ve covered here, this one does actually pay attention to and incorporate various signifiers of modern gay life: Holly Woodlawn, Bette Middler, the Ccockettes. Partly this may derive from the fact that Trina Robbins was a feminist, and alert to the idea that liberation means a little more than just being sexually available for the next man who comes along. Looking back to the late 60s and very early 70s, it does show that emergent gays were hippies, not some separate breed apart, and also demonstrates camp is actually a kind of social behaviour. Slight bitchiness to women can be interpreted as the fact that your beloved doesn’t actually really need you in his gay world. Yet, even in one panel there does have to be an ostentatiously limp wrist. And yes, it’s America, so it’s almost the bloody law that there has to be a homosexual called Bruce. No cocks in sight, unlike her male comix counterparts, but some enthusiastic blowjob noises as compensation.

371: Art Spiegelman - Real Dream

2010-01-24T05:59:00.000-08:00

“Real Dream” by Art Spiegelman
in "Short Order" #2 1974

This was one a series of strips which Spiegelman ran in various magazines recounting his dreams. It’s then up to the reader to decide how much they want to believe that is the case, and how much has been made up to fill in and flesh out. Windsor McKay’s “Dreams of the Rarebit Fiend” are made-up fantasies for comic strips, while Rick Veitch’s “Rabid Eye” strips are supposed to be real dream journals. How much of this strip by Spiegelman is the original dream and how much is opportunity to pass off assorted thematically gay-related silliness under the cover of being a dream?
The clerk in his changing extravagant outfits reminds me of the roles usually played by Frank Nelson (Yeeeeeeeeesssss? in Jack Benny, “The Flintstones” and “The Simpsons” and numerous other shows). Everyone else in the shop is some sort of lurid gay variant on hustler or dandy – although the colouring is a big contributor. That a gay apartment would be a toilet cubical for cruising could be taken as a joke in relatively poor taste, although it’s made obvious the character is only there for a brief assignation himself. So when the police turn up, he has existing feelings of guilt. The piece therefore does recognise that homosexuals do suffer unjust oppression and brutality. Although with one proof of his heterosexuality, as in so many other cartoons, he is free. This piece was later reprinted in Alan Moore’s 1988 anthology “AARGH!” (Artists Against Rampant Government Homophobia), to aid the fight against Clause 28. Since Spiegelman was then being critically acclaimed for "Maus", a contribution from him was a good thing in itself.

Less laudable is this throwaway gag from his parody crimefighter serial “The Viper” (“Real Pulp” #2 1973). Before even reading the text I was horribly certain it was going to be a gay joke – the hair, the shirt, the shit-eating grin. And then it’s a lisping, sissy actor. Oh, dear. Honestly, it’s no better than “Mad Magazine”, and that’s a very low bar in the ‘70s

But then even before that he had his positive gays in the military cartoon in “The Realist” which has also been repeatedly reprinted

370: Gary King - Boys Will Be Boys

2010-01-24T05:57:00.000-08:00

"Boys will be Boys" by Gary King
in "Manhunt Comix" #1, 1973

I know all there is to know about the crying game
All about comic sexual frustration in the new sexually liberated age. Particularly when you unexpectedly find a raging cock headed your way. The transvestite who tricks the heterosexual was already a long-running subject for humour in Playboy cartoons. At least this strip recognises that tranvestism is not necessarily a gay trait, if only so to suggest that the gay man may be about to ball his “old lady”.

369: Gilbert Shelton - I Led Nine Lives

2010-01-24T05:54:00.000-08:00

“I Led Nine Lives” by Gilbert Shelton
in "Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers" # 3, 1973

Just a lot of silliness, really.
One of the recurring gags in Fabulous Furry Freak Bros was that they were always under surveillance by the FBI and cops. Usually Shelton mocks the cops and FBI for their gung-ho, macho idiocy. So I suppose a drug which threatens to gay-ify the entire USA is a natural play on their view of the world. Really though, this strip is more a broad spoof of over-the-top James Bond heroics. Shelton seems to be happy just to leave the idea of a gay threat as funny in itself without much further development. Just the revealed sissy “ Tee hee hee” name gag. And then the brief appearance of the diabolical mincing villain. Although the suggestion of better dead than gay (which is part of the parodied macho spy ethos) only really works because of the 9 lives of a cat thing.

368: Bill Griffiths - Real Live Dolls

2010-01-24T05:51:00.003-08:00

"Real Live Dolls" by Bill Griffiths
in "Short Order Comix" #1, 1973

Confess it, when you started reading this, weren’t you tempted to think that the hard-talking bitch model was going to be some mean tranny. Transvestites are usually drawn as laughable, never genuinely fierce like this. And it’s a reasonable suspicion, given the ambiguous way she’s drawn and her dialogue. It was a definite hope, but what a disappointment. And then when the gay photographer is brought on, he is just the weakest, most extravagantly lisping feeble mary.

367: Bobby London - Artie Schnopp the Friendly Cop

2010-01-24T05:48:00.000-08:00

“Artie Schnopp the Friendly Cop” by Bobby London
in "Left Field Funnies" 1972

This largely stands in for all the other occasions in underground comix when the word faggot is liberally thrown around. In most instances it comes from the mouths of uptight squares, conservatives right-wingers, and cops and the military. And then the use of “hippy faggots” and “queer punks” is to illustrate their ignorance of what the counterculture is really about.
Here it’s the fact that it’s the sole punchline which make it noteworthy.
Anyway, you can read this comic two ways. The first is the most obvious. That you can say many things intended to offend, but calling someone a “faggot” is just crossing the line.
Or is it a double bluff, that in the minds of the authorities and the rightwingers, since “faggot” is the worst thing they can think of calling the hippies, it is likewise the worst thing you can call them in return.
Either scenario rewards you with a necessary truncheon in the face.

366: Bobby London - Merton meets Yiddie Yippie

2010-01-24T05:45:00.000-08:00

“Merton meets Yiddie Yippie” by Bobby London
in "Left Field Funnies" 1972

“Merton of the Movement” was London’s comic parody of hippy commune life and radical politics. These are the first few pages from a much longer story. For a change, and unlike most cartoons of this type by others, London recognises that there is a “Gay Lib”. However, his Gay Libber is a bearded man in a dress with a flower in his hair and elegant eyelashes who calls himself “Tiger Lily”. Now a few people did go to early Gay Lib marches in drag, but I don’t think London is drawing upon those instances. It’s just funny to draw a homosexual as somebody who wears women’s clothes, and so unfortunately it’s not much of a strain or particularly enlightened on London’s part. Then again, how many cartoons have you seen with a bisexual orgy? The musical notes thing when gay men speak gets old very fast, as far as I’m concerned. The near-blowjob with the venal Fidel is comically achieved without descending into homophobic abuse.

365: Ted Richards - Dopin' Dan

2010-01-24T05:41:00.000-08:00

From “Dopin’ Dan” 1972

From “Merton of the Movement” 1972

Now we get gays in the military, in this rather more adult, gritty version of “Beetle Bailey” – sex, drugs, actual combat, etc. And it’s an actual recurring gay character. That Kyle is a bit of a sissy stereotype and a sexual predator, is less encouraging. Kyle only appears in the earliest strips I found and the first comic book. Then Richards starts writing longer stories in which jokes about Kyle are superfluous.
There may be some strips which explain more about what may or may not be going on between Kyle and his superior.
And look, Kyle’s roommate is called Bruce.

364: Vaughn Bodé and Berni Wrightson –Purple Pictography

2010-01-24T04:56:00.000-08:00

“Munchmo” in “Swank” November 1971

“Titus and Pubius” in “Swank” March 1972

by Vaughn Bodé and Berni Wrightson

A distinct part of the commix scene was devoted to sci fi, horror, and fantasy stories – Corben, Greg Irons, Jaxon, etc, although fantasy and weirdness is a large component of comix in general. The smaller men’s magazines like “Knight”, “Swank”, “Cavalier”, had already proven profitable markets for the New Wave of adult, literary science fiction of the late ‘60s. Vaughn Bode was probably Robert Crumb’s near-rival in terms of mainstream break-out potential, and “Cavalier” magazine and Crumb had had success with “Fritz the Cat”. So in the early ‘70s “Swank” ran “Purple Pictography” by Vaughn Bode for about a year. “Purple Pictography” were humorous sci fi/fantasy/horror stories as set-ups for sexual gags.

In “Munchmo”, an effete dragon with sissy expressive eyes, a misogynist distaste for women, perking up at the prospect of a flasher’s large cock has got to be a first of some kind.

In “Titus and Pubius” , the classical scenario as per usual portends sodomy of some sort (as seen here and here). Here Bodé alternates between unabashed brutish heterosexual and slightly perverse gay sexual appetites. In contrast to the hulking hetero, his homosexual is small with heavily lidded eyes, pouty red lips, and almost constantly clasped hands. As with American cliches of homosexuals, there’s the utterance of a “silly”, although the obsession with young boys is barely justifiable because of the Roman setting. Again, Bodé offers something new with pink speech bubbles for his gay character.

363: Rand Holmes - The Continuing Adventures of Harold Hedd

2010-01-24T04:52:00.001-08:00

In the S.Clay Wilson cartoons, though not malicious, gays are largely there as part of a rambunctious spectrum of “perverse” sexuality. The Osborne comic is more about the thrill of depicting famous film stars roughly buggering each other with a few sissy comments. There’s no condemnation or real mockery in them, but this strip by Holmes is the first which is unabashedly positive. It is also quite contemporary. “Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex (But Were Afraid to Ask)” had aroused much ire in the emergent gay communities and the new Gay Lib movements, and there were efforts in quite a few countries to have the 1969 book taken off shelves because of its obviously bigoted and ignorant attitude towards homosexuals. Gore Vidal wrote a magisterial demolition of the book. Then it’s the rest of the strip, with a sympathetic but explicit gay sex sequence, which contradicts Reuben, and would produce so many subsequent problems with the censors. Finally, you have Holmes’s final exhortation to his readers.

This strip had a checkered history throughout the 1970s. It originally appeared as just one more instalment in "The Continuing Adventures of Harold Hedd," published in the underground newspaper “Georgia Straight”, 19-22 October 1971. It was published in a censored form then, with the sex scenes removed because the printer refused to publish them. It was then reprinted in the May-June 1975 issue of “Body Politic”, a Canadian gay magazine. That issue was ordered off the newsstands by the Toronto Morality Squad. The next issue, #19 July-August 1975, had an article about the previous issue’s censorship and ran a partially censored panel from the strip of two men giving each other head on the cover. The blowjob depicted in the original was covered by a black lightning bolt labelled "Toronto Morality Squad." But this censoring zap, overprinted on the illustration, could be seen through. The collective had to order a second print run.

It was reprinted in the 1973 Canadian sex comix anthology “All Canadian Beaver Comix”. Then the cover came with this banner in the corner, which is a bit more disheartening, employing more familiar clichés. However, it may be a bluff to entice readers expecting a laugh and then confront them with this strip.

Holmes would also produce the cover for the first issue of “Gay Comix” in 1980.

362: Skip Williamson - The Voice of Doom

2010-01-24T04:47:00.000-08:00

"The Voice of Doom" by Skip Williamson
in "Bijou Funnies" #5, 1970

No homosexuals in sight in this strip, but kudos to Williamson for recognising that homosexuals are a target for easy persecution. In light of this near contemporary piece in National lampoon, it’s worth wondering whether even the hint of Gay Lib and a slightly more visible and demanding gay presence in society elicited an immediate rightwing lashback, particularly in Reagan’s California.
Otherwise it’s a reminder that rightwing asshole commentators are forever. In this case based upon Joe Pyne. Although it ‘s a nice irony that the outrageous voice of bigotry kills its audience.

361: Jim Osborne - Paul & Marlon in Bottoms Up

2010-01-24T04:44:00.000-08:00

"Paul & Marlon in Bottoms Up" by Jim Osborne
in "Snatch Comics" #3, 1969

Jim Osborne’s intense cartoons alternated between depraved horror tales about psychopathic mutants and sideshow geeks inflicting mayhem that out-gore and out-puke-induce “Basket-Case” and the likes, and noir tales enacting perverse rumours of Hollywood Babylon in varied styles reminiscent of old “Weird Tales” (he was a major contributor to “Sleazy Scandals of the Silver Screen”). A small but distinct percentage of his work brushes with art or the sickest humour and some of it is an incitement to the vice squad. I recommend “D.O.A Comics” and a bucket.
It’s not some of his best drawing, so it’s not immediately obvious here that these are Paul Newman and Marlon Brando. This is an early bringing together of recurring innuendo about Newman and Brando. In the ‘70s Brando admitted to being bisexual. Gay rumours have regularly stuck to Newman, with the suggestion that his wife Joanne Woodward was just a beard. So in this strip these two long-rumoured homosexual film stars have special encounter - Brando/Newman slash for those who want it, with cocks aplenty. Particularly since Newman here is an absolute bottom.
“Flit” was a slang term for gays from the 1950s still used during the 1960s.
And the phrase “You’re so savage” crops up again. The same phrase made a camp appearance in the Bonzo Dog Band’s 1968 song “Trouser Press”, but it’s an improvised line from the transplanted Californian member of the group.

360: S. Clay Wilson – Captain Pissgums and His Pervert Pirates

2010-01-24T04:38:00.000-08:00

“Captain Pissgums and His Pervert Pirates” by S. Clay Wilson –
in “Zap” #3, 1968

What to say, what to say. I suppose there’s some inspiration in the old line about “rum, sodomy and the lash”. Rough old salts who are as “perverted” as he can make them. Almost no fetish left undrawn. George wearing lipstick might be thought to be classic gay cliché, but it’s done in such a way as to show it’s atypical.
All this is recognisable S.Clay Wilson. Sex and violence in the most grotesque combination. Never knowingly moderate, Wilson’s drawings are a deliberate affront, a reaction against sterile bourgeois good taste and standards of living. Ultimately though, they’re only ever lines on paper.
This work is surprisingly important. “Zap” was one of the most important and influential of the underground commix. And this work was particularly influential:

“Not to diminish Crumb’s major contributions to ”Zap” or underground comix in general, Moscoso credits S. Clay Wilson with inspiring the contributors to feistily bust taboos. “First Wilson comes out with the “Checkered Demon,” then “Captain Piss Gums and his Perverted Pirates,” in which he is drawing my worst fantasies! Frankly, we didn’t really understand what we were doing until Wilson started publishing in “Zap”. I mean, he’s not a homosexual, yet he’s drawing all these homosexual things. He’s not a murderer, yet he was murdering all these people. All the things that he wasn’t, he was putting down in his strips. So that showed us that we were, without being aware of it, censoring ourselves.”” – Steven Heller, “Print”, 2000

So the filthy, let-it-all-hang-out underground really starts with a gay gangbang, an orgy of cock-sucking. Which if that’s the start, no wonder homosexuality gets left behind as those who want to end up exploring ever more unusual and disturbing subject matter..

359: S. Clay Wilson - early works 1967 - 1969

2010-01-24T04:35:00.000-08:00

“Ruby the Dyke and Her Six Perverted Sisters Stomp the Fags” (1967) in “Radical America Komiks, 1969
An early example of the patented S. Clay Wilson battle panorama. This early in his career he enjoys drawing disparate and unlikely groups having it out, whereas later these frenzied scenes are usually reduced to pirates or bikers. Hence diesel dykes beating the shit out of fashion gays. Ruby the Dyke will become a regular character in his work. It is a little difficult to discern in the melee, but Clay’s “fags” are typical stereotypes of the mid-60s. They wear tight “fag pants”, and Cuban high-heeled, sharp toed “fruit boots”, and the striped shirts that were thought rather gay at the time too. And why, there’s a gay bar too, “The Gilded Lily”, because that’s the sort of name people tend to think gay bars are called. Anyway, here it is, violence, with the suggestion of “perverted” sex because of the nature of the combatants.

“Yellow Dog” #4, 1968
Hey, rough tough greasy dirty gay bikers. Ambiguity is probably deliberate as to the intent of “Whad’ya eat last?”

“Yellow Dog” #8, 1969
Also another early appearance of a S. Clay Wilson stalwart, the Checkered Demon. Here meeting a lisping sissy in fashionable attire, although it’s the second panel that merits the inclusion here. The sixth panel – is it sex or violence – take your pick.
“Yellow Dog” was a very early San Francisco commix anthology. Most of its content were either whimsical cartoons or sequences of psychedelic doodles. So the two pieces by S. Clay Wilson here are little less in-yer-face than thbe works he would very shortly be publishing in “Zap” and that would define his career and subject matter.

358: The Gay Deceivers

2010-01-20T12:21:00.001-08:00

Original trailer: http://www.videodetective.com/TitleDetails.aspx?publishedid=524840 (since it refuses to bloody embed)

Tagline; Is he or isn’t he? Only his draftboard knows for sure

Released in 1969, this daring-for-its time comedy (it was immediately slapped with an X) starred boyish Kevin Coughlin as Danny a preppy 22 year-old with a steady girlfriend (Brooke Bundy) and handsome Larry Casey as Elliot a lady’s man and lifeguard who get drafted. To avoid being sent to Vietnam, the friends pretend to be gay lovers who desperately want to serve their country. The two are convincing enough to be deemed unfit for active duty but wary Colonel Dixon (Jack Starrett) questions the boys' true intentions and warns them that if at any point they are found to have misrepresented themselves, they will immediately be shipped to Vietnam. Celebrating their success, they panic when Danny notices that they are being spied on by the Colonel. The duo shack up in a one bedroom apartment decorated in pink with a heart-shaped bed in a swinging gay complex and try to convince their landlord Malcolm (Michael Greer), his partner Craig (Sebastian Brook), and the resident stud, Duane (Christopher Riordan) that they are homosexuals. Both Malcolm and Craig have penchants for unannounced visits, which complicates the task of deception for the boys. Lady friends are eager to visit the new digs, which could unravel the whole scheme if the neighbors discover the truth and alert the authorities. Visiting relatives, too, want to inspect the new premises, and need to be kept in the dark, ensuring they don’t mistake the elaborate charade for reality. At the landlord’s costume party, Elliott takes a woman to bed not realizing it’s a guy in drag. A frustrated drunken Elliot then starts a fight in a gay bar, which is witnessed by Danny and his unsuspecting girlfriend, leading to further complications. Their friends and relatives become convinced that the two are gay, which is when they begin finding out for themselves about the discrimination and social ostracism that the gay community faces in the America of 1969. When Elliot loses his job as a lifeguard (because he might “be a bad influence on kids”), Danny's fiancé leaves him, and his family begins to look on them as mentally ill perverts, the boys decide that Vietnam might not be the worst case after all, and confess to the draft board, but by now, it could be too late. The twist is that even after the pair is caught, they aren't inducted. The Army investigators assigned to watch them are themselves gay and are trying to keep straight people out of the Army: “We don’t want their kind in the army, do we, Joe?”.

Really this is just a curio of gay cinematic history.
It’s an exploitation flick in several sense – both slightly raunchy and also exploiting topical social topics such as the Vietnam War and homosexuality. And so it gains retrospective attention as a forgotten trailblazer, and also for its exploration of various controversial themes. Of course, plotwise it’s basically a farce, with feigned homosexuality as its motor. It is not a forgotten treasure, but is about as good as its elements will allow. Productionwise its low budget origins are obvious. As various critics at the time pointed out, audiences will only enjoy it if they were “prepared to find homosexuals an endless source of humor”. And the film does stand out as being possibly the first comedy where homosexuality is the entire premise of the plot and humour. Other comedies during the sixties had their camp and faggy cameos, but here it is the main meal. Similarly, there are a growing cohort of dramatic films about homosexuality – although most of those finished with a dead homosexual protagonist. In summer of 1969 when this film was released, “Staircase” and “The Boys in the Band” were also appearing in cinemas. Unlike those two films, it’s homosexuals have satisfactorily accommodated their lives to their sexuality and a gay lifestyle. Also through the course of the film, the two straight men become friends with their landlord, who is in a genuine relationship, neither of whom are self-loathing. Likewise, admittedly for comic effect, it does make excursions into the gay bar scene and a drag party. The film-makers evidently realised that in presenting homosexuals, they stood a good chance of attracting an interested homosexual audience, and so they attempt to satisfy them with a number of flesh shots of the male leads
Even as the film was capitalising on the public’s willingness to be entertained by homosexuals (by the end of the 60s and beginning of the 70s there is a scattering of jokes about gay men having to explain their roommates to their family and butch up their apartments), it clashed with the new political confidence in the emergent gay community. When the film opened in San Francisco, just two weeks after Stonewall, it was picketed by a dozen members of the Committee for the Freedom of Homosexuals. However the film did prove to be relatively successful – a search of the newspapers shows that it had lengthy runs and was not merely a fly by night on the screens.

And then there’s Michael Greer as Malcolm “The Gay Landlord”. It is a very large extremely swishy queeny performance that probably makes slightly more sense in a theatre, seen from seat 78HH (apparently Greer had a long successful career in cabaret). It’s a far way away from the tortured characterisations of “The Boys in the Band” and “Staircase”. Quite a few reviewers felt he added interest and zest to an often lifeless film (supposedly Andrew Sarris suggested Greer should be nominated for an Oscar). There is the sense, however, of someone attempting to steal or dominate every scene, for good or bad. It’s not a particularly nuanced performance, but then it’s not supposed to be (and is probably not a million miles away from Tim Brooke-Taylor’s performance in the 1969 film “12+1”). It’s simply a matter of how can he get a laugh out of his characterisation without actually being offensive, since this is a gay man playing gay (which can often be slightly dangerous territory). Greer stated he wanted to be overt yet innocuous, to make an audience “think it is possible to like a fairy simply for himself”. It probably comes down to individual taste as to how well viewers feel he succeeds.

This scene seems to have stuck in quite a few veiwer’s memories. For good or ill, Greer certainly makes some sort of impression at the end.

357: I’d Rather Swish Than Fight

2010-01-20T12:14:00.000-08:00

I was going to make the title “Suck Cock, Dodge the Draft” (which was a real Gay Lib placard from 1970-71) but I thought I’d show a little decorum

One area in which homosexuality began to impinge upon the younger generation in the 1960s was its usefulness as a way of avoiding the draft. It worked for the straight Ken Tynan in the UK. It didn’t work for the American writer Tom Disch, and he was gay. Swings and roundabouts. Other than actually admitting to a homosexual act, the rough and ready method of immediately proving one’s homosexuality was a little transvestism. Because, as I’ve covered elsewhere, cross-dressing stands in fro homosexuality. And so the following couple of gags.

By Guindon
In “The Realist” April 1966

Cover to “Esquire” September 1966.
Well this is underwhelming. The English style magazine had a fashion spread in the early ‘60s with the drag artiste Danny La Rue modelling the new styles for women. That was witty and daring (some of the advertisers objected at the time). One lipstick reluctantly held by one very straight looking boy is not much of a snappy eye-catcher.

And of course there was the character Klinger in the sitcom “M.A.S.H.” (1972 – 1983). Klinger played on the “mental unfitness” rather than the “sexual perversion” line. Klinger, played by Jamie Farr, was always dressed in women’s clothing to try and prove his psychological unsuitability for the army. Apparently the character was originally written as an effeminate gay man, but then inspired by Lenny Bruce’s escapeds, they subsequently decided that it would be more interesting to have Klinger be heterosexual, but wear dresses in an attempt to gain a Section 8 discharge. So Klinger just ended up being a fast-talking heterosexual who was the go-to guy for a hairdryer with a concern for the the standard of his wardrobe.

“Greetings” (1968)
Directed by Brian De Palma
Written by Charles Hirsch and Brian De Palma

Starring Gerritt Graham, Robert De Niro and Jonathan Ward.

This rather choppy, fly-by-the-seat-of-its-pants early comedy-drama effort by Brian De Palma follows three young counter-cultural sorts and their escapades attempting to evade the draft and get laid in New York City. When the Jonathan Ward character is called to attend his conscription office, there’s is a brief scene where Gerritt Graham gives him a lesson in how to mince and swish before De Niro relo-playing as sergeant – a very limp wrist, a fey lisping voice, primping his hair, some not very veiled come-ons and invading personal space. A bunch of straight guys showing each other how to act gay is never particularly rewarding, except as a display of degrees of cluelessness, and this is really just flailing around.

1.10 – 1.20
Then there’s this brief clip from a “The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour” episode from early 1969. A brief man-on-man kiss between an officer (Jonathan Williams) and a draftee. I suppose even just a brief peck on the cheek must be accounted relatively bold for this time. Especially because of the throwaway compliment on the kiss even as the soldier is kicked out of the army.

356: Camp Comedy Cash-In Records

2010-01-15T13:01:00.000-08:00

When I posted about the 1966 single, “Boy Wonder I Love You”, I wondered as to whether people picked up on the odd suggestion of rabid homosexual fannishness it proposes at one point.

Well here some other records from the same period that go a lot further
What both the LP “These are The Hits, You Silly Savage!” and the single “Kay, Why?” are capitalising on is the new trend for camp humour on both sides of the Atlantic, growing throughout 1965 – 1966. Before 1965 camp comedy meant a humorous incident that took place in the army, the scouts or at little league (although this quote from a review of Kenneth Williams by Ken Tynan from April 1961 may or may not have been titivated for collection in 1967, but is proof that camp had a refuge in the theatre all along). What it’s also worth pointing out is that for some time tv and film critics and audiences were ambivalent, not entirely sure who camp humour was aimed at. Is it something that mainstream audiences can participate in, merely the latest exploitation, or is there still some secret homo code that deliberately excludes the uninitiated? Straight audiences in the UK enjoyed “Julian and Sandy”, not necessarily aware of how gay all the Polari words were. Contemporary reviews of the film of “The Loved One” were often unsure as to whether the film was pandering to a gay in-crowd or was intended for a mainstream audience. But judging from audience reaction, by late 1966, suggestions of homosexuality and “camp” were enough to get big comic rewards. At this time Alan Bennett can get a big laugh from his sophisticated BBC2 audience just by acknowledging the word “Camp”, let alone camping it up, and radio show “I’m Sorry I’ll Read That Again” gets showstopping guffaws from a few camp mannerisms and puns, because presenting camp characters is the cutting edge of humour.

“These are The Hits, You Silly Savage!” by Teddy and Darrel
from Mira, a LA-based studio
Dec 1966/Jan 1967?

If you really, really want, you can listen to the tracks here:
http://blog.wfmu.org/freeform/2005/11/the_hits_of_196.html

“Teddy and Darrel” were Theodore Charach and Darrell Dee. Theodore Charach appears as the narrator and one of the characters in the 1967 documentary “Mondo Hollywood” 1967. This may or may not be related to the fact that the film was music directed by Mike Curb, who was also the producer of this LP. Besides narrating, Charach also performs various novelty horror songs in the film, after openly admitting that he’s looking for a schtick (which I think explains “These are The Hits, You Silly Savage”). Charach would appear to have a natural thick-tongued lisp (a la Percy Dovetonsils), and an overly dramatic declamatory manner, so camping it up on this LP only requires so much effort.

To put any amount of effort into producing any LP would suggest those involved think they have some commercial possibility, that this campness is something au courant to which they can hitch their delusional wagon. It’s all put on in such a way that it’s more of a novelty intended for a straight audience.
When I describe this album of consisting of a load of lisping, purring, and camping through a selection of recent hits, with additional comments, and the occasional thrown in rough-trade appreciation, then it’s exactly what you think it’s going to be. In practical terms, camping it up means Charach doesn’t even have to try to sing, just camply speak his way through the lyrics in a slightly high sissy voice with impromptu side comments. When he’s really camping it up I think he sounds more like Peter Lorre having a psychotic fit (hence possibly the attempt at horror novelty songs). Those songs which have become gay bar standards get the best results, so you can at least give Teddy and Darrel some credit for spotting potential this early on. Unusual, is that in the last track, “Hold On, I’m Coming” degenerates into a sequence of groaning and panting predating “Je t’aime” by a couple of years, and a final acknowledgement of the sexual component which has been only semi-suppressed through out this entire enterprise since unlike the English there’s not much actual innuendo or double-entendre.
“Silly” has been a word with unmanly connotations in America for a very long time. “Savage” too when used in a camp manner seems to crop up repeatedly. So “Silly Savage” gets reused a couple of years later as a band name by “Ben Gay & The Silly Savages”, 1973

1967 – “Kay, Why?” single by The Brothers Butch

This novelty I suspect is intended more for a gay audience. Well, how much is a straight audience willing to listen to a song which is a sequence of hardly disguised allusions to the practicals of sodomy?
“Kay, Why?”, yep, as the cover makes clear, alludes to KY Jelly, and then a lyrics which include “you made a mess/ slip through my fingers/ little squeeze / come again/ get to the bottom/ can’t get through”. Choruses of camp oohing. Just prior to piano solo, there’s a spoken part where encouragement sounds more like someone like sexually coaching a virgin – with the follow-up “Didn’t hurt a bit, did it?”
It's some escalation on the genial world of “Julian and Sandy”, more of an unacknowledged precursor to the single-entendres of Julian Clary.
Comparing these bitching, passive-aggressive London queens to Julian and Sandy, I think they sound more like Mick Jagger actually

Oh, and during a Christmas episode broadcast on 25 December 1967 The Monkees highlight the phrase “gay apparel” with a flash of limp wrists during a performance “Deck the Halls”. No laughter but then to highlight it too much, might have been to alert Network Standards.

355: Gay Cowboys - The Last Roundup

2010-01-14T11:23:00.000-08:00

“At Last the 1948 Show”, 1967
Marty Feldman as 1st Cowboy
Tim Brooke Taylor as 2nd Cowboy

(Two typical cowboys ride on, with the sound of bullets in the distance. While Marty Feldman speaks, Tim Brooke-Taylor is chewing gum and listening with determined and mean expression)

1st Cowboy: C'mon! Posses on our tail! Let's hightail outta here. Iffen we quick, we can cut across dead man's belly over there, (points with gun to emphasise each destination) through cold corpse canyon, cross broken bone mountain, through gallow creek gorge, over there to slaughter rock

2nd Cowboy: (in sissy tones, bursting into big cheerful grin) No! Let’s go the pretty way!
(makes limp wrist gesture with hand holding gun. Then Cowboys ride off)

The heightened grimness of the listed locales of course sets it up for the sissy deflation by Tim Brooke-Taylor. By now Tim Brooke Taylor was regularly playing pansies on Tv and radio.

---------------

“Cowboys Love Cowboys Best of All” by Sean Kelly and Peter Elbling

from “National Lampoon’s Disco Beaver” 1978
(Peter Elbling running around as a vampire is part of “Disco Beaver”’s running joke about Dragula, a gay vampire who converts his victim to homosexuality with a bite)

This wistful, rather sweet Country and Western song spins off the lonely situational homosexuality premise.
The last line alludes to Tom Robbins’ 1976 novel “Even Cowgirls Get the Blues”, and there was a spate of songs with same title from 1978-80)

Some cowboys they love rhinestones
Or whips, or guns, or ropes
Some cowboys love a drunken barroom brawl
But when it comes to sitting round the campfire on the prairie
That's when cowboys love cowboys best of all.

Yes, cowboys love cowboys
More than boots or beans or booze
And you all know that's the reason
Even cowgirls get the blues…

It employs none of the swishy, sissy, femme, or perverse stereotypes to be found in these parody gay cowboy songs:
http://ukjarry.blogspot.com/2008/05/115-goodies-cactus-in-my-y-fronts.html
http://ukjarry.blogspot.com/2008/05/116-ballad-of-ben-gay.html
http://ukjarry.blogspot.com/2008/05/117-big-bad-bruce.html

-------------------------

National Lampoon June 1978
“The Preacher Boys’ First Roundup (or, The Preacher Boys Last Roundup) featuring The Appearance, for the First Time Ever in Polite Fiction, of the Honorable Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wilde, Esq., on His Famed Tour of the American West” by Ted Mann
Illustration by Bob Larkin

The appearance of Wilde in this parody of western fiction is actually very straight. Mann largely presents him as Wilde, the lecturer on interior decoration, who has charmed all the local cowboys – which was indeed the historical case. There’s nothing faggy about Mann’s set-up at all. The illustration by Bob Larkin is another matter. That strange overgrown Little Lord Fauntleroy has no correlation to the eminently caricaturable Wilde. Larkin does see fit to grace us with a whole row of very effetely waving cowboys.

-----------------------

“South Park”, August 19, 1998
“Chef's Chocolate Salty Balls”
Written by Trey Parker, Matt Stone & Nancy Pimental

This is part of a larger satire on Hollywood. Earlier in the episode Cartman comprehensively denounces all independent films as being about “Gay cowboys eating pudding”
The others say this, is stupid, but when they go to see an independent film, lo it proves to be true that it is indeed about “Gay cowboys eating pudding” (and read your own innuendo into what “eating pudding” can mean).

Cowboy in Pink: Say, Tom. Do you have any pudding left?

TOM: (slightly fey) I ate all mine up, silly.

Cowboy in Pink: Well then, now what do we do?

Cowboy in Pink: Well, why don't we just explore our sexuality?

Tom: Oh good idea, lets.

(They throw their pudding bowls down, and grab each other)

The first cowboy is of course in pink – whether you want to read more into his facial hair is of course intentionally ambivalent. The second cowboy employs the word “silly”, which has effete/gay connotations in America, and is therefore regularly used by South Park’s stereotypes.
Being a cartoon means that they can get away with pretty much depicting a blowjob

Curiously, pretty much every gay cowboy joke I’ve found has been independent of any Village people allusions or inspiration. Which I suppose is a good thing.

354: Gay Cowboys - 1920s and 1930s

2010-01-10T08:13:00.000-08:00

“The Soilers” 1923
Directed by Ralph Ceder
Written by Hal Conklin and H.M. Walker
Stan Laurel
George Rowe as camp cowboy

This was intended as a parody of another cowboy western “the Spoilers”. Rather unexpected is the sudden entrance of this unnamed effete cowboy. In the first scene he skips in, fussily picks up the gun with an almost girlish joy, then skips back out, oblivious of everything else.
In the second scene he’s in the window casting moony gazes at Laurel, “My Hero”.
So here we get a mincing ultra-sissy, who is so very out of place in the rough and tumble world of the cowboy western. Since he doesn’t really interact with any one he isn’t actually mocked.

“A Wanderer of the West” 1927
Directed by R.E. Williamson and Joseph E. Zivelli
Written by Arthur Hoerl, W. Ray Johnston and Victor Rousseau
Al Rogers as Clarence

This is a cameo in the 1927 silent film “Wanderer of the West”.
Clarence (Clarence and Leonard were frequent giveaway names for gay men) is announced by a title card which says: "One of Nature's mistakes in a country where Men were Men".
The brief excerpt which features in the film of “The Celluloid Closet” has Clarence

amply ogling another cowboy,

fussily brushing him down,

then leaning on the cowboy’s shoulder and casting up his eyes.
Title card: “I wonder if you’re going out with the boys tonight”.
The cowboy does a rapid double-take then irritatedly pushes Clarence away. Which will always remain good for a joke up until the very present day. Howe seriously we are meant to take "one of nature's mistakes" possibly depends upon the attitude of the rest of the film - is it lexical exuberance or a normative put-down.

Both of the characters in “The Soilers” and “A Wanderer of the West” show definite male on male interest, are more than merely sissy. Which is more than they'll be allowed to get away for quite a few decades after this. Even if that attraction is nothing more than a comic nuisance.

“The Dude Wrangler”, 1930
From “Screened Out” by Richard Barrios, 2003
(Although just tyoing the words “dude wrangler” makes me fear what sort of internet searches are going to be lured here.)
Barrios states that no print exists.
Such précis as exists, suggests that the lead was Wally McCann who played an effete naïf fish-out-of-water who learns how to be a cowboy.

“The Tenderfoot” 1932
From “Screened Out” by Richard Barrios, 2003
A real cowboy, Joe E. Brown, visists the big city, and mistakes a bunch of chorus boy boys for other real cowboys, a misunderstanding that is put right when they shoot out “whoooo” and hail him with some very limp wrists.

353: Gay Cowboys - 1970s and 1980s

2010-01-10T07:32:00.000-08:00

Charles Rodrigues
In “National Lampoon”, May 1970
I’ll confess this one is a bit of a guess. But hey, he’s riding side-saddle (see poem below) and is lisping. So it’s not much of a leap to assume that some sort of weird effeminate thing is going on. Although Rodrigues slightly eggs his gag by having another character laughing at him, as though to prove that his ridiculousness is irrefutable.

("O cowboy so lean,
O cowboy so tall,
You sit there straight as an arrow.
But side-saddle you ride,
Instead of astride.
Are you perhaps a gay ranchero?"
- Ernie Kovacs as "Percy Dovetonsils", a joke that tends to be remembered better as "Show me a cowboy who rides sidesaddle, and I'll show you a gay ranchero")

Arnold Roth
In “Punch” 15 October 1980
From a collection of cartoons about “The Drinking Public”
This is exactly the same joke from “Laugh-In” about 10 years earlier. Not that Roth needs to crib. A little thought and this gag writes itself. The Cowboy at western saloon demanding a whisky is a cliché. The sissiest drink for a man to request is a daiquiri. Et Voila! An effeminate cowboy drinking a daiquiri. It then just comes down to how you want to depict effeminacy or homosexuality. Okay, yes, the pursed lips, yes, the effeminate eyes, yes, the hand on hip. But really, a watering can in his holster?

Illustration in “Playboy” January 1982
Oh look. It’s a cowboy all in pink, hand on hip, lowered eyelids, with a hairdryer for a gun. Cause a gay cowboy would be a hairdresser.

Banx
in “Punch” 18 May 1983
The cowboys holding hands is one joke (and note, yes, the one has got his hand on his bloody hip). The caption puts an ambivalent spin on it. Either he’s angrily refuting the insinuation anything gay could be going on. Or he’s threatening retaliation in response to a gay slur.

“Brokeback Mountain” is another phenomenon altogether. The cowboy aspect was the original hook, but now it’s almost spread independently. There is the tendency to slap the tag “Brokeback” on anything with homosexual or homosocial potential, with the same liberty that scandals are awarded the suffix “-gate”. And there’s there currency of “I wish I knew how to quit you”.

Wholly useless is this lame joke by David Brenner about “L.A.’s first gay western bar: it’s got a mechanical sheep”. Anything else, to say? Nothing further you might comedically extricate via the juxtaposition of ideas about homosexuality and cowboys? No. Then fuck off, David. We’re just a byword for perversion and bestiality, thanks.

Last, and honestly I don’t know whether it would be least, is the 1975 British film, “Eskimo Nell”. One of the plot threads in this satire of the tawdry end of the British film industry and sexploitation is about the filming of a gay western. I know no more than that. This is a film whose most repeated clip is of a naked porn actor getting his cock caught in the clapperboard, followed by an extend shot of him being taken out on a stretcher with his cock extravagantly bandaged up. Just because I know about a film doesn’t mean I’m going to bloody watch it. There are better things in life.

352: Lenny Bruce - Thank You, Mask Man

2010-01-08T05:59:00.000-08:00

“Thank You, Mask Man”, 1968
Performed by Lenny Bruce,
Directed by Jeff Hale, animated by Imagination, Inc
(According to Albert Goldman’s doorstopping biography of Lenny Bruce, this routine dates back to 1962.)

“Masked man’s a fag!”

Unlike almost every other piece of the last month or so, in its subversion of childhood heroes this routine actually analyses the social consequences and impetuses of so-called heroism. Why are people “heroes”, and how are they perceived by the public? And what happens when they don’t fulfil the role we have set up for them? –i.e. not receive our gratitude with the appropriate social niceties, or lust after Tonto.
Like most Lenny Bruce routines this skit was semi-improvised and developed every night. This animation is therefore a recording of just one version, not necessarily even an optimum version. “The Essential Lenny Bruce” features a much longer version, which gets a lot of mileage out of making everybody heavily Yiddish. This version has a quick bit about syphilis instead. “The Essential Lenny Bruce” also has opening and closing sections which nicely frames Bruce’s reason for the whole routine, so I’ve included them in the transcript in brackets.

According to the cartoon’s producer John Magnuson, at early showings of this, gay audiences were upset by its apparent “fag-bashing”. And it’s true, part of the fun of the piece is just crying out “Masked man’s a fag”, scandalising and defacing the image of this all-American hero. But it’s within the larger context of Bruce’s analysis of heroism, and that the towns people reject the Masked Man is because of their prejudices, not because Bruce is asking us to endorse them.
Part of the reason why this is so successful and was worth animating is because Bruce has hit upon one of the modern myths. Modern youth may not be so au fait with the Lone Ranger in particular, but the single heroic cowboy who rides into save the day is a powerful icon. The cowboy is not merely the fodder of childhood games and entertainment (pow-pow, ptanng), but also inextricably binds American machismo with American history.

I do like the legally precise yet biologically evasive term “an unnatural sex act”. This cartoon was one of the joys of keeping the dial tuned to PBS stations so many years ago, the odd little films and cartoons used as fillers. I suppose all this stuff has migrated to Youtube now. But it’s not the same as having it unexpectedly blazon itself on your consciousness at 10.25 on a Wednesday school night.

Bruce testified in the Jazz Workshop trial in San Francisco about the Lone Ranger sketch. Prosecutor Ronald Ross had the following exchange with Bruce, as reported in THE TRIALS OF LENNY BRUCE: THE RISE AND FALL OF AN AMERICAN ICON.
Ross: Well, specifically, you are talking about...the unnatural act between Lone Ranger and Tonto...
Bruce: Yes...What's the most ridiculous thing that the Lone Ranger could do? We assume that it's completely incongruous...He wants the Indian...To perform an unnatural act. It is silly, you know...
Ross: In other words, you were not trying to say anything about the unnatural act, then? In other words, it was just for incongruity, then? Was it trying to raise a laugh from the audience? Was that its point?
Bruce: What do you want from me? Tell me—
Ross: Just your answers.
Bruce: I didn't--I didn't want to encourage anyone in the audience to be perverse or perform an unnatural act.

---------------------

[There was only one guy – I just thought of a man now – Selflessness – a man who did it all for you, and wanted nothing in return. Ohhhh (sigh), what a good man, a man that never waited for “thank you”. Who was that good man? The Lone Ranger. He was truly that Corpus Christi image projected, a man that never waited for “thank you”. Cleaned up towns of five thousand people. Always did the same bit: The Silver Bullet; nod; and split – HHHHHYYYYYUU, SSLLLLLLVVVVVVAA....]

Redneck: Mask Man, what's your story, buddy? You know Mr. Di Angelo, he's hoppin' ass mad at you. His momma made all those hot pancakes and you run'd off. Run'd off and didn't wait for nuthin. How come you're so snobby you can't accept love or thank you from nobody?

Lone Ranger (noble tones): I'll explain - take your goddamn hands off me, you barbarians. The reason I never wait for thank you …see …ah...Supposing for once I wait for thank you?

Redneck: Thank you, Mask Man.

Lone Ranger: What's that?

Redneck: Thank you, Mask Man.

Lone Ranger: Thank you, Masked man!? Goddamn it, I like that! Let's hear it once again, son.

Redneck: Thank you, Mask Man.

Lone Ranger: Thank you, Masked Man. Ain't that sweet?

(In background) Mask man, help Mask Man, help we're being robbed, get the Mask Man!

Lone Ranger: Don’t break my balls now. I've helped you people a lot. I'm entitled to take one week off to get some “thank you”s. You're not gonna get nuthin' if you keep it up. All right, let's have it again.

Redneck: Thank you, Mask Man.

Lone Ranger: I'm gonna get a book, that's all, screw these people. I'll get a “Thank You Mask Man” book. I'll put it in the book. They'll say, "You in the shingle business?" I'll say, "You think I'm in the shingle business? - look at this: “Thank you, Masked Man. The people of Long Island.” Look at all the “Thank you, Masked Mans'"….I'm going down to the mailbox to see if the “Thank you, Mask Man” has been here today....Someone's been fooling with my mail, I know it. Someone is foolin' with my mail! Where is my 'Thank you, Masked Man?'

Preacher: There are no more 'Thank you, Mask Mans.' The Messiah returned during the night."

Lone Ranger: The Messiah? What has this to do with me?

Preacher: Well, you see men like yourself you thrived upon the continuance of segregation, violence and disease. Now that Messiah has returned all is pure. You're in the shit house.

Lone Ranger: Well then, I'll make trouble. Because I'm geared for it. And I must have a 'Thank you, Masked Man.' That's why I always ride off and never wait for 'thank you.'

Redneck: Man, you sure can talk some shit buddy! I got a goddamn headache. My head hurts me. What the hell you talking about -"Thank you, Mask Man--the people of Long Island"? Look, I work for the city. You know what I mean, buddy? I got a job to do. Now look, I'm here to see you accept a present, just one present. Do it for the kids and we'll get the hell out of here. What do you say?

Lone Ranger: Alright, for the children I'll do it. Give me…no ashtrays…Anything I like?

Redneck: Anything. Just take a whip, or a doll--any of them of things on the top shelf.

Lone Ranger: I tell you what…Anything? Give me that Indian over there.

Redneck: Who's that…Tanto?

Lone Ranger: Yes, Tanta…I want Tanta the Indian.

Redneck: What you talking about? You can't have Tanto.

Lone Ranger: Bullshit! You made the deal. That's what I want. I want Tanta the Indian.

Redneck: You gonna get your Tanta buddy. His name ain't Tanta it's Tant-o. What the hell you want Tanto for?

Lone Ranger: To perform an unnatural act.

Redneck: What!?

Lone Ranger: To perform an unnatural act.

Redneck: Oh, the Mask Man’s a fag. Bleagh! Blaargh! …Fag man! Bleargh, a dirty fag, you dang queer you. The Mask -fag man, ain't that a kick in the ass. Bet you got mascarry under that damn mask, ain't you? A dang queer, I never knew you a fag, Mask Man.

Lone Ranger: I'm not a fag, but I heard a lot about it and read “Expose” and I want to try it now to see how bad it is, just once. I like what they do with fags anyway. Their punishment is quite correct. They throw them in jail with a lot of men. Very clever, hmm-hmm! Wash him up and get him ready. Tell you what - give me the horse too.

Redneck: What the hell you want the horse for?

Lone Ranger: For the Act.

Redneck: Dang queer freak!

Growing reverberating chorus of disgust, cries of fag!

[I always wonder about the anonymous giver. Cause the anonymous giver truly is the egomaniac: “I’m so good – I’m not going to tell anybody.” That’s sick, man. I’m going to leave you with this, that the only anonymous giver is the guy that knocks up your daughter.]

351: The Gay Daleks

2010-01-04T11:03:00.001-08:00

from “TV Offal”, 31 October 1997, May 22nd – 19 June 1998
by Victor Lewis-Smith

Part 1, 31 October 1997

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Part 5

Part 6

Part 7

Neither big. Nor clever.
Here the tea-time terrors of children’s sci-fi “Dr Who” get the most immense of gayings-up in a manner which is deliberately calculated to offend. Indeed, in several instalments of these sketches Lewis Smith openly acknowledges just how offensive his stereotypes are. I think it’s fair to say Victor Lewis Smith is of the type that thinks the only real equality consists in bring equally offensive to everyone. So here we get a load of almost breathtakingly outrageous sexually predatory camp bitches who bicker incessantly. Indeed, if you want to be in on the joke then you probably revel in its tastelessness, whether you’re gay or not.
This dates from the mid-1990s, the same period as “The Ambiguous Duo” in America. Where those sketches were fairly broad in their innuendo, this lets no opportunity to be offensive go pass. “TV Offal” however had the benefit of being broadcast late at night, so it can transgress in oh so many more ways. Lord only knows how it bypassed Terry Nation though.
Victor Lewis Smithy is not entirely wrong that it doesn’t take much effort to turn the usual metallic shrieking of a Dalek into rather harsh camp banter. Indeed the first instalment is the best, with Victor Lewis Smith explaining why Daleks seem gay, and the final shot of a convoy of Daleks singing “YMCA”. The later episodes repeat the same catchphrases as it just descends into pantomimetic abuse, leavened by crass innuendo playing off science fiction terms.
A lot of it is quite explicit about the more extreme areas of gay sex – cottaging, rimming, rent boys, cruising on Hampstead Heath – everything then enumerated in the pages of the British tabloids for the public’s disapproval.
That it even starts off with the sniggering playground taunt of “Better watch your back” shows what level he’s aiming for, with cries of “White Wee-wee!” and the moderately ingenious “Ex-Sperm-inate!” (the Dalek’s catchphrase is “Exterminate!”) as the Dalek’s plungers mimic a hard-on. The two Daleks also address each other with a litany of slurs: “fagggot”, “arse bandit”, “shirtlifting”, “turd burglar”, etc.
Also of the period is the insinuation about Tory MP Michael Portillo. I remember rumours circulating about at that time, which he later publically confirmed about a decade later.
Even at two minutes apiece these sketches rather wear out their welcome. But then the same can probably be said of “Queer Duck” which mined much the same humour for a gay audience.

Addendum:

I found the following articles by Victor Lewis- Smith in which he reminisces (exhumes all the old gags) about these sketches.

The Mirror, February 1, 2003

TO my slight shame but also my enormous delight, I once co-wrote a disgracefully politically incorrect TV series called The Gay Daleks.
Featuring a pair of shirt-lifting pepperpots who travelled the universe in their five-dimensional cosmological superloo (the Turdis), everything about the show was just so, from the title music ("they're camp, they ex-sperminate... better watch your backs") to the closing announcement: "Join us next time for another adventure with the fudge-packers from the planet Mascaro, as they penetrate the mysteries of Uranus."
The extraterrestrial friends of Dorothy didn't know if they were Arthur or Martha as they camped around and, in their lispingly monotonal voices, talked of meeting Michael Portillo on Hampstead Heath and trolled along the High Street with their robotic dog called - what else? - KY.
I was concerned that the show might be misinterpreted as anti-gay but I needn't have worried.
The healthy postbag demonstrated that these weekly tales of the metallic homonauts quickly attracted a substantial gay audience, who enjoyed the surreal and absurd take on their lifestyle, particularly the scenes set in a public lavatory.
Until I researched for the series, the word "cottage" had, for me, conjured up images of Anne Hathaway, rather than have-it-away, and a "hole in the wall" was a place to seek fiscal rather than physical comfort.
But I soon discovered that the gentlemen's public lavatory is a focal point for many homosexuals, who find the sense of danger exciting and the smell of disinfectant more erotic than aftershave.
BEING as ocularly challenged as Mr Magoo and heterosexual and ugly to boot, I would been blissfully unaware of this alternative lifestyle taking place in public lavatories.
But I had occasionally read about male celebrities being arrested for "indecency in a public place", so I was interested to hear this week about the Sex Offences Bill, which will finally abolish much of the discriminatory legislation against gays, and will allow them to have sex in public lavatories, "provided the cubicle door is closed".
Which, unfortunately, wouldn't suit the Gay Daleks, because their plungers cannot achieve full tumescence unless the door is wide open.
The Bill seems well-intentioned but it will probably put an end to the ancient and furtive etiquette of cottaging, which gay friends once explained to me. Apparently, absolute silence at the urinal indicates interest, followed by eye contact and a quick dash to the nearest cubicle, where holes in the door are plugged with lavatory paper ("putting up the curtains") to evade prying eyes.
One man sits, while the other stands erect with his feet in a shopping bag, to confuse any members of the vice squad who might peer beneath the door in search of excessive legs (a great idea except that, in the throes of congress, the bag inevitably moves about like a sack of ferrets), and the deed is done. Well, I'm sorry if you are eating your breakfast but that's what happens.
Although the Bill will end the illegality of such practices, it still insists on a modicum of decency and discretion. And quite right, because who wants to enter a public karzy and hear what sounds like two asthma victims enjoying a wine-tasting in an adjacent cubicle? But my theory is that, once cottaging becomes legal, public lavatories will cease to be venues for such clandestine activities, because much of the excitement has always been about the fear of arrest.
Homosexuals will find there are hundreds of far more pleasant places in which to widen the circles of their friends.
The Bill is long overdue, because our society's once-intolerant attitude to homosexuality has greatly relaxed in recent decades.
That's why George Michael was able to laugh off his arrest for indecency in a lavatory a few years ago, unlike poor Peter Wyngarde, whose TV career as Jason King was ruined in the 1970s by a similarly innocuous incident in a gentlemen's lavatory at Gloucester bus station.
A court case. End of series, and of a TV career that was itself like lavatory paper. Off the wall.

The Mirror, March 22, 2003

Just in case you don't keep my old columns filed away for easy reference (and you'd be surprised how many readers use them as plant pot linings instead), let me remind you that I've been planning to relaunch The Gay Daleks, a "just so" duo who became something of a cult hit on a TV series I made in the 90s.
So once again I've been arranging for the pangalactic arse-bandits from the planet Mascaro to take to the skies, exploring Uranus, penetrating a red dwarf, and exsperminating all who cross their path as they travel around the universe in their interstellar cruiser, the Turdis.
I'd already found my animator (the brilliant Kevin Spark), agreed budgets with a TV channel, and sketched out several plots. In one, a dyslexic Dalek confuses an M&S store with an S&M parlour.
In another, a trip to a pet shop ends in tears when they ask for a cockatoo and get more than they bargained for.
I was confident that the new series would be even more popular with the gay community than the original one was, because their many letters and emails tell me that they love the campery and absurdity of it all (it's all firmly in the best traditions of the Carry On films).
But, sadly, I have to tell you that you'll never see the shirt-lifting pepperpots on TV again, and here's why. The Terry Nation estate (who happily gave me permission to use the Daleks five years ago) have now refused point-blank to let me use them again, and I am therefore unable to add to the Gaiety of Nations.
The refusal came from Terry Nation's wife, Kate, whose business affairs are handled by Roger Hancock Ltd. Considering that he's the brother of Tony Hancock, you'd think the company would have a sense of humour, but despite numerous requests for an explanation as to why they're preventing the return of my comedy series by not granting a "use of image" licence, I've had nothing more than a frosty "no". Presumably
they cannot be objecting to a Dalek appearing in a comedy context, because they recently allowed one to feature in a beer commercial.
I'm willing to pay them the going rate, so was there (I asked) perhaps a touch of homophobia at the root of their refusal?
No reply came the reply, and their silence leads me to suspect that what really irritates them is the depiction of a Dalek as a friend of Dorothy.
WHAT a delicious irony, because you only have to look objectively at a Dalek to realise that it wouldn't look out of place in the Village People.
There's the skirt, the all-male bonding, the plunger that's always getting erect when other Daleks are around, the obsession with discipline... isn't it obvious?
What's more, despite their quasi-fascist demeanour, they're actually as ridiculous as Viz's Pathetic Sharks and, although they used to look pretty scary on primitive 405-line black-and-white screens, the advent of higher-definition colour sets enabled us to see the hilarious truth.
Which is that Tim Hancock and Kate Nation are trying to preserve the "dignity" of something that's constructed from a sink plunger and a few spare parts from a Morris Minor.
So what exactly is it that they think they're protecting?
Dr Who has had its day, and if they keep saying "no" to ideas like mine, the Daleks will simply fade out of public consciousness altogether and become worthless to them.
But what's worse is that they're depriving viewers of the chance to watch the further adventures of what has proved to be one of my most popular creations.
So if you want to see the metallic homonauts back on your screen, probing the mysteries of a black hole once again, let the campaign begin. Bring Back the Gay Daleks.

350: “The Nancy Boys Hardy Drew Mysteries”

2010-01-03T11:13:00.000-08:00

“The Nancy Boys Hardy Drew Mysteries”
from “End of Part One”, 1980
by Andrew Marshall and David Renwick

Haven’t seen this one, but this gag nicely fits in with the gaying up of children’s adventure stories theme I’ve been flogging to death.
It is of course a play on the TV title of the show “Nancy Drew Hardy Boys Mysteries” (which I dimly recall having a very evocative title sequence and two very pretty boy leads), and also drawing upon the old slang term for homosexuals “nancy boy”. Does anyone even use the phrase Nancy Boy anymore? Both allusions rather show my age.
Anyway, once you’ve come up with the sketch title, and you know it’s the end of the 1970s, then the sketch parody pretty much writes itself. An abundance of camping around and “ooohing”ing, I’ll be bound.

349: Up the Chastity Belt

2010-01-02T09:44:00.000-08:00

Up the Chastity Belt, 1971

Directed by Bob Kellett
Written by Sid Colin, Ray Galton, Alan Simpson

Frankie Howerd as Lurkalot
Hugh Paddick as Robin Hood
Rita Webb as Maid Marion

This is the Middle Ages based spin-off film from the TV series Up Pompeii!, the vehicle for Frankie Howerd. The script is co-written by Galton and Simpson, but is hardly typical of their best work, sharp and character-based, as seen in their gay-themed 1970 episode of Steptoe and Son. Here, whatever they actually contribute is to the model already established by the TV series – a barrage of fairly obvious predictable, low-grade corny gags about sex with mild sarcasm from Frankie Howerd. It’s not terrible, it’s just slow and only middlingly written. But this really is what people wanted in the 1970s, all in the same vein as the Carry On films, Benny Hill, “Are You Being Served?”, and cheap sex-comedies which are a category by themselves but reaped enormous financial rewards.

Indeed how much is original and how much was written to order is a thought that occurs to me, since many of the characters and gags seem written in mind with the familiar actor or actress who performs them. Anyway, so we get a camp Robin Hood and his Merry (read gay) Men.
There are about 6 recognised comic actors in the UK who could possibly play gay in the early 1970s. Although Kenneth Williams was one of Julian and Sandy in the mid-60s, his comic film roles are more repressed oddballs. The effete Charles Hawtrey had become a very minor character actor and was too often drunk. And they were both caught on the Carry On treadmill. Graham Chapman and Tim Brooke-Taylor who in the late 60s had often played camp were now tied to their successful TV series, and were rarely quite this end of the pier. John Clive, Hugh Walters (who was then playing what is possibly the first regular gay character in a sitcom ever) and Michael Ward are all possibilities with their respective takes on camp, effete and mimsy, but are only minor supporting part players. But luckily, for a sense of historical continuity (and that may be the very reason he was chosen) Hugh Paddick plays this gay Robin Hood. Hugh Paddick had been the other half of the popular camp radio duo Julian and Sandy, so he’s here as a slightly familiar type. He’s not just playing the same character though, since he is not as flamboyant or having as much obvious jolly fun.

The costume and physical mannerisms convey the sense of camp, but Robin himself is more in the theatrical bitch mode (and since the film was produced by Ned Sherrin, probably the preferred interpretation). Since Paddick’s first line features the word “Ducky” the audience doesn’t have to think hard about what he is. Limp wrists are unconfined (particularly in the second clip, when you just know that Howerd’s miming out of delicacy was intended to get an enormous laugh). He’s preening and vain about his aging appearance, obsessed with fashion, and coy about the touches of SM (black leather). We know what he and his men are, but there’s not much about what they do, no sexual double entendres which might be a bit much at this relatively early date for a mass audience. When Hood is gossiping about his men, there’s a little insinuation, and suggesting Will Scarlet is looking for solider action. But he’s more of a dryly camp old maid, even down to the winding his wool.

Aside from all the characterisation and explication of stereotypes above, the dialogue also works by offering various obvious key words which the audience would be expected to recognise, and which from a distance of forty years are clonkingly unsubtle:

“What do you think of our CAMP” (when barely five years earlier Alan Bennett’s sketch emphasises the novelty of camp as a known quantity)
“The Boys in the Band?”
“I’m BENT on joining them”
and a “bona drag” Polari reference, familiar from Julian and Sandy

348: The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes

2009-12-31T09:32:00.000-08:00

The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes 1970

Written by Billy Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond

Robert Stephens as Sherlock Holmes
Colin Blakely as Dr. Watson
Clive Revill as Rogozhin
Tamara Toumanova as Madame Petrova

Not quite a spoof, but pushing at the boundaries of the Holmes canon with a sometimes sly wit (revisionist, if you like) and some outright comedy. As did several other Holmes films of the 70s, produced by people who loved the stories but also relished the opportunity to acknowledge certain facts of life impermissible in Victorian times. The bit I’m interested in here is a joke where even Holmes and Watson know how ambiguous their relationship seems to others. A variant on the sexual pretences of Billy Wilder’s earlier film“Some Like It Hot”. Also an early instance of some comic playing of gay by straight actors for plot reasons. Although the wholly unremembered “Gay Deceivers” about evading the American draft got there on film first. The only camp stereotypical swishing in this film is from the male ballet dancers who are a stretype unto themselves. After his confession Holmes does not alter one whit. Though the stout Watson is offended, and feels betrayed, which is also supposed to be funny. Illegality is not mentioned, since that would be a touch too far, it is merely a matter of scandal. Just as homosexuality has just recently been legalised in the previous few years, and so can be applied to Holmes in a mass market film without cries of disgrace and perversion. Though of course, homosexuality is ultimately disavowed. The use of the word pederast is rather a period detail, too.

---------------------------------

WATSON (voice-over)
It was not the first not the last time he tricked me like that. Normally, I was inclined to forgive him...But on one occasion, he did something that was so utterly unforgivable, that I would gladly have murdered him -- had it not been for my saintly disposition.

Holmes and Watson are invited to the Russian Ballet. There Holmes is introduced by the Russian manager, Rogozhin, to Petrova, an aging ballerina. Gradually it is made clear to Holmes that he has been selected by Petrova to father her child. Reminiscent of the legendary encounter between George Bernard Shaw and Isadora Duncan, Holmes is informed that he has been selected for reason of his intellect, after earlier attempts on Tolstoy, Nietzsche and Tchaikovsky.

HOLMES
Oh, you couldn't go wrong with Tschaikowski --

ROGOZHIN
We could -- and we did. It was catastrophe.

HOLMES
Why?

ROGOZHIN
You don't know? Because Tschaikowski -- how shall put it? Women not his glass of tea

Holmes attempts various arguments to disqualify himself. Meanwhile Watson has been entertaining himself at an after-ballet party with the ballet corp and suddenly pokes his head (with a flower tucked behind his ear) around the door. Brief chat ensues and then Watson departs.

ROGOZHIN
(to Holmes)
I repeat question. You find Madame attractive or no?

Holmes is still looking at the door where Watson exited, an idea forming in his mind.

HOLMES
(turning to Rogozhin)
Oh, I find her most attractive -- for a woman, that is.

ROGOZHIN
Then no problem.

HOLMES
Maybe a slight one. You see, I am not a free man.

ROGOZHIN
Not free? You are a bachelor.

HOLMES
A bachelor -- living with another bachelor -- for the last five years. Five very happy years.

ROGOZHIN
What is it you are trying to tell me?

HOLMES
I hoped I could avoid the subject. But some of us -- through a cruel caprice of Mother Nature --

ROGOZHIN
Get to point.

HOLMES
The point is that Tschaikowski is not an isolated case.

ROGOZHIN
You mean, you and Dr. Watson -- ?
(Holmes nods)
He is your glass of tea?

HOLMES
If you want to be picturesque about it.

PETROVA
(slightly agitated)
Chto on govorit? Pri chom tut Chaikovsky?

ROGOZHIN
On pederast.

PETROVA
(on her feet now; flaring)
Jescho odin? Eto stanovitsa odnoobrasno! Kakoi vi idiot!

HOLMES
(picking up his silk hat and cane)
Believe me, Madame, the loss is all mine. But I would prefer to disappoint you know than disappoint you in a gondola in Venice.

He takes her limp hand, kisses it. Then he crosses to the door.

HOLMES
(imitating Rogozhin's accent)
It would have been catastrophe.

Petrova berates Rogozhin in Russian escalating into screaming.

At the party Watson is dancing with a line of ballerinas. Holmes informs Watson he is going home but Watson refuses to leave. A shaken Rogozhin comes up to the buffet, pours himself a stiff drink of vodka. As he drinks his eyes follow the dancing Watson balefully. Watson spins off several of the girls, grabs another group. His ex-partners wind up close to Rogozhin. He whispers something to them. Their eyes widen, and they stare at Watson with disbelief. Watson again switches partners, and the first girls now whisper intensely to those who just left the floor. The same reaction. Watson, oblivious to all this, is whirling around with another set of girls. The whispering carries along a string of girls, until one of the ballerina tells one of the male dancers. His eyes light up as he cocks his head approvingly.

The other girls are dancing in a line with Watson, backwards and forwards. The male dancers come behind them. Before Watson knows what's happening, two men step forwards to replace the girls dancing on either side of Watson, and then each time the line dances backwards a further pair of men replaces the girl dancers, until Watson is dancing only with male ballet dancers, all still in their tights and make-up.

Watson dances enthusiastically with them until it gradually dawns on Watson that there is something wrong with this state of affairs. After some difficulty, he breaks away from them.

WATSON
Hold on! Just a moment!

He walks over to the massed ballerinas, who all look slightly disapprovingly disappointed. The girls shrink away at his approach, leaving Rogozhin.

WATSON
(bewildered)
What's going on? What happened to the girls?

ROGOZHIN
Why? Do you not prefer it this way?

WATSON
What way?

ROGOZHIN
You don't have to pretend. Mr. Holmes told us everything -- about you and him --

WATSON
About me and him?

ROGOZHIN
Come now, no need to be bashful. We are not bourgeois. Maybe with doctors and detectives is unusual -- but in ballet, is very usual.

WATSON
What is?

ROGOZHIN
Caprice of Mother Nature. Look at Pavel and Mischa and Boris and Dmitri --

Watson looks around at the boys in tights, who are standing in a half-circle, grinning at him. It is beginning to dawn on him

ROGOZHIN
-- And Ilya and Sergei --
(breaks off, rocks his hand back and forth)
Sergei -- half and half.

Rogozhin pours himself another vodka. Watson goes pale and looks a little weak on his legs, takes the glass away Rogozhin, then staggers slightly away to down it with a gulp and a slightly sick, horrified look.

END OF SCENE

WATSON AND HOLMES APARTMENT

WATSON
There you are, you wretch! You rotter! You blackguard! Of all the vile, unspeakable fabrications. What do you have to say for yourself?

HOLMES
From the sound of your footsteps, I gathered that you were not in a particularly amiable mood.

WATSON
(with renewed fury)
How could you do a dastardly thing like that to me? What the deuce were you thinking of?

HOLMES
Watson, you have my most abject apologies. But have you ever been cornered by a madwoman? It seemed like the only way to get out of it without hurting her feelings.

WATSON
What about my feelings? And my reputation? Do you realize the gravity of what you have done? The possible repercussions?

HOLMES
So there'll be a little gossip about you
in St. Petersburg...

WATSON
These things spread like wildfire. I can just hear those malicious whispers behind my back. I'll never be able to show my face in polite society... And if it ever got back to my old regiment -- you don't know the Fifth Northumberland Fusiliers -- they'll strike me off the rolls -- they'll cut off my pension...

HOLMES
Watson, you're running amok.

WATSON
Dishonored, disgraced, ostracized. What am I to do?

HOLMES
Well, for one thing, I'd get rid of that flower.

He points to the flower behind Watson's ear. Watson grabs the flower, hurls it into the fireplace.

WATSON
You may think this is funny, but we're both in the same boat. We must take desperate measures. We must stop this talk...
(a beat, then an idea)
Maybe if we got married...

HOLMES
Then they'd really talk...

WATSON
(starts pacing)
Obviously, we cannot continue to live under the same roof. We must move apart.

HOLMES
Of course, we can still see each other clandestinely -- on remote benches in Hyde Park, and in the waiting rooms of suburban railway stations --

WATSON
(a change in attitude; defiant)
The whole thing is ridiculous. We have nothing to hide.

HOLMES
That's what I've been trying to tell you.

WATSON
Let somebody start a rumor -- just one ugly word -- and we'll sue them for slander.

HOLMES
Nobody would dare. After all, you have an enviable record with the fair sex.

WATSON
Damn right. I can get women from three continents to testify for me. And you can get women to vouch for you, too -- can't you, Holmes?

No answer from Holmes. Watson is becoming a little concerned.

WATSON
Can you, Holmes?

HOLMES
Good night, Watson.

He starts toward his bedroom.

WATSON
Holmes, let me ask you a question --

(Holmes stops)
I hope I'm not being presumptuous – but there have been women in your life?

HOLMES
The answer is yes.
(a relieved sigh from Watson)
You're being presumptuous.
(Watson's face falls)
Good night.

WATSON (voice-over)
What, indeed, was his attitude toward women? Was there some secret he was holding back -- or was he just a thinking machine, incapable of any emotion?

347: Sherlock Holmes Is Only Sometimes Very Gay

2009-12-29T08:40:00.000-08:00

This article, “Sherlock’s dear Watson” by Robbie Hudson is a decent run-down of various gay interpretations of Sherlock Holmes:
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/film/article6959490.ece

Previously I had posted this full-page cartoon strip from Viz in 1992. “Sherlock Homo” was presumably inspired by the realisation that Holmes sounds like homo, and then they tried to see how many clichés could fit into available panels. It’s basically mincing and innuendo, but it isn’t sneering, unpleasant, or rapey (i.e. obsessed with unwanted butt sex), so the fun that they’re having trying to cram as much into this is effectively conveyed.

Holmes, his behaviour and mannerisms, lends himself to gay interpretation. Holme’s hauteur, emotional oddity and repression and sudden burst of flamboyancy (particularly in Jeremy Brett’s portrayal). The disdain for women. The penchant for dressing up. And of course there’s the Holmes-Watson partnership – which has a secure place in the popular consciousness. Two men living together, in what is an emotionally turbulent relationship. Watson subtly undermined, ever subject to Holmes’s whims, yet whenever Watson eventually rebukes him Holmes declares his fondness and admiration for his chum.

by Mike Williams
from “Playboy”, September 1976

Basically just a transvestite gag, but playing off the fact that a couple of times Holmes goes around dressed as beggar women.

by Roy Raymonde
from “Playboy”, date unknown

Again this cartoon plays off the cross-dressing aspect in Holmes’s history. But as in Cyril Connolly’s “Bond Strikes Camp”, it’s now employed as one element in a wider panorama of gay behaviours, all with the intention of sexually enticing the unwitting heterosexual. And that’s what makes it a particularly “Playboy” sort of cartoon. Once Hefner started allowing cartoons about homosexuals into the magazine then he also started slipping in cartoons about transvestites. In particular, how the male in the cartoon has been tricked by the canny tranny. Since, as various articles have led me to understand, the cartoon editors at “Playboy” only select the cartoons for Hefner to make the final decision, it’s fairly obvious that the prospect of accidentally fucking an attractive women who is really a man hits some sort of psychic sensitive spot for Hefner. One day I may do a round-up of tranny gags in “Playboy” – it’s certainly a bit of an obsession.

By Michael Heath
In “Punch” 13 February 1980

The other name associated with Holmes is his arch-enemy Moriarty. A quick gag about the most unlikely possible pairing. I like Holmes’s distraught expression.

from “Private Eye” 1 October 1965
This is mostly a piece mocking trendy British films of the period. But it takes its comic spin by changing “Elementary, my dear Watson” into “My Darling Watson”.

from “The Peter Serafinowicz Show”, 4 October 2007
Peter Serafinowicz as Sherlock Holmes
Alex Lowe as Dr Watson

And here we get actual-man-on-man action. Watson’s craven admiration only encouraging Holmes’s predations. A nice touch to have the sketch close with the camera panning away onto the portrait of the queen herself as Holmes’s repression and oddity finally gives way as Watson desperately but futilely resists.

346: The Problem with Boy Wonders

2009-12-27T09:59:00.001-08:00

from "How to Be a Superhero, Save the Universe in Thirty Days or Your Money Back" 1992
by Mark Leigh and Mike Lepine
illustrations by Steve Dillon (a proper comics artist)

Pretty much speaks for itself.
Although since the insignia of a triangle inscribed in a circle is like the Gay Pride symbol, and therefore slightly queers the supposedly oblivious innuendo of the superhero, and makes it rather more like real NAMBLA recruitment. Although how many readers got that I don't know.

345: Burt Ward - Boy Wonder I Love You

2009-12-27T09:56:00.000-08:00

Vocals: Burt Ward
Arranged by Frank Zappa
November 1966

This single dates from a few months after the release of Zappa’s first album “Freak Out” in 1966. In its own way "Boy Wonder I Love You" explores some of the same territory as Zappa’s early album, criticising the cheesy commercial popular culture teenagers are expected to buy into because of their exploited nascent sexuality. The sound effects are typical of Zappa and that slightly stressed repetitive “I will” passage is like bits from his other early albums.
Apparently this is a composite of real fan letters.
And if it weren’t for what happens at about the 1 minute, 30 second mark I wouldn’t be posting it here. The letter suddenly gets a little more intense in its declarations of devotion and invitations for the Boy Wonder to come visit. Suddenly there’s the qualifier, “I hope you know this is a girl writing”, which rather than comforting, raises the previously unconsidered possibility that it might be a man writing such a passionate letter. Apparently this suggestive passage (although not the hints of homosexuality) got the single pulled from some radio stations.

For more than you’d care to know about this single:
http://globalia.net/donlope/fz/related/Burt_Ward.html

I’m certain Burt Ward says “man mail”, but I suspect it’s just a slip of the tongue for “fan mail”.

344: The Ambiguously Gay Duo

2009-12-22T10:34:00.000-08:00

The Ambiguously Gay Duo @ Yahoo! Video

by Robert Smigel, J. J. Sedelmaier and Stephen Colbert
Voices of Stephen Colbert and Steve Carell
Narrated by Don Pardo
1. September 28, 1996 "It Takes Two To Tango"
2. November 2, 1996 "Queen of Terror"
3. December 14, 1996 "Don We Now... Or Never"
4. April 19, 1997 "Safety Tips"
5. November 15, 1997 "Blow Hot, Blow Cold"
6. May 9, 1998 "A Hard One To Swallow"
7. November 21, 1998 "Ace and Gary’s Fan Club"
8. May 6, 1999 "AmbiguoBoys"
9. May 13, 2000 "Trouble Comes Twice"
10. October 19, 2002 "The Third Leg Of Justice"

“Playboy”, December 1999

The Ambiguously Gay Duo is a parody of the stereotypical comic book superhero duo. It’s also a parody of the cheapness and formulae of 1970s superhero animation. Which is lucky, since it lets the writers and performers keep repeating in good faith the same jokes and set-ups, just like a cartoon of the period. It puts the joke in a repetitive frame which pardons what would otherwise just be the normal pandering to an audience’s tastes for more of the same from familiar characters.

The typical episode usually begins with the duo's arch-nemesis Bighead briefing his henchmen on a plot for some grandiose plan for world domination, interrupted by a debate as to whether or not Ace and Gary are gay – often with some speculation as to how he knows so much about The Gayness (which is all gym locker stuff to be honest). Once the crime is in process, the police commissioner calls on the superheroes to save the day, often engaging in similar debates with the chief of police. Ace and Gary set out to foil the evil plan, but not before calling attention to themselves with outrageous antics and innuendo, and behaving in ways perceived by other characters as profligately homosexual. And

Ace [patting Gary on the buttocks] : Good job, friend-of-friends!
Villains/Bystanders [gasps, and ghastly stares]
Ace: What's everybody looking at?
Villains/Bystanders [in unison]: Nothing!

is the pay-off in every instalment.

The shorts were intended to satirize suggestions that early Batmancomics implied a homosexual relationship between the title character and his sidekick Robin, a charge most infamously leveled by Fredric Wertham in his 1954 book, “Seduction of the Innocent”. But where that was merely a possible subtext in the originals, the “Ambiguously gay Duo” makes that explicit and therefore the sole point of discussion for everyone except the unwitting heroes, Ace and Gary. It’s not merely that there is the close relationship but that everything they do has a sexual aspect, which is not all that bloody ambiguous. The gags presuppose that the audience now know everything about gay lifestyles. It’s the same dubious pleasure of gossiping and the cheap fun of speculation. It’s assumed that the homosexual’s tastes and mannerisms unwittingly give him away and leaves everyone else nudging each other in the ribs. Of course this is all merely conceptual set- up for the plethora of sodomy puns and innuendo. If the sitcoms and sketch programmes of the ‘70s and ‘80s were quite happy to have gay gags set up by speculation about mincing poofs, by the late 90s humorists on TV can get away with a penis-shaped car and visual gags which ape a cock stuffed into two round arse cheeks, masturbation, oral sex or the Ambiguously Gay Duo fighting in ways which resemble having sex with each other. What in the ‘70s in “National Lampoon” and the likes was the height of deliberate bad taste are now merely a little risqué.

343: Superman

2009-12-21T14:31:00.000-08:00

by Ken Pyne
in “Punch” 13 October 1980

There are sizeable chunks of the internet devoted to teasing gay meanings out of old Superman and Batman comics, and of course there was all Fredric Wertham’s obsessing in the 1950s, but actual gay cartoons or gags about superheroes don’t seem to have really cropped up with much regularity until the Ambiguously Gay Duo in the mid-1990s.

Since this is by Ken Pyne, it’s inevitable that the mood of this is disillusionemnt rather than jokes about lycra-clad muscled fetishism.

342: parody of A. A. Milne

2009-12-21T14:20:00.000-08:00

“The Change at Pooh Corner”
by Alan Coren
in “Punch” 13 October 1976

A contemporary updating of A.A. Milne’s children’s poem “Buckingham”, each verse closely parodying its equivalent in the original. Wised up about the ways and disappointments of the world. As I’ve mentioned elsewhere the Guards were fairly notorious for being available for sexual liaisons. This being 1976, “prominent MP” alludes to revelations about Jeremy Thorpe.

As far as depictions of a gay Guard go, this is par for the course for the mid-70s: a cocked hip, hand resting on that hip, and swinging a handbag. Which doesn’t excuse it, or make it any better than it actually is.

341: Gay Wind in the Willows 2 - Sean Kelly

2009-12-20T12:44:00.000-08:00

“The Wimps in the Pillows”
by Sean Kelly
in “National Lampoon” February 1974

A pretty good parody of “The Wind in the Pillows”, which makes explicit some of the undercurrents suggested by the all-chaps-together ethos of the original children’s story. As in the book the lower classes are only there to support the heroes’ comfortable lifestyle – in this instance offering cheap blow jobs. And the book’s attentiveness to children is repaid in paedophile orgies in the last paragraphs.

Mole as a little scene queen – camp, bitchy and crude
Ratty as the more Wildean aesthete
Toad Hall as a repository of all the high cultural camp kitsch (classical and high church) which outfits the typical mis-en-scene of such gay novelist stalwarts as Firbank and Rolfe.
Toad as depravity in all manners, and an incorrigible transvestite to boot
Badger as the embodiment of S&M

340: Gay Wind in the Willows 1 - Mahood

2009-12-20T12:40:00.000-08:00

by Mahood
in “Punch” 9 February 1983

From a piece by Mahood about how since “The Wind in the Willows” is now out of copyright how different artists might choose to illustrate a new edition. And so the appearance of the word “gay” in its older sense elicits a homosexual reference – a not uncommon comic response viz numerous editions of “I’m Sorry I’ll Read That Again” and numeous instances thoughout this blog.
A gay artist apparently evokes David Hockey to Mahood’s way of thinking. Which is something different I suppose, and hence a Toad in LA. The badge however is thumpingly unsubtle.

339: Fairy Tales 4 - Ed McLachlan

2009-12-20T12:38:00.000-08:00

by Ed McLachlan
in “Private Eye” 14 January 1972

338: Fairy Tales 3 - Barry Humphries

2009-12-14T13:34:00.000-08:00

from “Dame Edna's Bedside Companion” by Barry Humphries, 1982
Illutrations by Daniel Rainey

This is rather an in-joke for fans who are familiar with the history Barry Humphries has spun over the decades for Dame Edna Everage and her fictional family. There is of course the monstrous Edna centre stage, and everything we know about her family is learnt from her monologues: the comatose condition of her husband Norm, her dominated spinster bridesmaid Madge Allsop, and then there’s her son Kenneth. A regular part of the Dame Edna Everage act is her clueless recounting of Kenneth’s life, which her more clued up audience realises is full of revelations about the gay lifestyle he tries to keep hidden from her.

So this fairy story is written in the persona of Kenny as a sublimated wish fantasy about his relationship to his mother, whose clothes he designs, and his taste for leather – crashing the fashion gay cliché against the sexual gay.
It’s written throughout in a campy style with the reader expected to be in on the joke, both about the story’s parallels with his life and also the gay allusions.
There are lots of camp diminutives, some gay slang and polari which are taken literally: fairies and nelly old queens and others besides. So credit to Humphries for not simply bashing out a cheap joke, since he does work out a style and content. All this is also padded out with the knowing stuff about assorted gay icons from cinema. Whether this whole piece all goes on too long, flogging this particular horse is another matter.
Particularly telling is the final full-page illustration of Kenneth’s fnatsies – which is a fairly good represenetaion of what contemporary gay bar might offer in terms of men and styles.

337: Fairy Tales 2 - John Boni

2009-12-13T13:25:00.000-08:00

"Yes, Delicia, There is a Punchline"
by John Boni
in "National Lampoon" June 1970

This is probably the next step along in jokes about fairies.
Bitch bar banter that wouldn't be out of place in "the Boys in the Band". Which is probably the idea that people have at the time. Camp aggressive jokes at each other's expense
Brucie, Lance are both very America of the period. While a fairy called Pansy? Reach for those comedic stars, Mr Boni.
The gay comic gestures are just part of the general padding out of crappy puns and smutty jokes which is the point of the piece.
If you're going to have fairies in a "Dirty Bedtime Story" then they're going to have be THAT sort of fairy:
Lavender, primping, pursing a lip, sillies, miffed, and sashaying perversion freak.

336: Fairy Tales - I'm Sorry I'll Read That Again

2009-12-08T11:57:00.000-08:00

I'm Sorry I'll Read That Again, 7 November 1966

John Cleese: Today it’s story time. And you can help me make up the story
Cast: Goody-goody
JC: It’s all about a wicked baron
Cast: Ew, boring.
JC: And a lovely young fairy
Tim Brooke-Taylor (camp) Oh, what’s his name?
JC: (emphatic) A lovely young fairy Princess
TBT: Nyaaaa (then blows raspberry)

I'm Sorry I'll Read That Again, 4 June 67

Narrator: And here is a fairy story by Hans Anderson
Tim Brooke-Taylor (camp): Don’t you mean Hans and his son
Narrator: I said a Fairy story
(oooohing and mmmming by cast)
Cleese: Cheeky!

------------------------------

As far as gags about “fairies” go this, this is as simple as you could imagine. What is noteworthy is these obvious jokes showstopping reception at the time.
“I’m Sorry I’ll Read that Again” was a BBC radio sketch programme that ran for the second half of the 1960s, and was a training ground for the writers and performers of “Monty Python’s Flying circus” and “The Goodies”. It consisted of lots of quick fire gags, puns, silliness, broad performances and as much innuendo as was permissible. The audience was always fairly appreciative, but when Tim Brooke-Taylor says “Oh, what’s his name” it brings the house down. There’s non-stop laughter for 10 seconds, and the cast are unable to deliver the next line except after a couple of attempts. For this contemporary audience this is pure comedy gold, something more daring than usual. That this is not a one-off is proven in the same 7 November 1966 episode, a sketch involving a becalmed ship has quick exchange:

John Cleese: A breeze, a breeze at last! I feel like a new man!
Tim Brooke-Taylor: How about me ducky?
CJ: Ah, we haven’t had a puff for weeks!

which again gets a disproportionately large and long laugh. So all I can guess is that jokes involving references to homosexuality are just now breaking into mass entertainment. The Satire Boom had died out a couple of years earlier so slightly more thoughtful or sophisticated jokes about homosexuality under the banner of social commentary had likewise vanished. BBC radio had been broadcasting “Round the Horne” since March 1965, so “Julian and Sandy” had been entertaining a large audience for the previous year and a half. In retrospect everyone knows Julian and Sandy are gay jokes, but at the time of broadcast it was only the gay minority of listeners who recognised them for what they were. The rest of the audience seems to have thought they were odd humorous characterisations of a piece with the rest of the programme. But now, for “I’m Sorry I’ll Read That Again” jokes about “effeminacy in men” as previously banned by the BBC censor, are permissible and very very successful.

335: Five Go Mad in Dorset

2009-12-07T11:52:00.000-08:00

“Five Go Mad in Dorset”
2 November 1982
Written by Peter Richardson and Peter Richens

Adrian Edmondson as Dick
Peter Richardson as Julian
Dawn French as George
Jennifer Saunders as Anne
Daniel Peacock as Toby
Ronald Allen as Uncle Quentin

English viewers can watch “Five Go Mad in Dorset at
http://www.channel4.com/programmes/comic-strip-presents/4od#2921994

American viewers can watch it on some sort of licensed Youtube deal at
www.youtube.com/watch?v=g_TiqoEw4sQ

“Five Go Mad in Dorset” is a parody of the long-running “Famous Five” detective stories for children by Enid Blyton. The books always featured the same four (upper-middle class) children, two boys and two girls, with their pet dog, who go camping or visiting some deserted spot, and in the process uncover some criminal plot, which they promptly feel compelled to put to rights.
“Five Go Mad in Dorset” isn’t just a parody of the shortcomings and reliance on formulae of the books, but also an assault on the political and social attitudes they embodied. The intrepid independent juvenile detectives of Enid Blyton’s childrens books are revealed to be greedy, sexist, racist, neo-fascists.

On holiday visiting their Aunty Fanny (fnarr-fnarr) the children are informed that their scientist uncle Quintin has been kidnapped yet again. The children resolve to rescue him. Eventually, after all the typical exploits, they discover yet another deserted castle where they are captured by henchmen and brought to the mysterious villain’s headquarters. In the villain’s chamber, they are surprised to encounter Toby a crass American schoolboy whom they had snubbed earlier on grounds of class and chauvinism. They ask if he’s alright.

Toby: (knowingly) It was a bit hair-raising at first. But now I’ve come to quite enjoy it

Dick: Spill the beans at once. There’s something very unnatural happening here, and that’s for sure.

(Someone comes in behind the children)

Uncle Quentin (dry, weary Noel Coward type tones): I think I can explain everything, children

The Famous Five turn around, and say as one: Uncle Quentin!

UQ: Do sit down children

Julian: What’s going on Uncle Quentin?

Dick: Yes we thought you’d been kidnapped

(children sit down as Uncle Quentin rests himself against mantelpiece)

UQ: That was all . . . part of my plan

Julian: What exactly do you mean, uncle?

UQ: Now you dreadful children have found out my little secret, I suppose I may as well “Spill the Beans”

Dick: You mean the kidnap was all a hoax? Whatever for?

UQ: For many years now, your Aunt Fanny and I have not had a proper marital relationship. She’s an unrelenting nymphomaniac. And I’m a screaming homosexual.

(Children all look quizzically at each other)

UQ: It seems pointless trying to explain it to you . . . you little prigs. So we concocted this story to save your aunt from any . . further embarrassment. Now it’s too late. Toby and I are fleeing the country tonight

(Toby cample exhales cigarette smoke through his nostrils as he winks at Uncle Quentin)

UQ: In a fishing boat

Julian (leaps up irate): Well you’re wrong about one thing Uncle Quentin. There is something we can still do. And that is call the police. Homosexuality is still against the law in this country, as well you know it.

UQ: Oh dear. I thought even you Julian might find a morsel of sympathy for your poor old uncle . . . for old times sake.

Dick (leaping up irate): It’s no good uncle Quentin. You’re a Queer, and that’s the end of it.

(Bells are heard, as Uncle Quentin looks pained)

Girls: Hoorah! The police!

(The police congratulate the Famous Five and usher Uncle Quentin and Toby into police car. As the car drives off Uncle Quentin casts his buttonhole out of the window)

Dick: Well, that was an adventure and a half!

George: Yes. Who would have thought That of UQ

Anne: Uurgh! I’m glad he’s safely locked up. I never liked him one bit anyway

Uncle Quentin is only a brief cameo, to top all the subversion of Blyton’s precious wholesome clichés. Having the villain turn out to be their uncle cuts through all the standard expectations of the “Famous Five” stories. Making him gay is the final twist. Quentin’s homosexuality isn’t laughable, it’s its appearance in a Blyton novel that supplies the shock of comedy. Any homosexual revelation is totally alien to Enid Blyton’s fictional world and that’s the real joke, the small-minded conformity of her nostalgic world. Quentin is a bit of a stereotype: the high class pervert, dry, louche refined and world-weary. However this sort of gay criminal mastermind does have some pedigree dating back to the more stylish thrillers and crime capers of the late 1960s. One or two reviewers have felt that the use of Quentin and his portrayal might be a bit homophobic. But it’s obvious that the episode is really satirising homophobia. The four children are so obnoxious in their conservative prejudices, that their contemptuous homophobia is laughable. So the mild stereotype of Uncle Quentin is used as the bait for more of their smug, self-congratulatory declarations about society.

334: Gay Biggles 4 - Waugh and Rushton

2009-12-07T07:50:00.000-08:00

from “Auberon Waugh’s Diary”
by Auberon Waugh
illustration by Willy Rushton
in “Private Eye” February 1985

“Three cheers because Biggles is back,” trills lovely, broad-bottomed Glenda Lee Potter. “Squadron Leader James Bigglesworth DSO DFC is being reincarnated on our screens to enchant small boys,” she shrieks.
Poor Glenda is possibly not au fait with the latest research in the English Literature Department of Strathclyde University. It seems to prove that Biggles was not only an alcoholic but also a raving pooftah.
A few years ago one might not have objected to the idea of this drunken Nancy boy being put on television to tempt small boys. If they wanted to be buggered, that was their own affair. It was still a free country.
But since the arrival of the disease called AIDS, which destroys the body’s natural immunities, it seems rather irresponsible to encourage small boys to take up a hobby of this sort. They might infect the rest of us by bleeding over our toes or peeing on our mosquito bites.

--------------------------------

Both Waugh’s diary entry and Rushton’s cartoon are each offensive by various criteria, but by God they made me laugh when I first saw them.
There’s a certain talent to Waugh's managing to make almost every line harbour some objectionable content. And Rushton, following Waugh’s argument, manages a nice line in RAF paedophile banter. If Biggles and co really did have designs on little boys this is just how they’d express themselves.
Waugh’s repetition of “little boys” reminds me of similar gay=paedophile insinuations in Monty Python’s Carl French sketch. The idea of homosexuality being a choice is nicely played off with the idea that boys will emulate Biggles’s homosexuality. Waugh’s suave fantasy then swerving into disdainful confusion about the transmission of AIDS also raises an inappropriate laugh.
If I find this all more amusing than similar attempts by the likes of Ricky Gervaise, I suspect it’s probably a matter of contained and modulated tone. Ah me, a traitor to the cause and an aspirant snob to boot.

333: Gay Biggles 3 - Alan Coren

2009-12-06T12:49:00.001-08:00

"Biggles Strikes Camp"
by Alan Coren
in "Punch" 3 February 1982

First thing to note is that Coren’s title pays tribute to Cyril Connolly’s 1963 gay parody of James Bond, “Bond Strikes Camp”
The second thing to note is that the homosexuals in Coren’s piece have no resemblance whatsoever to the “nancy boys” of TV’s “Brideshead Revisited” which inspire this parody. Here, and in other pieces by Coren, his idea of homosexual behaviour is slightly outdated and probably owes more than a little to first exposure to the stereotypes to be found in 1969’s “The Boys in the Band”.
The idea that a certain sort of homosexual behaviour is incompatible with certain manly ideals has been exploited for comic purpose on numerous occasions, particulalry in regard to the military and cowboys, but in this case I can’t help but think of the earlier “Monty Python” sketch about a Hairdresser’s Expedition on Everest. Coren’s gay Biggles and co are a bunch of bitchy, overemotional hairdressers who just happen to fly aeroplanes on the side. There’s plenty of camp speech, “her’”s all round, with a few touches of actual polari, besides occasional eruptions of flaring condescension when crossed. Otherwise they are concerned with fashion and interior decorating, and deliberately nostalgic references to old film stars. Since Coren has more space than is usual, these caricatures have an additional dimension, where they are constantly angling for each other's affections in attempts to become top dog – which is not unrealistic.

Unlike Graham Chapman’s parody of Biggles, what none of them are is sexual in the slightest. But then Chapman was writing as a gay man with fairly vigorous sexual appetites (by his own account). Coren is writing for the audience of “Punch” and knows what he likes and what is acceptable in terms of funny homosexuals. Also, it’s rather less of a parody of W.E. Johns as well, but that’s not really our concern.

---------------------------
"Biggles Strikes Camp"
by Alan Coren
in "Punch" 3 February 1982

News that Brideshead Revisited star Jeremy Irons is to play Biggles, the fictional aviation figure of the thirties, has raised fears among scholars that the schoolboy hero will be played as a nancy-boy.
- Daily Mirror

The shattering roar of the engine was bad, but the heat was worse. Trapped in the juddering seat, the whirling blades inches from his head and howling on maximum revs, Biggles wondered whether something might not have gone terribly wrong. He tried to turn, but the restriction of that tiny space prevented him from seeing Algy behind him. He could hear Algy shouting something, but he could not, in the fearful din and the rushing of the air, make out the words. Desperately, Biggles waved a hand, hoping against hope that Flight-Lieutenant the Hon. Algernon Lacy, with whom he had been through so much, would draw on that long partnership now and interpret his brief signal correctly.
Algy did not fail him. A switch was flicked, the motor Cut out, the roaring died, and with it the vibration and the dreadful heat. It was over!
Squadron-Leader James Bigglesworth, DSO, drew a deep breath, and slid out from beneath the hair-drier.
'What was all that shrieking about, you silly mare?' he enquired.
'I suddenly remembered about the conditioner,' said AIgy. 'I suddenly said to myself, oh my Gawd, I said, I never put any hair conditioner on her, she'll frizzle up like nobody's business, I said, you know what her ends go like after a day in an open cockpit!'
Biggles leapt to his feet, shot his trusty co-pilot one of his withering looks, and ran over to the mess mirror. He took a glance, and screamed faintly.
I look like Greer Garson!' he cried. 'It's flying all over everywhere! It's very fine, my hair, it's always been very fine, body is what it lacks, it lacks body, I don't know how many times I’ve told you about not forgetting the conditioner, I remember the night we were over Bremen and that silly old queen Hopcroft caught a tracer bullet in the. head and I was covered in icky blood and brains and everything, I remember saying to you then, I said I’ve just had this streak put in and now it's soaked, I'll have to rinse it out in lemon juice, and you threw one of your fits and said where are we going to get lemon juice, don't you know there’s a war on, and I said never mind that, just remember after the lemon juice you'll have: to put tots and lots of conditioner on otherwise. . .‘
‘You don't half go on,' muttered Algy. 'I've only got one pair of hands, I can't be bloody everywhere, I had to comb out Gimlet's perm in the middle of everything,'
'It looks ever so nice: said Gimlet, from the other side of the mess, examining the moustache in a little mother-of-pearl pocket-mirror. 'It's come up exactly parallel, Algy. I think I look Ward Bond. Do you think I look like Ward Bond, Skip?'
Biggles glared at his navigator.
‘Skip?' he mimicked, dropping his voice an octave. 'Ward ? Our little friend would appear to be feeling very masculine this morning, Algy. What do you suppose has come over him, if you'll pardon the expression?'
Algy removed the Kirby grips from his mouth.
‘I blame that hormone cream she uses on her legs,' he said. ‘Start with that, you never know where it's going to end. Personally, give me a good pluck every time.'
Biggles nodded.
‘She thinks she looks like Ward Bond,' he said. 'If you want my opinion, dear, 1'd say it was more like Anne Baxter tucking into a piece of shredded wheat!'
Algy shrieked, and fell against his captain. They foxtrotted briefly, and when they broke apart again, breathless, Gimlet had gone, slamming the hardboard door.
'Temper!' shouted Biggles. He sat down, and his co-pilot began skilfully to comb him out. Biggles, soothed, closed his eyes; but at the tap on the door, they snapped open again. 'That'll be Gimlet back to say she's sorry,' he said confidently. 'I can read her like a book!'
'Be firm,' murmured AIgy, the tail-comb flicking.
But it was not the trusty Gimlet who strode into the mess. It was a tall, slim, freckled, red-headed youth, who saluted formally, and then, shyly, grinned.
'Who's this?' said Biggles.
'Call me Ginger,' said the youth, 'everybody does.'
'Yes, well, they would, wouldn't they, dear?' said Biggles.
'What can we do for you, if it isn't a silly answer?'
'Gimlet has told the Wing-Commander that he's not going to fly with you any more,' said Ginger, 'so I've been assigned to your crew instead.'
Biggles sprang from the chair. Vogue slid! from his lap.
'You?' he screamed. 'You, fly with us?'
Ginger's soft face fell. His lower lip trembled.
'Why not?' he enquired.
Biggies grabbed him by the arm, and dragged both him and Algy to the mirror.
'Look!' he cried. 'Algy's brunette, I'm ash-blonde, and you're a redhead! We look like the Andrews Sisters! It's such bad taste!'
'You don't have to be blonde," murmured Algy. I could put a nice tawny tint on it. Or you could wear a wig.'
Biggles reeled!
'Me? A wig? Gumming it on like some poor old poof behind the scout hut, before going out to paste Jerry over the Ruhr, is that what you think this war is an about?'
'I think it's a super idea!' cried Ginger, dapping his hands. 'If you got shot down and it flew off and you were captured, the RAF could drop a spare into the camp, just like Douglas Bader!'
Algy giggled, and clapped him on the shoulder, gently.
'I think I'm going to like you,' he said. 'By the way, we haven't been introduced, I'm - '
'You have to be the faithful Algy,' said Ginger, offering his hand.
Algy held it.
'No have to about it, dear,' he murmured.
'I'll kill you!' hissed Biggles.
There is no telling what might have happened then, if the klaxon had not clanged, summoning them to the morning's briefing. Ginger and Algy instantly snatched up their flight-pads and teddies and ran; Biggles, caught in indecision between his pastel-blue flying scarf and the cerise with the polka-dots, followed on. When he arrived at the briefing hut, it was already full, and buzzing with excited gossip, in which Biggles had no chance to join, for at that very moment the door to the left of the dais opened, and the impressive figure of the Group-Captain limped in, followed, as always, by the loyal and almost equally impressive figure of his trusty cat, Bosie.
'He's so, oooh, I don't know,' murmured Algy. 'Very few people can get away with a game leg.'
'You could, Algy,' whispered Ginger. 'You've got the presence.'
Biggles hit him with his flight-bag. Sequins flew. Men went shoosh!
‘Right, chaps,' bellowed the Group-Captain, taking a corner of the green baize that hung down over the blackboard, 'shan't keep you in suspense!'
He flung back the cloth.
The hut, as one man, gasped!
Pinned to the blackboard was a detailed drawing of the mess, covered in multi-coloured squiggles. Here and there, swatches of cloth dangled from pins, with paint-charts beside them.
‘It's the new wallpaper and curtains!' breathed Algy.
The Group-Captain tapped the board with his pointer.
‘Now,' he said, 'I've had a word with our chums the boffins, and they tell me that if we want an apricot dado, there is - '
‘PELMETS!’ thundered a voice.
The men swivelled, craned. The Group-Captain's face darkened.
‘There will be an apportunity for questions later, Bgglesworth,' he said. 'Meanwhile, if you would be so - '
'They went out with the ark, pelmets!' cried Biggles. 'We might as well have plaster ducks going up the wall, dear! We might as well have regency stripes!'
A terrible silence fell over the hut. The Group-Captain stared at Biggles for a very long time. Then his cat began to cough. Without another word, the Group-Captain snatched Bosie from the floor, and stomped out, echoingly.
The men cleared their throats, and shuffled, and murmured. After a few minutes, the door opened again, and the Group-Captain's aide-de-camp hurried in, with tiny, precise steps, and tossed back a golden forelock.
'He's very, very hurt,' he said. 'He's having one of his migraines. He says you're all to go off right this minute and bomb Hanover!'
The door slammed"
The men got up, slowly, and began to move out. Everyone ignored Biggles.
'It's suicide, putting a pelmet up in a room like that!' cried Biggles, but nobody listened.
'I hate Hanover,' muttered Algy to Ginger. 'It's such a boring route. '
'I could navigate a pretty way,' murmured Ginger, squeezing Algy's arm, as they walked towards their Wellington. 'We could go in low over Holland. The tulips'll be out. That'd be bona, wouldn't it, Biggles?'
'Go to hell!' snarled his Squadron-Leader, and pulled himself up into the plane. Algy rolled his eyes.
'Gawd belp us all,' he muttered, 'she's come over masterfu1!'
He allowed Ginger to climb up through the belly batch first, and helped him with an unhurried push. Biggles was already at the controls. The starboard engine fired, the port engine followed, the bomber swung out onto the runway, lumbered over the rutted concrete, and finally heaved itself into the cold East Anglian sky.
'Makes a change, having a closed cockpit,' shouted Algy from the co-pilot's seat, to break the frigid atmosphere, 'better for my rash.'
Biggles said nothing.
'Be like that,' said Algy. He pulled his mask over his mouth, and flicked the communications switch. 'Co-pilot to navigator,' he said, 'you wouldn't fancy that new Judy Garland tonight and a skate dinner on me, by any chance, dear?'
'Love it!' came back Ginger's eager crackle, on the open channel.
Squadron-Leader Bigglesworth, trained to a hair's breadth, did not react. His experienced eyes, emphasised with just the merest hint of mascara, stared straight ahead towards the Dutch coast, unmoistening. Only the sudden whitening of his knuckles on the controls betrayed the tensions of the inner man.
Which was why, betrayed by that rigid glower, he did not spot the Me 109 hurtling in on his starboard quarter until it was too late and the bullets were pumping into wing and fuselage! Too late, he heard the anguished cry of Algy in his ears:
'Ooooh, they've hit a fuel lead, the port engine's packed up, there's oil pouring in all over me, we're losing height, what're we do?'
'Hang on!' cried Biggles. 'Don't panic, I've had oil on my flying-suit a dozen times, you just soak it in a lukewarm solution of soap-flakes and engine solvent, but,' and here his voice rose above the stricken starboard motor, 'whatever you do, don't try boiling it!'
Algy gripped his knee.
'I didn't mean that about her skate dinner,' he shouted. Then he kicked open the bomb doors, and dropped. Ginger and the mid-upper gunner followed him. The tail-gunner was long gone.
Biggles waited until their parachutes flowered open, then he unbuckled his seatbelt, grabbed his douche-bag, and went out through the yawning bomb-bay.
It was not until the precise second when he pulled the rip-cord that he remembered about his parachute. But he was Biggles, so he merely grinned: some people would give their all for silk pyjamas, and some wouldn't. That was what life was all about.
He had just enough time to glance up through the shrouds and see the remnant tatters of his chute before he hit the Rotterdam ring-road, like a brick.

332: Gay Biggles 2 - Graham Chapman

2009-12-03T11:54:00.000-08:00

‘I, Biggles’ from “A Liar’s Autobiography” by Graham Chapman, 1980

A fantasy blending Biggles and the raunchier parts of Robert Graves’ “I, Claudius” novels.
This parody subverts Biggles in every manner imaginable. Not only is everybody gay, but voraciously so, with few sexual fetishes left unindulged. Chapman parodies the matter-of-fact W.E. Johns style’s worst faults, while the standard celebrations of the glamour of aeronautics repeatedly degenerates into sexual innuendo. As a parody it is fabulous, shamelessly disgracing

------------------------
‘I, Biggles’ from “A Liar’s Autobiography” by Graham Chapman, 1980

The plane banked sharply to the left as we hurtled downwards, but the Fokker Wolf was still on our tail.
'A-a-a-a-a-a-a-zing,' went the twin cowl-mounted Mittelschmertz 25 mm cannons.
'Peng!' it went, in German, as one of the shells bit into the sleek wooden fuselage.
'Peng?' cogitated Biggles. 'That's the German for "Bang!"’
'We've been hit,' volunteered Ginger grimly.
"Nothing,' said Biggles grimlier, as he slipped his leather-gloved hand over the by now moistened joystick. He pulled it back in a series of sharp jerks.
'Level off a mo,' put in Algy drily and through drawn lips stepped purposefully into the body of the aircraft, past the by now shapely nude lady navigator; and back into the rear of the plane. The door of the Gents Only Sauna hung precariously from one hinge. He slammed it shut with a haunting squawk, and fought his way past the two naked WAFs wrestling in perfumed sump-oil. .He erupted into the Aft Leather Room, to find Wingco still chained to a cross, wearing the by now familiar black hood bearing the also familiar Wing Commanderic braid.
‘Have your way with me, you hunk of manhood,' he hinted coyly.
'What ho, old sport!' hazarded Algy gingerly. 'I say, old man, the Group's a bit dashed worried - thinks you might have some kind of, well. . . you know, problem. . . you old bison. . .' He fingered his cigarette nervously.
'Don't worry about me, old tapir, I've pulled through a lot worse than this.'
‘The plane lurched suddenly as Biggles swerved to avoid a hail of bullets that pumped in spurts out of the penis-like nosecone of the pursuing Fokker. Algy rushed for'ard.
'Everything OK, Skipper?' he admitted.
'We haven't made it yet,' inserted Biggles, as he gritted his thighs and plunged his machine into a savage spin.
As they plunged downwards, the mighty engines throbbed and the well-lubricated pistons thrust themselves back and forth in their vice-like steel sheaths.
'You look a bit green around the gills, old eland,' observed Biggles smoothly.
'Never felt better,' puked Algy. 'Sorry about the mess,' he opined.
'Why can't you just say things?' snorted Biggles. 'Tell you what, old man, having a bit of trouble with this one, could you just pop your hand down my Mae West?'
'If it's an order, old guillemot.'
'It is,' grinned Biggles.
'Right-ho, here it comes.' Algy plunged a questing sensitive hand into the Group Captain's flying jacket.
The plane soared upwards.
'Don't stop now, I'm nearly there.'
'So am I.’
'Oooooh!'
‘Aaaaah!’
'Ooo-ooh!' ejaculated Biggles and Algy together. They were through. The white silence of a cloud surrounded them.
'What about me?' rasped Ginger.
'Fuck off a sec. Ooooh,’ oohed Biggles and AIgy. Then suddenly they were through it. Peace. Calm. Ecstasy. They floated, as one, in a post-what can't be described in a children's book sort of feeling.

331: Gay Biggles 1 - Monty Python

2009-12-03T11:48:00.000-08:00

30 November 1972

Graham Chapman as Biggles
Michael Palin as Algy
Terry Gilliam as Ginger

Biggles is the archetypal English adventure hero, a proud icon of military glory to inspire the best in our Empire’s youth. In WI and then WII, Captain W.E. Johns’s fighter pilot showed the Boche, Hun and Jerry what for. The English are noble, the English are best, and wouldn’t give tuppence for all of the rest.
Here the Python team are spoofing an icon of their own childhood (and Michael Palin in particular was fond of committing various Biggles parodies). The nonsense about letters and antler hats, pantomime Princess Margaret, and foreign royalty borrowing household tools seems rather Palin/ Jones, though the sudden bursts of abuse seem more Cleese/Chapman territory :” Fairy! Poof's not good enough for Algy, is it. He's got to be a bleedin' fairy. Mincing old RAF queen!”.
But the joke here is about how the fine upstanding Biggles handles his modern concerns about the sexual orientations of his close comrades Algy and Ginger. And also subverting the signifiers of homosexuality at the same time. Algy’s portrayal is just as we remember from the books, but when he comes out of the closet, Biggles immediately does the decent thing and shoots him dead. Ginger (ginger beer rhymes with queer) is possibly one of the most screaming portrayals committed to screen at that date, in the most outrageous costume and the campest queeny denial.

330: Boy's Own Adventures

2009-12-02T09:52:00.000-08:00

Children’s stories – always a temptation for cheap sexual gags. The supposed innocence (or ignorance) of childhood is played off against adult sexual experience, as humorists are tempted to subvert the simple role models of youth. In children’s stories and fairly tales, ideas of heroism, manliness and honourable behaviour are made quite explicit, and therefore ripe for the introduction of a little filth and smut “Playboy”’s cartoon pages would be a lot emptier without regular adult revisions of fairy tale classics.

by Andrew Marshall and David Renwick
from “Bestseller! The Life and Death of Eric Pode of Croydon”, 1981

The very all-male ethos of Boy’s Own stories can’t help but invite homosexual subversion. Not a genre much known to Americans outide of Harry Potter, daring tales of good, clean decent schoolboy pluck and spunk have been a mainstay of generation’s of British childhoods in magazine like “Boy’s Own Paper”, “The Gem” and “The Magnet”. Of course, books like “The Loom of Youth”, “Enemies of Promise”, and films like “If” have been more forthcoming about the affections and attractions young chaps may develop for each other. Let alone late night exploits of The Biscuit Game. And this before you take into account a nostalgic taste for school-boy themed flagellation that holds such an appeal for a particular type of older gentlemen, vide Dennis Price in school cap and blazer begging to be spanked in the 1972 film “The Adventures of Barry McKenzie”.

329: Peter Tatchell

2009-11-30T13:12:00.000-08:00

Peter Tatchell has been doing things in the Uk for about the last four decades, and is famous/notorious as the nation’s leading gay rights campaigner. At times this has brought him great opprobrium, although as the principles of gay rights have been legally instituted, he no longer seems such a strident figure. Also his attempt to perform a citizen’s arrest on Robert Mugabe probably did a lot to endear him to many.

Tatchell first came to national attention when he stood as the Labour candidate in the 1983 Bermondsey byelection. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bermondsey_by-election,_1983 should probably give you all the context for what follows.
It was infighting in the Labour Party at the highest levels about the appropriateness of Tatchell’s selection which made for such good copy in the newspapers. And therefore made him and his homosexuality a matter of national discussion.

Here we have cartoons and gags about an out gay figure (although it was confused at the time by Tatchell’s attempts to “in” himself somewhat for electability). There were an awful lot of snide gags made about him at the time. But we shall discounting all the obvious homophobic abuse, (presumably thought to be killingly witty at the time by its perpetrators), and instead focus on how humorists and cartoonists portrayed Tatchell.

How is Tatchell as a gay man portrayed, and what use is made of his homosexuality as a club to beat the Labour party.

from “Private Eye”, 18 December 1981

On 7 November 1981, Bermondsey Labour Party selected Peter Tatchell. Labour Party leader Michael Foot declared "the individual concerned is not an endorsed member of the Labour Party and as far as I'm concerned never will be". Foot’s outburst was prompted by suspicions that Tatchell was of the hard Left, a part of the Trotskyist Militant Tendency, But then the Labour party’s objections all got confused in the public consciousness with revelations about Tatchell’s homosexuality.
So this column from Adrian Spart – an ad hoc adaptation of “Private Eye”’s usual left-wing activist Dave Spart. Spart’s typical contradictory and illogical ranting are employed to present a touchy homosexual who will take anything as opportunity for offense, rejoicing in his victimisation.

The controversy over Tatchell’s candidacy was largely played out in the press as a conflict between Michael Foot and Tatchell, so as to undermine Foot’s leadership
Such was the obvious conflict between the two that gags about gay coupledom were pretty much impossible.
This cartoon by MAC is the only I can find that makes an attempt. MAC presents Foot and Tactchell as a couple. Not only are they holding hands but the caption refers to Deidre and Ken from the soap opera “Coronation Street”, two characters then going through a tempestuous romantic reconciliation, a storyline making national headlines.

by MAC in “Daily Mail” 21 February 1983

The following three cartoons are all about the difficulties between Foot and Tachell. Whatever the point of each cartoon, the cartoonist employs certain elements from gay stereotypes to depict Peter Tatchell. Overly detailed eyebrows and eyes with large, pursed lips, and often stood in a fey stance. It contributes nothing to the gag but it lets you know that Tatchell is a gay man

by Keith Waite in “Daily Mirror”, 16 February 1983

by Nicholas Garland in “The Spectator”, 19 February 1983

by Michael Cummings in “The Sunday Express”, 20 February 1983

from “Private Eye” 25 February 1983
Another of the editorials by “Private Eye”’s fictional proprietor Lord Gnome is fairly accurate summation of the hypocritical conflation of politics with homophobia enjoyed by Tatchell’s opponents that marked the Bermondsey by-election.

Cover to “Private Eye” 25 February 1983
This however is just a cheap gibe. The tendency Foot referring to being The Militant Tendency. Hmmm, “Ducky”, is not advanced.

by Marc Boxer in “Private Eye” 25 February 1983
The embarrassed father's slightly posh son looks as though he’s an extra from “Brideshead Revisited” but as per usual, note the prominent almost rouged lips.

by Michael Heath in “The Spectator” 3 April 1983

from "Private Eye", 16 December 1983
And this refers to Tatchell’s book “The Battle for Bermondsey” at the end of 1983

So as you can see, in most of the above, outright homophobic jokes are usually outside the discourse of political comedy, but even caricaturists find it tempting to include some allusion or other to Tatchell’s homosexuality no matter how irrelevant. Although this si somewhat understandable since homosexuality was then unknown in public politics.
It would be profitable to compare this approach to Peter Mandelson’s treatment by the press. Coded phrases, double entendres, fussy descriptions of his clothes and manner, and allusions to Larry Grayson and “Are You being served” are all employed by cartoonists, impressionists and humorous political journalists. Mandelson’s homosexuality makes for a vulnerable point. Is it expressly homophobic? Well, the fact that Mandelson’s outing was handled so badly made him seem embarrassed and so a characteristic for mockery like boggle-eyes, corpulence, speech impediments or any other mockable trait.

328: You Can't Lick Dick 3

2009-11-29T12:30:00.000-08:00

by Edward Sorel
cover to “Screw”, 10 December 1973

A small selection of scandalous sexual gags at Richard Nixon’s expense. Another example I’ve posted earlier of Nixon indulging in Caligulan-style homosexual orgies is this comic in “National Lampoon” February 1974
Unlike that cartoon by Sean Kelly and Tony Hendra, these three examples all turn on Nixon’s friendship with Bebe Rebozo. http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/JFKrebozo.htm is probably a decent overview of Rebozo’s character and the history of his friendship with Nixon.
Nixon and Rebozo were incredibly close friends, almost devoted to each other since the early 50s. This was a relationship all the more striking since the awkward Nixon had few others friends. Their friendship may have been made more public than is common as a means of countering the impression Nixon usually gave of possessing all the human affect of a cheap lawn ornament. But it also had the side-effect of making people ponder as to the true nature of their companionship. Even members of Nixon’s administration are on record declaring their suspicions. (Not that any gay historians would be minded to claim Nixon, or Edward Heath for that matter, for our team as a matter of pride.) So these gags play off existing qualms that people had about Nixon and Rebozo together.

Of course these jokes are primarily intended as cheap shots. And deliberately so. The editors of “National Lampoon”, Edward Sorel and Paul Krassner are not really the type to thing that homosexuality is actually dishonourable. Each has differing attitudes of relaxation and liberal acceptance given their generation, but they are all prepared to play off the assumption that for the general public homosexuality at the very least has a strong stigma.
It is those unenlightened attitudes that Nixon repeatedly made his political base.
We’ve seen Nixon express his distaste for homosexuals in his incisive review of a 1971 episode of “All in the Family”
So it’s not big, it’s not clever, but making gay allegations against Nixon is just the sort of base attack that would really rile him. No need to be political, no need for ornate caricature, just paint him as a queer. Nixon was such an uptight and unsexual person, it was the perfect comic contrast to show him relishing some passionate gay sex.

The first example, the letter in “National Lampoon” predates Watergate, so it’s just a general humorous jab, some common abuse of the man. Playing off his strenuous image of probity even it is undermined as he gets some executive head.

The second from Paul Krassner, is just one small part of a larger assault on Nixon’s character, morals, and general fitness for office and general existence as a human being. Gay rumours are raised, in the vicinity of other longstanding rumours about Hoover and Clyde Tolson, only to be scotched. And how are the rumours disproved? By visiting whores. Classssy.

The third example above, the illustration by Sorel, obviously builds on contemporary interest in the Watergate Tapes. A cover for “Screw” magazine means the opportunity for Sorel to be as scandalous as possible. It also has Nixon as the one being buggered, which probably has a touch of further denigration about it.
The last five pages of Robert Coover’s 1977 novel “A Public Burning” has Richard Nixon sodomised by the figure of Uncle Sam, an equally vicious and low conman representing the true base nature of America. It’s quite a graphic passage, and in its “Deliverance”-style rape there’s more than a slight element of Coover exacting some unspeakable vengeance on his imaginary Nixon, since what could be a worse indignity. However, after this gross buggery, in the last couple of paragraphs, homosexual affection comes into it as this venal Uncle Sam and Nixon realise their love for each other.

327: You Can't Lick Dick 2

2009-11-29T12:29:00.000-08:00

from “A Sneak Preview of Richard Nixon’s Memoirs” by Paul Krassner
in “Chic” 1976

There seems to be a tradition of accusing those who fight Communism of being homosexual. This smear tactic was used against Whittaker Chambers; against Senator Joseph McCarthy; against J. Edgar Hoover. In that vein, gossips used to joke about Hoover and Clyde Tolson double-dating with Charles "Bebe" Rebozo and myself.

Neither Rebozo nor I are"'gay." We have been very close friends since 1950. What we enjoy most about each other's company is the fact that small talk becomes unneccessary. Weare not afraid of silence. But we have never had any kind of sexual relationship.

We were introduced by Senator George Smathers, who was infamous for supplying female company to his fellow politicians. It was Smathers who sent Mary Jo Kopechne to Senator Edward Kennedy.

Whenever I was in Florida, I would always stay with Bebe, and he would occasionally get a couple of beautiful $200-a-night girls. Or, as they would be called nowadays, $200-a-night women. But when I bought my own home in Key Biscayne, then his yacht became the rendezvous site.

326: You Can't Lick Dick 1

2009-11-29T12:24:00.000-08:00

from "Letters to the Editor"
in "National Lampoon" August 1971

click - be with you in a second, Bebe, as soon as I figure out how to work this new Dictaphone and record a letter for my idiot secretary to send out. There, I think it's on now. Ah, Miss Conklin, when you play this tape tomorrow, please transcribe it as a letter and send it to the National Lampoon, and let me make it perfectly clear that there are to be no accidental omissions this time, or your services will no longer be needed here in the White House.

Sirs:
A trusted advisor of mine had brought to my attention that your recent Pornography issue does not meet the minimum standards for decency as outlined by recent Supreme Court rulings. Because of this - ha, Miss Conklin, change that to "For this reason" - an injunction against your magazine is being prepared by the Attorney General specifically citing your obscene assertions that Mr. Rebozo and I habitually engage in - Bebe, cut that out - unnatural practices. These libelous and false assertions - c'mon Bebe, at least let me finish this letter - will also be brought to the attention of the postal authorities - Hey! You'll simply ruin my new pants. Now I mean it! - for proper disposition.

You are hereby directed to cease publication of such - oh, please stop - ridiculous and -oh oh- offensive material or face the legal consequences. Look, Bebe, will you stop fooling around? At least wait until we're in the car. Somebody might walk in. Now where was I? Ah, yes I must add that I, personally, find your publication - mmmmm - disgusting and degrading to American youth and a sign to our enemies that our moral fibre is in serious - faster, Bebe, oh faster! - question. I can, promise that if you keep up this sort of -oh oh oh oh - filth, none of you will even be able to write home for money - ooooh God! - oops! Who's there? Oh, heh heh, hello Pat. Funny I didn't hear you come in. I seem to have, heh heh, dropped one of my contacts in my lap and Bebe was kindly, ah, helping me find - er, Miss Conklin, please type this up and sign it for me. Why, Pat, I've always worn contacts, didn't you - click.

Richard M. Nixon
President of the United States
Washington, D.C.

325: When Intimacy Goes Wrong

2009-11-27T08:13:00.000-08:00

Men kissing. Always good for a laugh. Unfortunately, particularly so among audiences watching serious gay films in the cinema. The scene builds up to a perfectly non-gratuitous kiss between the leads (often played by straight stars, let’s be honest, because gay men kissing gay men might be too much) and then just as lips touch, from somewhere in the audience there will come a giggle or two.
Now, let’s be thankful it’s not a cry of revulsion. Society has moved forward somewhat. But in an entertainment arena if its not turning you on or winning your sympathy then the sight of two men kissing most likely provokes a comic response. Is it because of diffused disgust, puzzlement, anxiety, awkwardness? Is the sight of two men kissing so outside of the normal order it can’t help stimulating laughter? Is it because the power of a same-sex kiss suddenly breaks the audience’s involvement and so like a bad line or cheesy special effect it can’t help but elicit laughs?
Of course, if a same sex kiss is truly intended to be funny then it’s best if it’s between two straight men. The discomfort will then be on the part of the two characters on screen, rather than on the part of the audience trying to parse their own response to two gay men kissing.
Such is the social power of gay kissing, that there are precious few examples of dramatic gay kisses being allowed, let alone funny gay kisses.
The 1982 black comedy “Deathtrap” has a twist about halfway through when Michael Caine and Christopher Reeves are revealed to be gay lovers. The most immediate and shocking way of proving this was by having them suddenly, unexpectedly kiss. In trade circles it became known as the $10 million kiss, since it’s estimated this how much the kiss cost the film in tickets. That’s a lot of audience to risk for the sake of one joke.

Other than in scenes where one man makes a move on another dressed as a woman, same-sex kissing tends to feature as the punchline to jokes about men discussing the boundaries of permissible intimacy. How close can they get, how can they show they like each other as friends? And then it just goes too far, and passionate kissing erupts. It’s usually not intended that these are closeted gay men, trying to sublimate, and never kissing for sexual gratification, but that in almost every instance there’s nothing half-hearted about these kisses.

You’ll notice each time there’s a kiss in the sketches below it gets shrieks, as taboos are broken, and the characters insist that there’s nothing sexual about two men kissing.

from “Fridays” 8 May 1981
“Men Who Hug”

Larry David
Michael Richards
Mark Hamill

Mark Hamill in an ugly suit kisses Michael Richards – not quite the “Star Wars” slash you were looking for?
A bunch of unembarrassed guys (David and Hamill are particularly boobish for contrast) are able to show their appreciation of each other. Although not in a casual urbane Parisian sort of a way.

from “Smith and Jones” (circa 1989-1990?)
Mel Smith and Griff Rhys Jones

The uptight, nigh-hysterically uncomfortable Griff Rhys Jones is almost a match for Gene Wilder at his best.

from “Exit 57”, 1996
Stephen Colbert as Father
Amy Dearis as Mother/Squirrel
Jodi Lennon as Daughter
Paul Dinello as Boyfriend

An occasional gag from sitcoms is for one character to show another how to put the moves on a potential date. At a particularly embarrassing moment a third character will enter to everyone’s gay-tinged discomfort. Here, it starts off with the inappropriateness of a father asking his daughter’s date if “he got any?”, not with disapproval but with encouragement. And then comes the kiss, which merits a positive evaluation on his daughter’s behalf.
Nothing makes sense and then it keeps being repeated with each element made more emphatic, culminating in the lingering, passionate romantic clinch of the third instance. The audience being left to assume how much further it can be taken in the fourth repetition.

from “Mad TV”, November 1, 2003
Ike Barinholtz and Josh Meyers

Basically the same celebrating athletes joke as Monty Python’s footballers and National Lampoon’s Disco Beaver’s hockey players, and the cartoons about the Football Association’s concern about emotional footballers. Except that here, rather than just a quick visual, the joke builds on the character’s confusion: “What just happened?” followed by much agonising as to whether they are gay. Of course, the fact that this is deliberately a joke, means the show can spend more camera time on men kissing (accompanied by leaping on each other, running their hands through each other’s hair, dancing provocatively), than any gay kiss would receive in any prime time drama.

Over the last five years or so, David Walliams has got a hell of a lot of mileage out of his sexually ambiguous persona, both in sketches, and on chat shows, flirting with other men, fondling them, and occasionally wrestling them to the floor and pulling their underpants off.

And for more crassly teen-oriented fare which I can’t be bothered wasting my typing on, why not search youtube for
“Baseketball” (1998) – Trey Parker and Matt Stone are two good friends affirming their friendship;
“Dude, Where’s My Car?” (2000) – Ashton Kutcher and Seann William Scott kiss each other in a moment of blithe one-upmanship;
“American Pie 2” (2001) Jason Biggs and Seann William Scott disgustedly forced into kissing each other against their wills to get out of trouble;
“Talledega Nights” (2006) - straight redneck Will Ferrell kisses cultured European gay NASCAR driver Sacha Baron Cohen as a sign of competitive admiration.

There's a lot of it about, you know.