63 - Gays in the Military: Art Spiegelman

Art Spiegelman in “The Realist”, June 1967

Well this takes the hippy slogan as far as one might hope. Like yeah man, what if the army went around loving each other rather than fighting? And so: two soldiers kissing. A fair enough satirical point. The homosexual aspect is partly incidental. I don’t think there’s animus to discredit the army through imputations of homosexuality. No sirree. Although one can imagine purple-faced bigots fulminating about the inappropriateness of employing men to kill their fellow men whose base urges to are to love their fellow men. And indeed we’ll be seeing that point made with a certain amount of heavyhandedness when I dig up the morass of American editorial cartoons from 1993. Many years later Paul Krassner, the editor of “The Realist” would reprint this cartoon specifically to illustarate the issues of gays in the military.