394: Anita Bryant 10 - Little Annie Fanny

“Playboy” August 1979
Writer: Harvey Kurtzman
Artist: Will Elder

The last page from an instalment of Kurtzman and Elder's lavishly composed and illustrated if underachieving “Little Annie Fanny” strip. This time the contemporary social trend having a cockeyed glance cast across it is Frisbee playing. Yeeerrrss, not exactly reaching for satirical heights there, I’m afraid. In this instance, the joke is that in all the running and jumping and dashing and catching involved in the so-called supposed sport, the joggling of the title character’s colossal mammalian appurtenances distracts the opposing teams with simply hilarious consequences. So yes, it’s “Playboy” and its booby gags, which I wouldn’t bother posting except it’s the necessary set-up for the final panel and the appearance of a new team who won’t fail foul of their gambit:

Clichés to tick off:
Hands on hips
Prissy look
Bitchiness
Lisping – “Frithbeeth” indeed!
Bruce

And even though it’s almost two and a half years since she first started her campaign, you can just make out that the frisbee in the last panel features a very sour-looking Anita Bryant with the legend “Anita sucks”. Nice to be remembered.

372: Trina Robbins - I Was a Fag Hag

"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.

365: Ted Richards - Dopin' Dan

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.

278: Bonzo Dog Band - Trouser Press

(Disregard the images in the video)
“Trouser Press” by Roger Ruskin Spear
From "The Doughnut In Granny's Greenhouse" (1968) by The Bonzo Dog Band

The Bonzo Dog Band were one of the delights of my late teens. (Balls to U2 and INXS. So very heartfelt, and so very loud: Woah, woah, feelings, with the amp turned to eleven). Intelligent nonsense and parody will always win over turgid rock n’roll sincerity, in my book. (My book is ‘Ulysses’, if you must know.) Every one of their records (five in 1969 -1972) is just crammed with gags, throwaway weird effects, songs that demolish whole genres of music. There’s so much happening in just this one silly little song. However, it’s the spoken word bits which must attract our attention today.

One, two, three, kick!
Come on everybody, clap your hands
Ooooh, you're looking good
Are you having a good time? I sure am
Do you like soul music?
Well, do the Trouser Press, baby!
You’re so savage, Roger!
Ecstasy, Bruce, ecstasy!

This rather effeminate camping about is in contrast to the raucous noise of the main part of the song. These bits are spoken by Joel Druckman, a temporary member of the Bonzos. He was also American, which may go a little way to explaining “Ecstasy, Bruce, ecstasy”, since as I’ve pointed out on several occasions Americans will not be dissuaded that “Bruce” is an innately Gay name. "You're so savage" also seems to be a 1960s West-coast gay stereotype too. The Bonzos weren’t averse to little liner note gags about “Hairstyles by Maison Poov”.
Viv Stanshall’s early performances made for a decidedly camp stage presence, posing on stage in attitudes which don’t just grab your attention but hold it hostage (he had studied under Lindsay Kemp), essaying assorted upperclass drawls. Vide his rather fey Elvis impression when performing “Death Cab for Cutie” on the Beatles’s film of “Magical Mystery Tour”
While I must go and try figure out everything that’s happening in “Rusty (Champion Thrust)” – “Marty and Frank were just full of this Gay Front. They just wouldn’t stop talking about it. What’s with this Gay Front? I mean I only just got the front painted up. Jezuz, aint that gay enough?”

264: Playboy selection

“Playboy” has a long history as one of the better venues for cartoons. It’s published all sorts of cartoonists in all sorts of styles. But when people think of a “Playboy” cartoon, they’re usually thinking of a particular type of sexual cartoon. Quite often featuring a naked lady, but almost always about the satisfactions of lust, with maybe a little about the convolutions of human jealousy or dissatisfaction as comic grit, but by and large fairly positive about sex.
Many of the gay cartoons just take the typical heterosexual situations which the cartoonists riff off anyway and just play them with a gay couple. There is a small but definite body of “Playboy” cartoons about gay transvestism, but that’s because of “Playboy”’s fascination for the female form, and so there’s a little disquiet about the repercussions of having one’s natural manly lusts fooled. There are not that many which are all that sneering about gay effeminacy, unlike “Mad” magazine of the same period. Playboy had adopted a pro-gay rights attitude as part of its general policy for healthy sexual and social liberation by the mid 60s but its comic homosexuals were usually sissy caricatures. By the 1970s Playboy had loosened up around homsexuals, and its comics were able to make jokes about gay people just as people not as some other weird species.
Here are some examples where the joke is a homosexual doing exactly the very thing a heterosexual would do in the same situation. And most actually wouldn’t look out of place in the pages of “Gay News” or “Christopher Street” at the time.

Buck Brown
“Playboy” December 1973
This is the only one where you could say the cartoonist has definitely drawn people intended to be identifiably “homosexual” – scrawny arms with clasped hands, cigarette held in less than virile manner, and the use of the name “Bruce”. The gag itself is just another one about swinging, like so many cartoons in “Playboy” about casual healthy orgies and wotnots. The gay variation: “Wife-swapping” but only with men, ho, ho.

Roy Raymonde
“Playboy”, January 1975
The standard outraged, betrayed older man discovering his young lover in bed in with another. It’s not until you read the caption, and the very last word, that you realise the variation. And then you notice something slightly different about the expression of the young man.

John Dempsey
“Playboy” June 1976
From a sequence of marriage guidance counsellor jokes, “The Honeymoon is Over”. Two fairly straight-looking men here, just casting devoted glances at each other.

Jared
“Playboy”, September 1977
Just a variation on the oft-quoted line from the “Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam”.

Phil Interlandi
“Playboy”, May 1979 from “Class Reunion”

156: Incredible Hulk parody

from “Mad Magazine” January 1979
written by Lou Silverstone, drawn by Angelo Torres

Here we have some pertinent excerpts from a parody of “The Incredible Hulk” TV series. The mild-mannered nebbishy David Banner is the necessary alter-ego of the non-stop rage machine that is The Hulk. “Mad” takes this one step further by running a series of gags making him so un-masculine as to appear possibly gay. However their idea of gay (and this is by the late 70s mind you) is an uninspired representation of a transvestite in an old lady’s clothes. By this time it really can’t be denied the “Mad” crew of writers were a rather middle-aged bunch of old farts.
This strip also highlights the strange belief American have that “Bruce” is an essentially gay name. The TV producers had indeed changed the TV version’s name from “Bruce” to “David”, possibly because of homosexual overtones. Here though, they undercut this assumption with the gag about the athlete Bruce Jenner.

117: "Big Bruce"

“Big Bruce” (M. Vickery, D. Tyson, Bud. Reneau-Bill Stith).
Sung by Steve Greenberg.
Atlantic 1969

SPOKEN: The folk history of America is the history of its heroes. Big working men like John Henry, Paul Bunyan and Big Bad John. But today, I’d like to introduce a new folk hero. He didn’t work in a mine, or in a railroad, or any of those strenuous occupations. He worked in a beauty salon, and his name was Bruce...

Well, every day at the salon, you can see him arrive
He stood six-foot-six, weighed one-oh-five
He's kinda narrow at the shoulders, narrow in the hips
With a curl in his hair and a smile on his lips
Big Bruce
Big Bad Bruce

No one seemed to know where Bruce came from
He kinda swished into town and stayed all alone
Never said much, kind of quiet and shy
And when he spoke at all, it was just to say “Hi!”
Big Bruce
Big Bad Bruce

Same say he came from New Orleans
Where he had a social group called The Cajun Queens
Some say Hollywood or Beverly Hills
Where he got arrested for passing three-dollar bills
That’s Bruce

Then came the day of that terrible fire
Something went wrong in the #5 dryer
Into the chaos of those matronly caves
Went Big Bad Bruce, just a-fannin’ the flames
Big Bruce
Big Bad Brucie-Wucie

Well, the flames grew higher and the fire got worse
And someone heard Brucie cry, “Mercy, I forgot my purse!”
Into the fire with a squeal and a shout
We waited an hour, but he never came out
Poor Bruce
Poor old Bruce

Where that salon once stood is a grocery store
But his name will live for evermore
In the annals of time
And in the Hall of Fame
As a gay young cat who went down in flames
Big Bruce

You might say this is a big kind of fairy tale

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

This is a parody of Jimmy Dean's "Big Bad John". This is a slightly rewritten cover of “Big Bruce” by The Country Gentlemen (Rebel 263, 1966). This version charted on the Billboard Chart at #97, July of 1969.

Not a gay cowboy song. Rather the joke here is the transposition of a gay scenario –hairdressers and their big city homosexual milieus (which we might recognise from #89: The Pied Piper of Burbank) – into a country ballad. In this there is of course implicit critique between the masculine he-men of the west, and even the typical macho western singer's drawl, and the effeminate fashion gay.
This also has significance because it is an early instance of Americans getting somewhat worked up in their belief that “Bruce” is a very gay name indeed.

While trying to find out more about "The Ballad of Ben Gay" and "Big Bruce" I found this Queer Music Heritage website which has an exhaustive history of gay cowboy songs:

http://www.queermusicheritage.us/apr2005a.html
http://www.queermusicheritage.us/apr2005as.html

116: The Ballad of Ben Gay

The Ballad Of Ben Gay, 1973
written by Darrel Gulland & Edd McNeely
performed by Ben Gay & The Silly Savages
Elm Records, 1973. GNP Crescendo, 1974.

Hi, I'm Ben Gay.
I'd like to dedicate this song to Wayne and Bruce
and all my friends at the Chartreuse Moose
One, two, buckle your shoe!
OK boys. Lets slap it from the bottom.

Born to be a cowboy,
That's what I try to be.
Wanted to be a cowboy,
But they poked fun at me!
Dreamed of riding horses,
Roping and herding cattle;
Oh how those brutes terrorised me
when they saw my velvet saddle.
(Can I help it if my skin's delicate?)

I tried to be a wrangler
Really and truly I tried
But after this experience
I'll stick to pony rides
You should've seen the way they looked,
Their faces all turned pale,
Each time I took my brush out
and ratted my horse's tail
(I though it looked just dahlin'!)

OK boys. Play the bridge
(Bridge)
Not that kind of bridge, you silly savages
You want Ben Gay all over you?

A cowboy's life is not for me,
in fact it was a curse.
Want to know why I gave up
They took away my purse
Now my wrangling days are over
But I can honestly say
Whoever heard of a cowboy
named Hopalong Ben Gay
(I don't know why they took my purse.
They have saddle bags, don't they?)

If you want to be a wrangler
Take Ben's advice. Hang Loose!
Come see old Wayne and me
we'll be at the Chartreuse Moose
Fix you up. Whatever!?
They laughed at me when I ripped my panty hose pulling them on over my spurs!

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

An American song to balance off the contemporaneous English parody by Bill Oddie. A deliberately fey, and lispy flirty voice for this one. And the joke being the delicate, fashion-obsessed sissy gay transposed into a cowboy environment, and then this gay cowboy doesn’t realise why it is that he’s being picked upon. This was sufficiently popular that it was re-released by a larger label.

92: "Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In" and Alan Sues

Alan Sues was a regular performer on the comedy series "Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In" from 1968 until 1972, where Sues played a number of characters as well as “himself”. Alan Sues’s most famous character was "Big Al", a fey and clueless sports anchor who loved ringing his bell which he called his "tinkle." Sues had been in the original 1953 production of “Tea and Sympathy”. He also performed on the cabaret circuit where he was spotted for “Laugh-In”. Big Al was a character from his own nightclub act. In 1969 critic Richard Warren Lewis described Sues as “‘Laugh-In’’s resident pansy”. While never explicitly saying he was gay, Sues employed exaggerated gestures and was known for acting in an intentionally "over the top" effeminate way. Other than “Big Al”, Sues would appear in a number of rather hamfisted mini-sketches where he would ask to hold a male celebrity’s hand, including Ringo Starr and James Garner, and then this being shocking enough to win a laugh, would then disavow it. Other black-out sketches would include the likes of:

A cowboy asking for a dacquiri.
A cop asking a girl if those were his hotpants
Saying to camera: “You know. I think God save the Queen was written for Oscar Wilde”.

(A police officer approaches Sues who is behind the wheels of a convertible)
POLICEMAN: "Okay, okay, buddy, where's the fire?"
ALAN SUES: "In your eyes, officer."

Since I’ve only seen a few brief clips on youtube, I can’t really say much about his performance. He was a surprisingly large man, which sets up an immediate contrast, but from the clips I’ve seen, his seems a rather toned-down sort of nelly or camp. Although on mainstream TV at this time it probably stood out on its own. Really, it’s a rather dull performance and has little lively comparison to real screamers like Kenneth Williams. Or to use an American reference, he’s no Paul Lynde (and apparently Paul Lynde loathed being mistaken for Alan Sues).

In 1970, one year after the Stonewall riots in New York City, the show created the stereotypically effeminate character named Bruce, who was subjected to long strings of anti-gay jokes about gay men and gay liberation. (this from: www.glbtq.com/arts/am_tv_sitcoms,2.html)

In 1979 CBS attempted an unsuccessful American adaptation of “Are You Being Served?”. Sues played the role of Mr Humphries in the 1979 pilot, “Beane's of Boston”.

It’s possible the deliberately over-the top gay stereotype of “Big Gay Al” on “Southpark” may be some sort of tribute to Alan Sues’s Big Al.