403: Gay Bar 4 - Rodrigues

Charles Rodrigues
Playboy, December 1967

Did straight bars of the 1960s really feature giant paintings of naked ladies? How would I know. But an appreciation of naked ladies is one of the tickets to heterosexuality.

Did gay bars of the 1960s have giant paintings of naked men? Almost certainly not, since gay bars existed by flying under the radar and not being too blatant. But hey, this is just a comic reversal.

The patrons in their tight trousers (compare to trousers of the two straight men), their effeminate stance, and their bouffant hair.

Roughly contemporaneous with this cartoon is “The Gilded Lily” and its clientele in S. Clay Wilson’s “Ruby the Dyke and Her Six Perverted Sisters Stomp the Fags” (1967)

353: Gay Cowboys - 1970s and 1980s

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.

309: Gay Frankenstein 2

“Doctor Colon’s Monster”
By Charles Rodrigues


from “National Lampoon” January 1972


from “National Lampoon” March 1972


from “National Lampoon” April 1972


from “National Lampoon” May 1972


from “National Lampoon” June 1972


from “National Lampoon” July 1972

Oh how I do love the worlds that Charles Rodrigues conjures up in his cartoons. Unending fantasias of bad taste. “Doctor Colon’s Monster” was one of the first strips that Rodrigues drew for “National Lampoon”. “The Aesop Twins” is probably better remembered if simply because it went on for years and years. “Doctor Colon’s Monster” only ran for half of 1972. Evidently something was in the air in 1972. Ed McLachlan’s gay Frankenstein was from a little later in 1972.
As with all of these gay Frankenstein cartoons, half the joke lies in the discrepancy between the murderous immensity of the monster and the cartoon version’s sissiness. In the same way there is the discrepancy between the panels and their details to get pay-offs about assorted gay stereotypes. Yet they never seem particularly belaboured. It’d almost be an insult if gay men didn’t elicit a “Queer” from the pen of Rodrigues. If a couple of the jokes seem slightly groanworthy then I like Rodrigues is inviting you to groan along with him, rather than simply laugh at the fags. Of course it’s caught in an act of hairdressing. Half a page of inarticulate mumbling and groaning to get a joke about similarly indecipherable lisping is pleasantly ingenious. Topped by a monster who after his frustrated lumbering is suddenly arranged like the cover photo on a Liza Minnelli album.
Rodrigues does expand his array of gay references since at least half of these strips end with a joke explicitly reliant upon homosexual rapacity. Cartoons of handjobs are relatively thin on the ground. While the final panel of March with the Doctor urging his monster to “SUCK!!!” as though it has the meaning of “Kill!” cracks me up, with its connotations of a terminal draining different from the typical vampire’s.

26 - Faggots: Charles Rodrigues

in “National Lampoon”, May 1977

Now here are some cartoons intended to be more scabrous and offensive. Rodrigues always had a very biological turn of mind. So if any cartoonist would show a grown man still attached umbilically to his mother, or looking proudly at his shit like a father, then Rodrigues would be the one. A new and different manner of being funny in awful ways about homosexuals.

Charles Rodrigues was a cartoonist for almost the entirety of “National Lampoon”’s history. His strips were weird, and often very gross. He would do the most awful things featuring dwarves, Siamese twins, amputees, corpses, abortions, people in a coma communicating through farts. The king of bad taste, but I’m afraid I really do like him. He also played around with the form quite boldly. Sometimes he would be half-way through a strip in an issue, get bored, kill everyone off and start a new strip, there and then.

Rodrigues also provided cartoons for the “Realist” and “Stereo Review”. His cartons for “Stereo review” would seem to be very fondly remembered and were collected in "Total Harmonic Distortion" (1988).