435: Jules Feiffer 6 - The Army Game

Playboy, May 1993

Feiffer hadn’t had a cartoon in “Playboy” for almost the last two years prior to this, and that was when he was doing a series of cartoons about the perils of middle-aged dating “Bernard and Huey”. This is a topical one-off, inspired by the months of investigation and debate about the issue of gays in the military in the early days of the Clinton administration which would lead to the implementation of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”.

The Larry on the other end of the phone would be American talkshow host Larry King.

Irrespective of the political issue, the comic hook of a sexual encounter where a gay transvestite tricks a straight man is pure “Playboy”. This particular scenario has cropped up in “Playboy” cartoons numerous times since the late 1960s. Usually the comedy payoff is shock or horror, but the acceptance and willingness of the soldier to fuck is a new development and so the joke goes further and is also proof of Feiffer’s superiority in handling his materials. Then the next twist is that the attractive transvestite is revealed to be a gay soldier – although a gay soldier naturally being in drag is a bit retrogressive. The subsequent queer-bashing is this soldier revealing his own hypocritical ignorance and opens up further conflicted arenas of machismo and the military. Finally the lewd comments about lesbians only includes one further aspect of crass attitudes to homosexuality. So a lot of territory covered in one short monologue.

434: Jules Feiffer 5 - The Decision

Playboy, November 1968

The first five panels are traditional Jules Feiffer : the monologue in which a man lays out his condition of conflicted, compromised emasculation. “Marriage is not a natural state for a man”. What punchline to this? What reconciliation? What ironic reversal? He’s escaping a completely different kind of compromise. Not a nelly stereotypical signifier in sight, otherwise it would ruin the punchline.

433: Jules Feiffer 4 - Little Murders

Little Murders – 1971

Alfred Chamberlain – Elliot Gould
Patsy Newquist - Marcia Rodd

Little Murders is an expansion of Jules Feiffers 1967 play. What is original to the play and what is new to this adaptation I don’t know.

The film is a nightmarishly comic view of a contemporary paranoid New York City that is disintegrating into an inferno of violence and corresponding anomy. The film is punctuated by random violence to which the bypassers have become inured. The corresponding sexual element is exemplified by a fear of homosexuality which pervades the film. Seriously - cries of “fag” and insinuations of homosexuality recur throughout the film. Whatever laughs the film wins are at the expense of modern fears and hysteria. Homosexuality is prominent as a disturbing modern element – and the writers and director are quite conscious of their intent.

The film opens with Patsy being phoned by one of her former lovers to be informed he is getting married. (Later in the film we discover that every single one of her boyfriends to date has been “swish”.) Patsy’s morning is then disturbed by the cries of “faggot” from a group of thugs outside her building who are beating up a man. Patsy eventually sets out and rescues their victim, Alfred. Elliott Gould’s character, a photographer who takes pictures of shit, is the exemplification of affectlessness and anomie, a man who feels nothing, and unresistingly allows people to beat him up for lack of any alternative:

“Those guys in the park, they said 'Hey, fatface! What are you staring at?' If I told them I wasn't staring at them, they would've beat me up for being a liar. And if I told them I was staring at them because I wanted to take their picture, then they'd beat me up for being a cop. So I told them I was staring at them because they looked familiar, and they beat me up for being a fag. There's no way of talking someone out of beating you up if that's what he wants to do.”

Having saved him physically, Patsy sets out to rescue him emotionally and they become girlfriend and boyfriend. She takes him home to her comically Jewish family. The first scene with her mother and father is a litany of her former gay boyfriends.

Father: Bet he’s a fag!

He’ll be a fine boy. I know it in my bones

Father: What was the name of that interior decorator she went to Europe with?

Mother: Howard. He was delicate.

Father: Swish. And that actor... the one she went camping up in Maine with.

Roger. He was very muscular.

Father: Swish. And the musician and the stockbroker and the Jewish novelist.

Mother: Oh, they're not like that.

Father: Swish, swish, swish, swish. I can spot them a mile away. She draws them like flies. She's got too much stuff. Too much stuff. You wait. You'll see. This new one, what's his name?

Brother: Alfred.

Mother: A swish name if I ever heard one.

We also meet her brother, in his early twenties, who still lives at home. Besides being an oddball, he is given to constantly abusing people and things he disapproves of as “fags”.

1: 48 – 2.08

Eventually Patsy and Alfred get married. At the wedding several of Patsy’s gay boyfriends make brief cameos. The second one in particular is camp. We then get a long, and marvellous monologue, from the opportunistic countercultural reverend, played by Donald Sutherland. Contemptuous of society’s hypocrisies and yet equally and arrogantly hypocritical himself, his speech comes to its conclusion when he addresses himself to each of the members of the family:

“And to Patsy's brother, Kenneth Newquist, with whom I had the pleasure of a private chat, I beg you feel no shame, homosexuality is all right, really it is.. it is perfectly all right.”

Kenneth Newquist: (screaming) Sonovabitch!! Aarrggghh!! (Kenneth assaults the minister and the marriage ceremony descends into a brawl, while Kenneth screams almost unintelligibly.) I’m not a faggot! I’m not a faggot!

There’s nothing obviously camp, fey, or gay at all in the brother’s performance. The revelation of his homosexuality is only another further facet of his oddness. If you want, you can see his constant aggressive cries of “fag” as a kind of projection. A little later though there is a scene where the brother is hiding in a closet, and talks about his attraction to his mother’s clothes.

Eventually the surviving characters find satisfaction and happiness by coming together to take sniper shots at passersby.

Apparently in the original play there’s some comment about Kenneth the brother also wearing his sister’s shoes, and the line in the minister’s monologue is different:

“And Patsy's brother, Kenneth Newquist, in whose bedroom I spent a few moments earlier this afternoon and whose mother proudly told me the decoration was by your hand entirely: I beg of you to feel no shame; homosexuality is all right”

so that in the play there are more transvestite / interior decorator allusions to Kenneth’s nature than in the film. Of course the play was from 1967 when assumptions about gay nature were even more restrictive than the early 70s.

432: Jules Feiffer 3 - Village Voice

Village Voice, 9 March 1967

This is rather ambiguous, but I include this strip so you can compare and contrast with the equally ambiguous figure in his 1966 strip about unisex fashion. Just as in that cartoon, here Feiffer offers a rather knock-kneed feyly-stanced figure who has some wrists as vertical as a plumb line. As one of the types to be found on campus, he is a slightly more mature version of the “flit” (or art fag, as we might call him nowadays). I may be reading too much into it here, but this sort of character isn’t a type Feiffer's drawn otherwise. So to build toward the larger point about politised campus life, he's thrown in as a signifier of contemporary diversity which the clued-in Village Voice audience should probably recognise.

431: Jules Feiffer 2: Hostileman 2

“Playboy”, June 1969

The point of interest in this two page excerpt from this late instalment of “Hostileman” is Jules Feiffer’s take on the gay folk myth that has historically accumulated around Batman.

In Feiffer’s case this piece doesn’t just grow out the obvious dig about a grown man and his close relationship with his younger ward. Only a couple of years earlier Feiffer had written his study, “The Great Comic Book Heroes” (Dial Press, 1965).

In his book, Feiffer quoted Frederic Wertham's 1954 condemnation of comic books “Seduction of the Innocent”, in which the homosexual appeal of Batman and Robin is revealed:

"At home they live an idyllic life…They live in sumptuous quarters with beautiful flowers in large vases…It is like a wish dream of two homosexuals living together. . . The atmosphere is homosexual and anti-feminine. If the girl is good-looking she is undoubtedly the villainess. If she is after Bruce Wayne, she will have no chance against Dick. For instance, Bruce and Dick go out one evening in dinner clothes, dressed exactly alike. The attractive girl makes up to Bruce while in successive pictures young Dick looks on smiling, sure of Bruce".

You’ll note this is a fairly good description of what Feiffer himself does in the relevant panels of “Hostileman”.

Feiffer however doesn't agree about any putative homosexulity, despite the fact that the young Feiffer had no real love for Robin (“I couldn’t stand boy companions….God, how I hated (Robin). You can imagine how pleased I was when, years later, I heard he was a fag…”). Wrote Feiffer: “Batman and Robin were no more or less queer than were their youngish readers, many of whom palled around together, didn’t trust girls, played games that had lots of bodily contact, and from similar surface evidence were more or less queer. But this sort of case-building is much too restrictive. In our society it is not only homosexuals who don’t like women. Almost no one does. "

Bruce Maim is an obvious ref to Bruce Wayne as Batman, however within the context of a cartoon with gay content in “Playboy”, there’s also the fact of Bruce as the stereotypically gay name.

Tangier, meanwhile, was long a famed bolthole for gay tourists.

430: Jules Feiffer 1: Hostileman 1

Playboy, January 1967
Jules Feiffer

Jules Feiffer first began to publish his distinctive cartoon strips in “The Village Voice” in 1956 and the newspaper would remain one of his primary venues for 30 or more years. At first Feiffer gave the strip to the paper for free as a means of advertising his work. One of the first big paying venues to hire Feiffer for other work was “Playboy” in 1958. Feiffer's work in “Playboy” has largely been forgotten but it’s just as good as the “Village Voice” strips and “Playboy” let him experiment with longer pieces, drama and stories .

Feiffer’s cartoon work stands out because he used the strip format for monologues and two-handers exploring sexual and political relations. Comic strip characters don’t usually exist solely to express contemporary dissatisfaction, resentment, neediness, conflicted emotions, neuroses and ideologies. Yet for all the crippling personal doubt, inadequacy and demonstrations of impotence in all its forms, Feiffer’s characters never seem to have any doubts about their sexuality. Similarly, for all the insults that get thrown about by his arguing partners, “faggot” or “queer” never crop up either. Homosexuality as an individual condition or a social phenomenon doesn’t make much appearance in his “Village Voice” strips.

One of the recurring features by Feiffer in the 1960s is his strip “Hostileman” in “Playboy” which ran for 6 instalments from 1964 to 1969. It features Bernard Mergendeiler, the generic adequate everyman from many of Feiffers’ Village Voice strips. Usually Bernard is pushed around and is incapable of expressing his needs or his resulting anger. In a parody of Captain Marvel who becomes a superhero by uttering the magic word “Shazam”, when the emasculated Bernard says “Hurt”, expressing his repressed desire for revenge, he is transformed into his secret identity of “Hostileman” and is able to gain the upper hand over his opponent, usually a girlfriend or his mother.

This one is inspired by the post-1965 new popularity of “camp” as the new style, which in the context of Feiffer-world is just a new way of making Bernard feel inferior. So you get “Chic Man” aka Tony In and his coterie of clones. The new mandates of fashion come from obvious homosexuals, which goes hand-in-hand with the fact that homosexuality and homosexuals are now slightly more conspicuous socially as the topic of assorted social analyses in magazines in “Life” and “Time” and an increase in sly homophobic digs in columns in newspapers like “The New York Times”. Note that “chic man” and co all have blond hair or platinum blond Caesar cuts, which is an American cliché of the time. There’s a profusion of wrists limp to the point of being perpendicular, and the tight striped suits are de mode.

Somewhat daring is the sequence at the top of page 4 in which Bernard gets cruised in a lavatory, a relatively early instance of acknowledging and joking about this aspect of gay life. Not one of those things people talk about. Near-contemporary sixties satirical types like Lenny Bruce and Barry Humphries treat the matter of cottaging via the aspect of the injustice of police entrapment. Here, there’s no distance, it’s just a preening winsome gay man having a bit of a leer. Note too the kicked back heel in the upper right column as he looks back into the toilet.

257 - American Unisex 1: Jules Feiffer

As I’m sure I’ve noted elsewhere, most jokes about unisex style tend to run not much further than third party comments about “How do you tell the girls from the boys”, or couples deciding who’s going to wear what. As far as boys with long-hair go, you’ve got the standard cry of “Get a haircut, you commie fag”, but that’s just cheap abuse. Unisex jokes about homosexuality are rather more rare. Stereotypes about homosexuals and a penchant for fashion are as old as the hills, but these unisex jokes are more about sexual collisions resulting from the blurring of obvious gender signifiers.

Jules Feiffer, “Village Voice”, 25 August 1966

When not worrying his cartoon monologists, Jules Feiffer’s subject has been the psychic battle grounds of male-female relations. Homosexuality doesn’t usually get a look-in.
This one, well, now the boys and girls can’t even tell one other apart. Since it’s in dialogue, it’s a bit more informed and involved than usual. Upon rereading, knowing it’s actually a male character, he is certainly rather more fashionably effusive and androgynous than normal. Also note his posture – that’s the same stance that Ronald Searle used, and also crops up in a few other cartoons and comics. And besides the sudden comic reveal at the end, emphasied by the sudden leadenly limp wrist in the final panel, also the suggestion that unisex will lead to transvestism.