226: Adam and Steve

If at some time you haven’t had some supposed wit inflict: “If God had meant for there to be homosexuals, then he’d have made Adam and Steve, not Adam and Eve” on you then you’ve been jolly lucky. To which wisecrack the only reasonable response is jamming your thumb into their eye, and then while you’re got their attention explaining the theory of evolution, punctuating the more important principles by slamming their head against the wall.
Aaanyyyyy-hoooo. Cartoons in which some typically male/female couple is changed to became an all-male gay pair.


“Larry” in “Private Eye” 5 November 1971.
Darby and Joan is an English phrase used to describe a couple who’ve been married for many, many years. Social clubs for pensioners were called “Darby and Joan Clubs”. "Darby and John" would have seemed like a workable pun.
There’s a handbag, and I think the chap seated in the window on the far right is wearing pearls.

David Austin in “The Spectator” 20 August 1983
A gay Punch and Judy for a gay audience

Michael Heath in “The Spectator” 7 July 1982

Michael Heath in “Punch” 17 March 1982
More of a crappy pun, to be honest, and less impressive than a cartoon I’ve seen from the ‘70s of a performance of “Oklahomosexual”

167: Gay Sports - The Games

by Larry, in “Punch” 6 October 1982

Outside of killing and/or fucking (or maybe even both at the same time, gggrrrr), what can be more traditionally masculine than participating in competitive sports. The commonplace straightness of organised sports almost inevitably invites comically contrasting visions of homosexuality.

Here Larry offers assorted femmy images: bouffy hair, high-heeled boots, purses, lipstick, earrings, etc. In competition his homosexuals are not merely unmanly, but almost infantile – hide and seek, bell horses?

Larry’s cartoons are inspired by the first “Gay Games” in 1982.

61 - Larry

Terrence Parkes in “Private Eye” 1 May 1964


Terrence Parkes in “Private Eye” 4 March 1966


Terrence Parkes in “Private Eye” 17 Jan 1969

“Larry” doesn’t seem to have made many cartoons about homosexuality. All of his though that I can find, are quite specifically about its illegality. No value judgements, just jokes about putting it in some context to highlight the criminality. You could argue that in these cartoons Larry makes the police efforts more ridiculous than the homosexuals, since their ferocity and intentness of purpose seems a little out of proportion to the relative innocence and casualness of the “criminals”. All of Larry’s people look much the same, so he must have gone to a little extra effort to offer us the two specimens in the second and third cartoons. In the second the mouth is more distinct than usual and the hand juts out on the hip, while in the 1969 cartoon (and homosexuality was actually legal by then) Larry’s actually gone to some effort – limp wrist, frou-frou hair, distinct lips and arms around each other.
I like to think that you can rearrange these three cartoons to make a little graphic narrative in miniature. Prisoners of Love, indeed!