470: Gay Santa Claus

Ken Pyne,
“Punch” 2 December 1981

From the early days of what we would now call multiculturalism, this cartoon offers all the possible bleeding-heart heart liberal alternatives to a traditional Father Christmas. The joke is marrying all these different instances of positive discrimination to harmless Father Christmas, rather than attempting to show what a gay Santa or a CND Santa might look like.

From “Santas for All”
Illustrated by Gerry Gersten
“Playboy”, December 1966

Whereas this is nothing but festive offerings to satisfy various contemporary steretoypes. Amidst the surfers and black power protestors, here's Swish Kringle.

Similarly, you can look at Richard Ingrams camping it up as Santa in “Private Eye”, December 1963

“Playboy”, December 1967

Just asking each other for their Christmas presents, or something more?

455: Gay American Football 2 - Phil Interlandi

by Phil Interlandi
in "Playboy", October 1975

Well, yes. Doesn't it just.

447: Charles Atlas

“Physical Culture”, body-building, call it what you will. Is it just a desire to build up a more manly physique to attract the ladies, or does it shade over into something more insidiously homoerotic? All those 1950s muscle magazines featuring glistening, toned, scarcely clad young men, and the 1998 film “Beefcake” would argue that the intent was more homosexual than advocates would admit. Of course the most famous body-building course, aimed at the boys who just wanted to look a bit more manly, was Charles Atlas’s, with his adverts about the wimp on the beach getting sand kicked in his face. So a few parodies of the format of the ad and the other appeals of muscle.

Monty Python’s Flying Circus, 16 November 1969
0.38 – 0.55

This animation by Terry Gilliam is a spoof of Charles Atlas. However the line, about “a body that is the envy of other men” produces this camp poof. The snide tones and a limp wrist are universal. The “duckie” I think is more English, but the blonde bouffant hair and striped suit are more American clichés of the time.

Playboy, November 1977
Lou Brooks

This one, since it is a cartoon, can more accurately follow the original cartoon style of the Charles Atlas adverts. The parody follows the format, but each panel is rather more subversively coarse than the original. The pay-off of the strip is the homoeroticism of body-building, confirmed by the final line in which the bodybuilder reveals his name is Bruce. This is obviously the cartoon I was trying to remember in this earlier Al Jaffee cartoon about the gay appeal of bodybuilding

440: Coming Out On Television

Playboy, January 1975

Heartburn, Nora Ephron 1983:

“I picked up the remote control unit and turned on the television set. There was Phil Donahue. He was interviewing five lesbians, who had chosen the occasion of their appearance on Donahue to come out of the closet. I could just imagine the five of them, waiting through the years for the right offer, turning down Merv, turning down Kup, turning down Cavett, watching contemptuously as their friends chose mundane occasions like Thanksgiving with Mom and Dad for the big revelation, waiting for the big one, Phil himself, to finally come clean.”

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

With the whole idea of coming out on television, comes the notion that different television programmes have different class associations, and aren't snobbery and self-aggrandisement a natural part of modern life.

1983 was also the same year as Walker Percy's Donohue Show parody which also started off with satire of the tendency to use homosexual rights and lifetsyles as TV discussion show fodder.

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.

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.

427: Computer Dating 2 - Robert Censoni

“Playboy”, May 1969
Robert Censoni

In this cartoon, almost contemporary with the last sketch, Censoni presents the standard late 1960s America homosexual – when not actually a man in drag. Overly dressed-up, fluttery-eyelashed, blithely smiling, pretty and blond. The idea of the homosexual with dyed-platinum-blond hair is very much the cliché of the times – lots of other Playboy cartoons in the 60s, the character portrayed by Rod Steiger in “No Way to Treat a Lady”, and the central character in the book of cartoons “My Son the Daughter” by Mort Drucker.

412: Eat, Drink, and Be Mary

by Vahan Shirvanian
Playboy, May 1975

Is this taken from an existing advertisement for a gay bar of the time? Don’t know.

Is it informed by any awareness that one form of casual address between gay men is “Mary”? Don’t know?

Is it maybe the idea that gay men are inveterate transvestites, hence “Be Mary”? Don’t know?

Sometimes a pun is just a pun

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)

402: Gay Bar 3 - Alden Erikson

Alden Erikson
“Playboy” March 1965

A cartoon that at the time can be assumed to speak for itself. The readers will know what these men are. A whole bunch of homosexuals get kicked out of a suddenly closed gay bar – cocktail sign in the window. So what do homosexual men look like as a tribe in the mid-60s? Tight trousers (“fag pants” as they were known then), colourful tops, matelot-style stripes, ascots, and sunglasses worn even indoors. Oh, and a handbag

400: Gay Bar 1: Shel Silverstein

Gay bars and discos are an opportunity to show a whole load of homosexuals in one place. What do they do? How do they behave together? What do they drink and how do they dress? If one homosexual is funny, then surely a whole mass of them should be a scream. Bearing in mind that for the longest time a gay bar was a barely legal venue, only operating under sufferance because of organised crime backhanders, with the patrons still subject to sudden arrest by cops and prosecution resulting in loss of their jobs and social shame. Fun times.

from “Silverstein in Greenwich Village”
Shel Silverstein
“Playboy”, September 1960

So here are some contemporary denizens who huddle together in the modern metropolis. Like knows like because they have overly styled, lengthy hair, expressive eyes with long lashes or eyebrows for men. Sensitive features and postures. An earring on the bartender. At least one patron looks as though he’s eying up another across the bar.

The gag in the cartoon is a reverse with the unexpected interposition of heterosexuality.

The psychiatrist is also a 1960s touch, particularly since it seems almost every, or at least every other, gay man of the time was seeing a shrink to try and deal with his sexuality.

To put this bar in some sort of context: “The New York Times” ran a lengthy feature , “Life on W. 42d St. A Study in Decay.” by Milton Bracker on 14 March, 1960. A large part of this “decay” is devoted to the homosexual presence on Times Square and 42nd Street. The reporter details encountering such homosexuals as “a Negro who wore fluffed up hair and heavy black make-up on his brows and lashes” and a "a white youth with thick blond hair and handsome features who wore makeup on his eyebrows" who "spoke effeminately and shifted his hips and legs as he spoke." Disgraceful. Worse may be a heterosexual “youth in a black jacket and tapered trousers” who listened to “‘nothing but rock’n’roll’” and considered “homosexuals … ‘nice people.’” He should know better. Amidst all the sex cinemas there’s also the Jewel Box Review – with "25 Boys and 1 girl – Astounding Deception!!!" it was a drag show. Drag will play a big part in the forthcoming depictions of gay bars in the 60s and 70s.

396: Assortment of Castaways

And in similar vein to the last of the Anita Bryant cartoons, what can be made of the cartoon’s cliché of the castaways on a desert island? Particularly since these are all from “Playboy” readers would normally expect a little cheeky sexual chasing. Funny things can happen to a man when isolated from civilisation.

“Playboy” March 1965
B. Kliban

A spectacularly early carton from Kliban – the style is much different from his unique surrealism, even the illustrative style is different. No desert island romance here: “masacara” does all the heavy-lifting here so that man and woman trapped on an island expectations are reversed.

“Playboy” May 1970
Cliff Roberts

“Playboy” April 1973
Robert Censoni

The boredom of being trapped, with language more suitable to a love’s tiff.

“Playboy” July 1976
Herb Green

395: Anita Bryant 11: Malcolm Hancock

Malcolm Hancock “Playboy” February 1978 Not much to say about this, as silence can be so eloquent sometimes, which is why it’s only taken me 25 words to make this point.

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.

390: Anita Bryant 6 - Across the Dials

A few more spot gags from the time, with references to “Fruits”, “Fairies”, “Queens”, and an implied “Queer” (as a three dollar bill).

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

Johnny Carson:
(as Carnac the Magnificent giving predictions to questions)

Answer: 13 Queens Boulevard.
Question: Name an address Anita Bryant will never have.

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

Bette Davis on “Laugh-In” - September 5 1977:

“Anita Bryant has won her court suit to force Florida orange growers to cover their navels and quit pinching the fruit. The fruit was not available for comment.”

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

Frank Sinatra at Dean Martin Roast – 7 February 1978

“I love Dean Martin and if that upsets Anita Bryant then so be it.”

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

The Unknown Comic on “The Redd Foxx Comedy Hour” late 1977 /early 1978

“Anita Bryant drove her car across a river yesterday, yeah she didn't want to take a ferry (pronounced: fairy)."

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

Playboy - November 1977:

“The Treasury are considering introducing a three dollar bill bearing Anita Bryant’s face.”

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

Saturday Night Live Newsdesk Update:

1. Anita Bryant, former mediocre actress and orange juice promoter, performed coitus in public yesterday, and campaigned to promote heterosexuality. She and her husband assumed the missionary position for two minutes, then announced she is a citrusexual. (April 9th, 1977)

2. A report from Florida states that Anita Bryant plans to undergo a sex-change operation this Spring. The exact date will not be set until the popular TV personality decides which sex to change to. More on this story as it develops. (February 26th, 1977)

3. (after Bryant was hit in the face with a pie by a gay activist) Fortunately, Ms. Bryant, who was not injured, enjoyed a good laugh, and said it was okay if the assailant dated her husband.(October 15th, 1977)

382: Gay Star Wars 1

"Star Spats"
By Laurence Gonzales
in "Playboy", December 1977

Back to the soul-sinking chronicle of fag jokes. I am Ixion. This is my wheel. If only I knew how to quit it.

The next few examples wouldn’t exist without Anthony Daniels’s performance as the android C3PO in “Star Wars”. A heritage of gay robot jokes is not quite the legacy any actor might hope to leave behind. Although George Lucas’s casting vision has to take some blame. Actually I was greatly tempted to give the following selections the overall title of “FAAAGS IN SPAAAAAAAACE!!!”, but that would be demeaning - to my childhood delight in the Muppets.

This parody is in the same vein as Harvard Lampoon’s “Bored of the Rings” and subsequent film parody franchises. Puns, heavy-handed sex jokes and contemporary life style references laboriously transposed into a science-fictionalised setting, while also deprecating the storytelling shortcomings of the original. Simply to cut down on space I left out all the Jewish and Yiddish jokes, though fans of Mel Brooks’s “Spaceballs” may feel deprived. The one atrocious racist joke I’ve left in for comparison.

Unsubtle probably best describes the overall impression. The title and picture pretty much let you know what to expect. Sissy gays don’t have wars, they have spats. I’m surprised they didn’t try to make Darth’s helmet look more like a penis, but then there are stories of Hefner getting weird about cartoons of penises in “Playboy”.

Discos, drugs, bitchy queens, s/m fashions, and hairdressers (“Mr” often being the title of choice for hairdressers). This is the contemporary Studio 54 lifestyle that the readers are expected to pick up on. With a “The Boys in the Band” allusion for those who can remember: “Who do you have to fuck....”

Suffice it to say this has never been collected in any anthology of gay science fiction.

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

STAR SPATS

Will Luke rescue Princess Orgasma?

Can a gay android find happiness in a bit part?

Will the universe be saved?

Does anybody have a valium?

Funny you should ask?




The erratic course of the galactic cruiser as it blasted through the constellation Tsooris was hardly intentional. Its captain had been hard by the Jack Daniel's for three days running. Coincidentally, this course was avoiding the long streaks of energy striking out from the Imperial cruiser. One of the beams touched the staggering, lurching ship and blew away its curb feelers and fender skirts. Then another distant explosion shook the ship and peeled away a layer of red-flocked wallpaper in the corridor - but it certainly didn't feel distant to Little Bo Peepio, the gay android, and his side-kick Panchoo DeeToo. To look at those two, you would have thought Little Bo Peepio, the tall, wispy machine wearing nothing but a necklace that said BITCH and a Porsche chronometer, was master of Panchoo DeeToo, the stubby, swarthy pistolero robot in the Two Fingers Tequila T-shirt; but while Bo Peepio might have thrown an absolute snit at the suggestion, they were actually equals in everything except that Bo Peepio gave better head and Panchoo DeeToo was the only Panchoo unit in the constellation of Tsooris that was running off a turquoise-and beaten-silver laser system.

Other explosions rocked the galactic cruiser. The low humming note that had been giving Bo Peepio a splitting headache suddenly stopped. Finally. Bo Peepio spoke:

"Who do you have to fuck to get a valium around here?" he asked.

Panchoo did not comment immediately. His barrel torso tilted backward, his three powerful hand-tooled leather cowboy boot gripping the deck. The meter-high Mexicano droid was suffering from severe postnasal drip sustained while sniffing some Peruvian graphite dust earlier in the flight, A series of short, chirping Spanish invectives issued from his speaker. To even a sensitive ear they would have sounded like just so much Third World gibberish, but to Bo Peepio they formed words as dear as a tequila sunrise.

"This butch captain of ours is definitely on a macho trip,' Bo Peepio said in a testy voice, thrusting out his metallic hips petulantly and patting down his chromium skullplate. "We're fucked for sure now.”

Suddenly a band of Imperial Storm Troopers appeared and began firing their weapons. One blast of energy threw Bo Peepio into a jumble of shredded cables, where dozens of currents turned him into a jerking, mincing, limp-wristed display of acrobatics.

"Help!" he screamed. "My servopelvic Accu-Jac!"

As Panchoo extended his switchblade mechanism to try to help cut away the cables, Bo Peepio's tone turned ultra-bitchy:

"This is all your fault! I should have known better than to trust the logic of an albino graphite-snorting, hand-held half-breed vibrator!"

Panchoo cut loose with a series of searching Spanish curses usually reserved for those who gang-rape your mother. One of them made an allusion to Bo Peepio's ancestral link to the Water Pik.

Then a violent explosion shook the corridor.

Two meters tall. Bipedal. Flowing black robes and a simple string of cultured pearls. Hair by Sassoon. Face forever masked by a black Tiffany breathing creation stunningly punctuated by pear diamond and rough-cut emeralds. A Dark Lord of Sith was a daunting shape as it snapped its tight little buns back and forth, heading down the corridors, glancing self-consciously at its reflection in the mirrored walls. Solidly into S/M, it normally sported heavy leather-and-chrome manacles and a set of expensive Spanish handcuffs. Once-resolute rebel crew members ceased resisting at the sight and threw themselves al its feet, crying:

"Where did you get your hair done?"

As it turned down another passageway, they could hear Mr. Darth's heavy breathing through the Tiffany mask. But who could resist?

Elsewhere, Bo Peepio and Panchoo were entering the lifeboat hatch. The explosive bolts fired after a loud warning and the pod ejected from the crippled fighter, sending the two droids to the surface of the planet below. Like much of the Promised Land, it was pretty grim compared with Fire Island.



Soon after Luke Starfucker had come into possession of Bo Peepio and Panchoo - and for no explainable reason - they were all fast friends, as if they'd known one another for eons. While Luke was valiantly trying to repair Panchoo, however, the little Latin pervert became horny and began showing dirty movies with his silver turquoise laser.

Luke who was only 20 years old, had lived a sheltered life and, consequently, was watching with rapt attention as Panchoo, who was a bit weirded out on some unnamed droid crystals, unabashedly flashed holographic movies of a beautiful young girl and her trusty exercise 'droid. She kept mumbling something about somebody's Kenobish.

"Boy," Luke said in awe, "look at the Kenobish on that dude."

Panchoo mumbled something in Spanish and kept showing the dirty loops.

"Oh, help me," the girl pleaded. "Slip me some Kenobish, Ben!"

"Who is that?” Luke asked Bo Peepio.

"I really don't know. She was a passenger on our last voyage. Had her own dressing room. A movie star of some importance, I think. Bitchin' wardrobe."

"Some movies," Luke allowed. Then suddenly, Panchoo ended the performance. "What kind of shit is that?" Luke asked angrily, jumping up.

Panchoo screeched and bleeped in incomprehensible but dearly obscene Latin aphorisms. Bo Peepio winced and translated some of them.

"He says before she got into heavy S/M movies like this, she used to co-star with the stud of the entire constellation of Tsooris, one of the last surviving Jewish Knights, Bennie Wadd Kenobish. He also says you can pay him fifty Imperial monetary units for an instant re¬play or else blow it out your Imperial ass."

"Bennie Wadd Kenobish," Luke said with a puzzled expression. "He's an old man now. He couldn't possibly get it up. And what in blazes is a Jewish Knight?"

"Don't ask me, deary,” Bo Peepio said, rolling his eyes seductively, "but if you know this Wadd character, I think I'd like to tag along."



Inside the bowels of the Imperial battle station, Princess Orgasma – intergalactically famous porn star - was being treated to the thrill of her life with a set of chromium molybdenum shackles by Mr. Darth.

"Tighter, Darth! Tighter!" she moaned, as one or Darth's minions moved forward to increase the pressure of the shackles on her pale wrists.

"You are my prisoner," Mr. Darth said, swirling his cape and fingering his strand of pearls. "I think what you need is a Farrah Fawcett cut."

"No, not that! Anything but that!" Princess Orgasma cried.

“How about a Linda Ronstadt?"



(omitted assorted Jewish stereotype jokes........)



Without even asking for any trouble from these Jewish Knights and gay robots, Luke suddenly found it in the middle of a real mess. He was out; riding toward Moishe Eisley Spaceport, a pretty nasty place according to Kenobish. It was imperative that they not be suspected by the Imperial Storm Troopers while searching the spaceport a pilot who could take them to rescue Princess Orgasma. But, as Kenobish had explained, the Force would be with them if they got into trouble.



(omitted Jewish Force jokes.........)

.

"Double Shirley Temple," Luke said across the bar.

They had entered the underground cantina and while Kenobish was scouting around for a pilot, Luke busied himself surveying the clientele. It was a sight like none he had ever seen. Lined against the bar three deep were men in hideous Palm Beach and Brooks Brothers suits. some of them with lethal-looking Bell System beepers attached to their alligator belts in case the hospital called for an emergency Caesarean section. Others carried American Tourister attaché cases. And all of them were knocking back deadly martinis without blinking an eye.

The bartender looked at him strangely when he placed his order but served it up anyway. Suddenly. Luke noticed that he was the subject of some unwanted attention. It must be these beige robes, he thought, and tried to ignore the stares. Something shoved him roughly nearly knocking him over. He turned angrily and then stopped in astonishment. It a little, stooped-over Polish janitor, myopically pushing a broom, trying to clean up some of the cigarette butts and peanut shells left behind by the rowdy business lunch crowd. Luke motioned to Kenobish and the wily old Jewish Knight deftly whipped out his sacred shotgun and blew the pushy little fucker into a thousand pieces, splattering brain and bone across the cantina floor.

Acting as if nothing had happened, Kenobish ushered Luke over to a table where an enormous monkey was sitting with a young man who was somewhat older than Luke.

"Who's the shvartzer?” Kenobish asked the man, indicating the monkey, as they approached the table.

"That's my monkey," the man said. "Leave him alone or I'll have him pull your head off. I'm Solo."

"And I'm Hetero:' Luke snapped.

"Listen. you little starfucker," Solo said, reaching across the table, "if you want to get to diddle the princess, you'd better watch your star mouth or you're going to be in for some star difficulties."



However, in spite of that thorny first encounter, the entire entourage - Kenobish, Luke, Bo Peepio, Panchoo, Solo and one big fullback type badly in need of a haircut - took off for a rendezvous with the Death Disco, a planet-size night spot that even now housed the Imperial cruiser commanded by Mr. Darth and a large number of rotating punk-rock groups.

Once cruising in Solo's speedy starship, the Millennium Chicken, in the calm of hyperspace and free of pursuing Imperial cruisers, Kenobish had a chance to give Luke some lessons with his newly found sacred weapon. "Pull!" Luke called and a clay bird flew out of the trap and smashed against the interior walls of the intergalactic cruiser before he could shoulder the shotgun.

"No, no, no," Kenobish was saying in disgust.”Here, put this on," he said, taking a large trash can from nearby and placing it over Luke's head.

"Mrgf! Gnlt butlts hbthblwsh!" Luke's Screams were unintelligible from inside the container.

"See,” Kenobish said, "You're already learning a new language. Ah, the Force."

Luke called for another bird and began firing wildly, scattering hot leaden revolutionary death all over the interior of the ship and sending everyone diving under tables and chain.



Having counted on the eternally inferior intelligence of people who wear Tiffany breathing devices and their armies and strategists in much the same way Pentagon generals counted on what they referred to in private as "gook stupidity," the star entourage entered the Death Disco and rescued Princess Orgasma by tantalizing her with her favorite sexual foreplay: a group grope in a warm garbage bath. Then, having hidden the architectural plans for the Death Disco - somewhere on her person - they headed back to the Millennium Chicken, using the “ancient Eskimo" plan of escape. This calls for taking an elderly member of the tribe and setting him on an ice floe until the polar bears are distracted and eat him, thus saving everyone else. In this case, alas, it was the noble Jewish Knight, Bennie Wadd Kenobish, who was attacked by Mr. Darth and chafed to death by Spanish handcuffs.



Luke hung back at a safe distance while fighter after fighter was chewed into molecular bits by Imperial energy weapons. As a matter of honor, he let his best friends go first. And even though they were getting dusted by the score, they were doing serious damage to the Death Disco, and finally Mr. Darth, seeing that Luke was coming in for the kill, boarded his own combat fighter to chase him down and, as he put it, “slap that bitch’s wrists but good.”

But once Luke's friends were all dead, he knew one thing for sure and no limp-wristed hairdresser was going to stop him. Visions of that first pornographic hologram of Princess Orgasma swam in his head as he homed in on the planetoid. Back at command center, Orgasma was hunched over the radar screen, watching Luke's progress. He was confident of the Force that he wasn't even using his computer aiming device. He just placed a trash can over his head, as Kenobish had taught him.

"Don't worry”' Orgasma’s voice came over the radio, "Solo has returned and he’s, um, right behind me," she panted, hunching more eagerly over the radar consol.

"That's right, kid," Luke heard Solo say, “I had a change of heart. And I'll keep things warm back here while you shoot your load."

And then, in unison, Luke could hear their voices cheenng, "Go, go. go, deeper, deeper, put it in, ye, “ until – trash can totally obscuring his vision - Luke made a slight miscalculation in his steering and rammed a gun tower, disintegrating into microscopic silvery fragments.

"Tough shit, kid," Solo said.

END

379: Golden Chestnuts I

A small selection of jokes which will stand in for all the other occasions when cartoonists and humorists have used the same joke. Not that they’re employing the same joke because they’re necessarily plagiarising each other, or because it’s a simple cliché. But because certain themes and phrases provoke the same reaction, and hence the same joke crops up. So these are intended to be early examples of jokes which are relatively flogged to death over the succeeding decades, since each time the perpetrator thought he was having some ingenious new comic idea. But there is little that is new under the sun.


from “Shel Silverstein in London”
in “Playboy” June 1967

This is the earliest instance of a recurring English joke. And it’s in “Playboy”, an American magazine. Here it has a certain freshness, because it’s contemporary with the subject of the joke, homosexual legalisation in the UK in 1967.

The joke, in its most common form:
A man is emigrating from England. He’s asked why he’s leaving. He replies, “At one time homosexuality was illegal, then it became tolerated, now it’s legal. Blimey, I’m leaving before it becomes compulsory!”

Normally it’s used by slightly bigoted people, and had some frequency in the ‘70s and ‘80s. Trotted out for slightly nostalgic effect nowadays. Here, in just about the earliest instances I can find in print, Silverstein puts it in the mouth of a gay man, which rather heightens the militant effect of the joke.

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.