467: AIDS 3: Avoid Like the Plague

All the casual disgust and revulsion occasioned in certain people by the mere existence of homosexuality, let alone any sexual practices, were given a full arena for open expression in the public health consequences of the apparent death sentence of AIDS. Homosexuals - not just innately detestably, and morally sick, but actual plague-carriers. So, thanks to the tabloid press, here’s the funny side of the leper’s bell:

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Stanley Franklin in The Sun, 26 February 1985

Bill Caldwell in The Daily Star, 19 February 1985
Stanley Franklin in The Sun, 5 December 1986

Stanley Franklin in The Sun, 10 July 1987

Two months before “The Sun”’s “Pulpit Poofs must stay” headline.

from the "The Appallingly Disprespectful Spitting Image Book", 1985

81: Stanley Franklin

Stanley Franklin in "The Sun" 4 July 1984


Stanley Franklin in "The Sun" 28 September 1984


Stanley Franklin in "The Sun" 25 February 1986


Stanley Franklin in "The Sun" 24 November 1987

Since I think I’ve mentioned him quite a few times, here are some editorial cartoons by Stanley Franklin. They’re not spectacularly hateful, but I am offended by their being so simplistically and thickwittedly stereotypical. It’s that, in a national newspaper, they are still are no better than the sort of graffiti someone might scrawl in junior high. It’s just ridicule, without even much thought, every nasty cliché garbled into an ugly mess. Weird and unabashed limpwristed transvestites with clone moustaches. Fairly badly drawn, they’re just designed to elicit guttural chuckling from the “Sun”-reading slopebrows who know poofs are just wrong. Since “The Sun” is a coarse blokey celebration of conventional appetites, anything outside its world is unblokish and weird. So weird, effeminate poofs are delineated in that same coarse blokish manner. We get the street jibes of the bored construction worker, with not a new hint of wit or thought since they were first learnt as children, drawn with exactly the same lack of skill as that same bored construction might achieve.

52 - Church outing 1987 (part 2)

When the General Synod convened, the Archbishop of Canterbury Robert Runcie refused to be railroaded by extremists. Instead the Synod was led to take a moderate approach which effectively fell between two stools. The Synod condemned “homosexual genital acts”, but refused to approve any expulsion of homosexual clergy from the Church. So homosexuals got a public beating from the church, but homosexual clergy got to keep their jobs. As “The Sun” so charmingly summed it up the next day, “Pulpit Poofs must stay”.


Stanley Franklin in “The Sun”, 13 November 1987
Stanley Franklin goes for the transvestite motif, and also gets to reuse the “Sun”’s own blatantly offensive phrase. Why think up something new when you can whip up someone else’s thick-witted second-hand vitriol.


Michael Cummings in “The Daily Express”, 13 November 1987
Michael Cumming’s strikes a slightly more moralistic tone. References to Sodom and Gomorrah being slightly more up market. Lot’s Wife is a strangely superfluous and touch, although I suppose it’ll jog the memory of any who can’t quite get what the caption is alluding to. Archbishop Runcie is the driver of the confessional car. This is about the only cartoon to put the event in any sort of context for the Church of England, and what it signifies for Runcie’s leadership. The rest just go for easy comic stereotypes about poofs. Cummings has though chosen to go for the twinkly eyed theatrical stereotype of homosexual.


Mac (Stan McMurtry) in “The Daily Mail”, 13 November 1987
Not an actual homosexual in sight. Just a comic situation. Although it could suggest that homosexuals are so predatory even young bridegrooms have no powers of resistance, or just that she had the wrong sort of taste in men. Anyway, if that’s the way Mac draws his matronly women, no wonder his transvestites look so damn odd.


Bernard Cookson in “The Sun”, 16 November 1987
I honestly don’t know whether to be offended or just contemptuous.


Jak (Raymond Jackson) “Evening Standard”, 16 November 1987
Again, 26 years later JAK reverts to the same blatant show of big-titted heterosexuality to sweep away the gayness as he did in #21
An interesting piece of gossip about JAK. You’ll notice the cartoon conspicuously features “Benson & Hedges” and “C.S.T Wholesale Meat” – which are both real business enterprises. You might think this is just for a touch of realism. But it was revealed that companies who featured in JAK’s cartoons would then buy the originals at surprisingly high rates, so that the companies were effectively rewarding JAK for advertising their brands in his work.