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.

300: Edward Sorel and S&M

in "The Village Voice", 28 July 1975

Edward Sorel is a fantastic caricaturist and illustrator, with a deft scratchy style sometimes as detailed as a daguerreotype or etching. Sorel is also ferociously left-wing, an anomaly in American editorial pages, hence his regular stint in the “Village Voice” at a time when that actually meant something. Sorel’s cartoons and illustrations cover four main topics: an aggressive interpretation of American politics, a vehement anti-clericalism, a nostalgia for the films and stars of his youth, and a personal concern for the life of his home, New York City. This cartoon would be almost wholly unexpected from Sorel, except that it does fall into the last category. Sorel doesn’t normally deal in minorities, not when he can give cardinals and popes, tele-evangelists, Nixon, Ford and timeserving local politicos a frenzied thrashing. So readers in the “Village Voice” usually knew what they were going to get - an attack on the common enemy, possibly with a light scourging of liberal doubt and hypocrisy thrown in for a personal ironic touch a la Jules Feiffer. This cartoon provoked a few angry letters in subsequent issues.
think, to be charitable, Sorel is amused by the whole ridiculousness of the thing, with an underlying criticism of politicians pandering to whatever looks likely to appease some voting bloc, even the nascent gay vote. S&M is a development from the gays are effeminate fairies stereotypes, but in its excessive elaboration of an active, almost violent, masculinity’s it’s not really an advance. As a public image, it makes gays just as alien as before - although if you’re persistently getting your rocks off then who cares about good PR for your mutual Tom of Finland fantasies. Which isn’t to argue that S&M wasn’t a distinct subset of gay life. And also that the inhabitants of major cities, with significant gay populations, weren’t unaware that the gay identity was changing. NYC had the Eagle’s Nest, the Anvil, Keller’s and whatever other venues leather fetishists want to get teary-eyed over. So this cartoon probably marks a change, but it’s more than just butch rough trade on display here. A ball-gag is intentionally shocking, particularly on the editorial page, so Sorel is taking advantage of the “Village Voice”’s liberality. The only other ball-gag I’ve found is in a panel in the Dixie Nixon comic strip tucked away in the back pages of “National Lampoon”

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.