106: GLC 8 - JAK

by Raymond Allen Jackson ("JAK")
in "Evening Standard" 25 November 1982

With repeated antagonistic reporting and distortions from the tabloid press, Livingstone and the GLC began to exclude the press in return – which really didn’t help matters, as this cartoon only proves.
Of course, the way to distinguish a GLC job advertisement from any other, it is that it simply must feature some gay slant.

105: GLC 7

in “Private Eye” 24 September 1982

Fundamentally, the same joke as #104, but with a swipe at modern architects.
Sir Quentin Blunt = Quentin Crisp + Sir Anthony Blunt
Sir Hugh Cashin = Sir Hugh Casson

104: GLC 6

in “Private Eye”, 29 January 1982

Haringey was a Labour-run council in the 80s, and therefore also of the “Loony Left”. Rape was a big feminist issue circa 1981/82 and therefore there were quite a few cartoons and jokes about rape in assorted magazines at this time. Given Ken Livingstone, gays, rape, rate-payers money – why the jokes just about write themselves.

103: GLC 5

in "Private Eye" 25 September 1981

102: GLC 4 - Coren / Mahood

August
Mr Ken Livingstone announces GLC plans for a gay bus route. Travellers will be able to go anywhere for 10p. The necessary subsidy will be met by dimming streetlights by thirty per cent.

From “Old Coren’s Almanac”, by Alan Coren. Illustration by Kenneth Mahood.
in “Punch” 16 December 1981

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One of Livingstone’s more notable actions had been to lower bus fares. So, ho ho, this through the magic of associational satire becomes “Gay Bus Routes”.

The creature in the Mahood cartoon has now become a stereotype that has nothing whatsoever to do with contemporary homosexuals. High heeled shoes, flowery tie, bouffant hair, handbag and a limp wrists. This is a shopworn cliché even in the early 70s.

101: GLC 3

in “Private Eye” 28 August 1981

Tchh! Gay police, what a thing!
This draws upon several “Private Eye” in-jokes. The recurring character of Dave Spart is a rambling self-contradictory ultra-left wing commentator, so Livingstone become Leninspart. In their mock news stories, they often use a photograph of someone with a passing resemblance to the real person being satirised. In this care, it’s “Alexander Sinclair”, a recently murdered gangland boss.
“Isaac Newt” is a reference to Livingstone’s keeping newts for pets. He also made a speech to the Harrow Gay Unity Group in August 1981 where he said “Everyone is bisexual”.

100: GLC 2 – Mac

Stan McMurtry in “The Daily Mail”, 24 November 1981

Again, it’s “Mac” with those comical transvestites.
There is more than a hint of petty truth in this cartoon though. Much of the animus against the GLC is about tax money being given to some socio-political group or other, to which traditional white men by default don’t belong and therefore won’t see any benefit. Any right-thinking person would see just how ridiculous it is, and how enraging such a waste of public money must be, surely, yes, hmmm?

99: GLC 1

cover for "Private Eye" 28 August 1981

Since it’s election time in London this week, let’s take a trip back in time some 25 years or so.

Ken Livingston became Labour Leader of the Greater London Council in the May 1981 election, and remained so until the Conservative government disbanded the GLC in 1986. The GLC ran many pro-minority schemes, providing grants to pro-feminist, anti-nuclear, ethnic, and gay-friendly causes. These policies were decried by conservative newspapers and pundits as “The Loony Left”. Livingstone, was given the nickname “Red Ken”, and was called “the most odious man in Britain”.

In this little jaunt down memory lane, we’ll see how homosexuality was used repeatedly to tar the Left and Livingstone as being stupid, senseless, ridiculous, wasteful, arrogant and unrealistic by association.

98: Gahan Wilson's "Nuts"

in "National lampoon" October 1972

in "National lampoon" November 1972

Gahan Wilson is best known for this macabre cartoons, appearing in “Playboy”, “New Yorker”, “Punch” and many other magazines. During the 70s he had a cartoon strip “Nuts” running in the backpages of “National Lampoon”. “Nuts” was a deliberate riposte to Charles Schulz’s “Peanuts”. “Nuts” was genuinely about kids, whereas Wilson thought “Peanuts” was a blind for Schulz to indulge a peculiar sentimentality and unchildlike philosophising. “Nuts”, while nostalgic, was about the real anxieties of being a kid. How confusing things are when you’re young, the intense desires and pleasures, and the struggle to just get through from one day to the next. Wilson’s slightly squashed and semi-deflated drawing style is ideal for capturing the proportions of a child’s world. As in “Peanuts” adults are only ever partly seen. The appearance of the adult’s hand in the last two frames of October’s strip is rather insidious and creepy. Whether intentional or not, these two strips rather flag up the connections in the public’s mind between homosexuality and paedophilia. Since these two strips are about children interacting with gay men, it’s almost inevitable. Again, any talk about Oscar Wilde is a shortcut to acknowledging homosexuality. The dinner table conversation in the second strip dramatises wonderfully the parents attempts to protect and insulate their child while at the same time only heightening a child’s sense of fear and incomprehensibility about the world.

97: Giles

Carl Giles in “The Daily Express” 18 April 1974

Giles’s traditional working class family faces up to fears about trendy modernising of education. Toddlers calling one another “duckie” would seem to have little to do with homosexual relationships. But it converts anxiety, or even anger, into just silly and ridiculous stereotypes. A genial cartoon fit for all the family isn’t even going to hint anything worse. Although what this evasion in itself is suggestive of is the fear of explicitness that might arise from these lessons.