Some things about homosexuals in Jack Chick Comics (esp. The Gay Blade)

1. In the Gay Blade, from the mid 70s, the cover combines three prominent signifiers of queer desire; two common and one not. (Lambda, Mauve, Sissy Prancing.) To know the Lambda is to spend enough time w. queer texts to get the cult.
2. The first three panels of Gay Blade actually make the married gay couple look as normal as possible; his strange over the top (camp?) phisiognomy is absent here.
3. The fourth panel is the most famous depiction of Chick and Homosexuality, and requires a closer reading.
a. Two Queer Radicals vs. Mother and Child.
b. It was a stated goal for glbtq folx when written to scare children, to antagonistically oppose the mother and child as an example of middle class sentiment
c. The men look like radical faeries, they have the genderfuck costume down pat, one large and bearded, with a brocade vest, a gay revolution t shirt, and be crowned with a v. fine bouffant—which seems to directly quote this foto: http://www.crazyfunnypictures.com/items/1619.jpg (Though it is a
radical queer picture, I find this mostly on funny picture now sites,
and not on places like gay.com or even the more pseudo-academic history sites.) taken about the same time… was it possible, living just north of SF, that he saw this, that he saw what was in the water?
i. The weird thing about the foto, is that it doesn't say faggot, he never actually engages in directed hate speech—it cannot be debated that the text is noxious, but he avoids saying things like faggot, queer, or any of the other more famous ones. His use of the word sodomite is explicitly biblical.
4. He footnotes the Lambda, talking about its presence as one of unity against oppression—which is true, and accurate, but does not note its classical and martial roots. Does he know it, is one of the reasons that jack chick hate fags, is that they are pagan, is that they oppose Christ and Christians, is their sin one of unbiblical decadence.
5. The sixth panel has the authority of the state is behind us, it faces the mob of radical queers, yelling and waving placards for gay revolution and gay power—there is only one cop for dozens of angry fags, they do not look pathetic, or angry, they look almost like they could win.
6. The text of this panel, talks about being defiant, it adds, almost half heartedly discussion of us being pathetic, miserable, etc—but the big thing for chick in the gay blade (and if that isn't a camp title I don't know what is) is that radical queer discourse provides an opposition to the order of both the state and god.
7. He then goes thru the standard, leftist gay is everywhere shit—literally the next three panels could be cribbed from something like Is It a Choice, or any of the don't feel bad about wanting to fuck men manuals that came after the militancy, the third panel in this sequence has two clones holding hands under an American flag, and the next panel has a butch dyke holding court at a school meeting, but she isn't the stone butch prison rapist that is so common in xian shit from this time…these two panels are actually fairly tolerant.
a. Chick is a skillful propagandist, he knows his Market, he has not gone over the top, he verges on journalism and he hasn't said anything that doesn't have correspondence in the queer communities…until about half way thru the comic.
8. Here he inserts the story of Sodom, and here he becomes the most vitriolic, the most revolted…in every anti-gay comic since the publication of the gay blade, chick inserts Sodom, and in Doom Town, his latest on the subject, he includes refutations of leftist hermeneutics about hospitality and social codes; Sodom is the key to this text.
9. The weird thing is that even biblically centered homophobic preachers don't really deal w. Sodom anymore, in many ways it is out of fashion (because of the wrath of YHWH is out of fashion, because we do not want to believe that someone is capable of such destruction (Pat Robertson is the exception here, with his recent comments on Hurricane Katrina.)
10. His Sodom sequence is drawn in the same style as bible illustrations from the 50s, before the good news bible:
a. Two archeologists sees images printed on the sides of caves indicating great and lasting evil, images so grotesque, that one immediately vomits (compare this to Doom Town: with its panel of a giant, yeti of a man, looking over a large eyed innocent child, saying "its that time again"—not saying that pedophiles are homosexuals, but saying allowing one sexual other lets the barn door open for everything else, an impt difference…)
b. It is from now on, biblical reportage: Abraham, Lot, The Two Angels, the great evil in the city, until we get about half way through the tour of Sodom
11. He then uses the line that Homosexuals surrounded the house of Lot, later calling them gay—this is the important part of the whole thing, he has moved between polemic and reportage, between theological point and moral one, between being fairly fair and being an asshole, between conservative but ethically consistent readings and cracked out misreading—the instability of the tract means that no grip can be held on it—there was same sex activity at that time and that place—b/w the Hittites mostly, and mostly related to foreign gods—there was a conflation b/w idolatry and adultery, w. Chick there still is.
12. The rest of the scene, 4 panels (including an oversize one) dealing with the evil of the homosexual men, two dealing with the angels who blinded the men, and one dealing with Lots Daughters a. Lot offered rape and murder as an option against anal penetration, in the most conservative reading of this text, and though Chick alludes to this, the phallocentric violence against women that grounds this story, that really does make it about men's violence against each other and women (Lot and His Daughters, YHWH and Lots Wife, etc)…there is a subtext here, mentioned previously, about order and the state, that the whole city, the government, the state, was corrupt, that corruption oozed into Lot, and Lot was in danger.
13. Then, nearing the end, we see the destruction of Sodom, ranking with Basil Woverton's illustrations of the apocalypse, this fire storm is so apocalyptic, and so modern—the desert, some people, and balls of flame, like Dresden, like Hiroshima, the left of the image looks like airplane fuselage and the right of the image looks like railway tracks.
a. This modernization of the fear of god, in the destruction of the modern world, comes in the this small picture, sandwiched with text, the top being the biblical verse, and the bottom being a footnote from an archeologist named DR MG Kyle, one of the ones who got sick I am assuming, the quote from Kyle (in 1924!) is one of salt plains, sulfur, and a "massively populated city" that is destroyed overnight.
b. The most powerful terror that permeates this entire comic, is that Chick is almost convinced that this slippage of gender and sex will destroy the world again, he is not looking forward to the apocalypse, not one of those rapture optimists—he surely has taken Christ into his heart, but even then, the fear of god is permeable.
14. The last 5 panels tell us that god hates fags, that they are coming to take over good Christians, has a few text panels added post AIDS with the same lying stats that have been bandied about forever, talks about recruiting, its so banal, so bog standard, it reminds us that homosexuality is one of many sins that can send us to hell, and that we have to pray and be forgiven. It rather ruins the enterprise.
15. This comic is the only one that still convinces me that I am going to hell, it is the only one that keeps terror in me, it is such a brilliantly executed piece of polemic, and there is nothing cute, nothing ironic, nothing amusing about it, it is a piece of religious fury, if best can be said to be a synonym for most effective, the homosexuals in Jack Chick Comics are one of the great villains—pathetic, dangerous, deluded, subversive, and able to be turned.

for tom at freaky trigger