Sunday, April 1, 2007

Qomics for Queers

Every week, like a good little gay boy, I turn my expectations of fair representation in the comics into innuendo for the weekly feature Qomics for Queers. I'll do my best to read between the lines, reinterpret artwork, and completely make shit up about the past week's comics.

We start the week with the Family Circus, h/t to the Comics Curmudgeon, because I don't usually read the Family Circus. These are from Sunday and Monday:


Well, well, well, Jeffy. I don't know many 4-year-old straight boys who want to hurt their mothers as much as Jeffy apparently does. That's probably because they're sexually attracted to them and act out against their fathers out of fear of castration in retaliation. Of course, Freud thought that all people were constitutionally bisexual and that resolution of the Oedipal conflict led to heterosexual sexual expression; a failure to properly resolve the oedipal complex because of a distant father or an overbearing mother inhibits a boy from identifying with his father and makes him identify with his mother as a role model, making him express homosexuality.

Uhhhh, yeah, advanced for the 1800's, I guess. Dr. Richard Isay returns to the psychoanalytic subject of male homosexuality in the mid-90's in Becoming Gay, starting from the idea that some men are constitutionally homosexual. He says:

I had found that, like the population of heterosexual men who recalled opposite-sex attraction from an early age, many homosexual men could remember experiencing same-sex attraction when they were as young as four, five, or six years. For gay men, this earliest attraction is to the father or father surrogate.
Isay goes on to say that the boy's non-traditionally-masculine behavior causes rejection from the father and for the gay boy to seek protection from his mother.

But what if a father were totally OK with a non-masc boy? (I think that, since the Family Circus is all things wholesome, Jeffy's father is probably unconditionally loving.) It would follow that the boy would expect his mother to retaliate against him through castration, so he would act out against her. In Jeffy's case, he's using snowballs to protect his own balls. (Yuk yuk yuk)

This Wednesday's Beetle Bailey:

The incredible gayness of Beetle and Sarge continues. Beetle is all too willing to get his beard hitched because he knows that this farce cannot continue forever. Dumping a woman who is totally out of his league isn't an option for him, but he's right there ready to pass her on to the next guy who shows any interest in her at all. All I can say is that Beetle should either come out or give up on sexuality altogether, because acting as Miss Buxley's boyfriend/pimp is not becoming.

Here are my improvements to this Wednesday's Archie:


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