A Waste of Time

Had a great time tonight seeing Simon Amstell again… I’ll blog about it in the next day or two, and also post the drawing I gave him.  I’m trying to stick to my projected Monday/Friday schedule on this website, but a lot of times when I scan something it I’m impatient for people to see it and I toss it up on my Tumblr immediately, so if you follow that you will have already seen the drawing.  Regardless, Simon’s show Numb is great, it was a lot of fun to see it again, and getting to talk to him again after was awesome as well, so I’ll talk about all that later on.  For now, I should probably sleep… Or read some Game of Thrones.  Hm.

Some things about Jodie Foster:

First I’d like to say that, as far as coming out of the closet or staying in it, I don’t think anybody should ever be forced or pressured to do anything other than exactly what they want to do. Talking about sexuality in general, I don’t understand the inclination to tell other people what to do when it has no effect on you. I don’t think this is any less true for celebrities. Nothing pisses me off more than the idea that because you like an artist they now somehow owe you something. If you bought a ticket to see a movie, that’s what you bought, a viewing of that movie. If you bought a CD, that CD is what you bought. You didn’t buy a piece of them.

However. There are some misconceptions people have when they talk about coming out or staying closeted that really piss me off. For one thing, telling somebody you’re gay is not the same as telling them about your sex life, and it’s not telling them “personal” information, any more than knowing that somebody is black tells you something “personal” about them. If you find out that somebody is gay and you think that you now know what type of person they are, you’re a bigot. There is also a lot more to being gay than sexuality, and the sexuality of gay people is as varied as the sexuality of anybody else. Telling somebody you’re gay isn’t telling them about your sex life any more than a straight man saying he has a wife is telling you about his sex life.

Also, coming out isn’t a choice in the same way that being closeted is a choice. In an ideal world, “coming out” is passive. You come out by living your life like anybody else would, and people who know you will figure out that you’re gay by little hints such as you having a partner who is of your gender. Being closeted, on the other hand, requires a great deal of work, and requires you to shape your life around other people so that they don’t see parts of it, and requires you to lie and dissemble. Obviously, people do that to avoid negative reactions that they would suffer if they did differently, but that’s because small minded people have forced you into that position. I’m irritated by the notion that “closeted” is somehow the natural state in which gay people start, and then they have to make the choice to move to another position.

Although many people obviously have good reasons for doing it, staying closeted is damaging. Homophobia is ignorance, and people’s opinions change when they learn more about it, which they do by gay people being more visible. Obviously, it shouldn’t be the responsibility of every gay person to be a teacher to the rest of the world, and it pisses me off much more that people choose to be ignorant until they’re prodded, and that they’re vociferously opinionated on gay people when they don’t know the first fucking thing about gay people. However, there’s no denying that us being more visible helps. In the last few decades, actually, it’s started to cause a sea change.

Which is also important to the Jodie Foster thing. A few decades ago when she was becoming an adult, coming out meant something entirely different, and it very likely could have destroyed her career. I don’t judge her for anything she’s done, even if I might have preferred that she do something different, and to hold her behavior to the same standard as somebody who’s struggling with how to deal with the same questions 30 years after she did is just ignorant.

But I’d really like us to get to a place where in or out of the closet isn’t even a question. It comes from us assuming that everybody is straight unless we’re told otherwise, and that comes from a limited understanding of human sexuality that’s decades or more out of date. There aren’t just two types of sexual orientation, and it’s idiotic to look at it as though plain vanilla heterosexuality is the default position and everything else is an aberration on that. And the idea of hiding who your significant other is because of their gender only exists because bigots and ignorant people have been given the power to make it that way. Very soon the notion of having to hide such a thing for fear of the reaction that vocal bigots might have will hopefully seem as bizarre and chilling to us as it does now to think that recently interracial marriage was illegal, or that women didn’t have the right to vote.

Lastly, Mel Gibson is obviously an asshole, but why on earth do people care if she’s friends with him? Who she is and isn’t friends with has no bearing on anybody else, and that actually *is* personal business.

So I’m posting this as a blog instead of posting the illustration as a comic with a blog attached, because I’m probably going to post the next Morbid Obsession strip soon, and I’d like to keep them somewhat in order when people are browsing through the archives.  You know, posting things in order like how I always say I’m going to and then I don’t.

I figured this drawing was worthy of a post, though, because I like it.  This was drawn from a picture a fan sent to me a while ago in the hopes that I would draw him, and I meant to but hadn’t got around to it yet.  So many twinks, so little time… It’s hard being me, I know. But still, I very much appreciated the picture.  I actually had it as the background on my cell phone for a while, so whenever I saw it there I would be reminded of why I’m an artist.  For the money shots, obviously.

I especially wanted to draw it because I thought drawings of the things that I’ve had as cell phone backgrounds might make a good series eventually.  After this, I had a picture of a guy I was dating on there.  When my friend, who knew how much I liked this photo, saw that I had put a picture of the new guy on my phone she said, “Oh, he replaced butt boy?  Wow, things must be getting serious!”

I did like him, but that ended up not going very far.  After him I started dating my last ex, the one that’s now been the subject of a few breakup comics and blogs, and he was my next cell phone background.  It was a cute picture.

When we broke up, I thought that maybe I should have something on there other than a picture of whatever boy I was currently into.  It’s nice to have a picture on there of a boy I’m dating, or a boy I just think is really cute, but, assigning importance to things that may or may not have any, I started to feel slightly awkward that, if you looked at the cell phone backgrounds as a timeline of my life, my life was being defined by the series of cute boys I dated and it ended up not going anywhere with.

That was a depressing thought, so I decided to make my new cell phone background something of much more lasting significance.  Next to my desk where I draw my comics, I have two things framed on my wall as inspiration for me, things I like being able to look at while I work.  I have a poster from the Bob Dylan show I saw a couple years ago, and I have a copy of the last ever Calvin and Hobbes strip that I saved from the newspaper the day it came out, which is, wow, like 17 years ago now.  I joke about doing comics for the money shots, but Calvin and Hobbes is probably a much bigger reason, and I love that strip now even more than when I saved the last one from a newspaper back at the age of 12, so it’s a much more enduring love story for me than the last several twinks who have wandered in and out of my bedroom.  So, after this last breakup, I took a picture of my framed Calvin and Hobbes strip, and right now I’m enjoying having that on my cell phone a lot.

So, I was gonna post this on Wednesday, but I was having problems getting online so I couldn’t.  Instead of posting one of my comics, I’m gonna blog about a commissioned project I’m doing illustrating a comic for Jason Quest.

He does a series of semi-autobiographical comics that deal with sex and whatnot, and he had a particular one that he thought might suit me.  The general idea of the comic is that a guy at a Halloween party in a Robin costume, Jason, meets a guy at the party in a Batman costume and, obviously, they fuck.  Robin ends up handcuffed to a headboard.  So, obviously I said I’d draw that.  I believe Robin should be fucked, and often, and by a rough top who knows how.

If you’ve been following my Tumblr you’ve already seen inks for the first four pages.  Jason’s blog has him talking about it, but also posting the colors as he’s been working on them.  He’s doing the coloring and the lettering, I’m doing the penciling and inking.  I’ve penciled the majority of it at this point, and inked the first four pages.

If you’re not following my Tumblr, btw, you’re missing out on a lot of awesome these days.

You can click on the pages to see the larger versions.

So, on this first page there was supposed to be a gay Halloween party circa 1997, when the Batman and Robin film came out.  To try to keep it in period, I added costumes that might have been popular then.  There’s a Power Ranger, and Ghostface from Scream, and to have something from the Batman and Robin movie I put in a drag Poison Ivy.  As a nod to my own comics, I also drew in the bunny boy I’ve drawn in the past, and I decided to have the Power Ranger cruising him.  And that’s Han and Lando about to make out in the last panel there.

On page two, Batman and Robin start talking, Bat-puns abound, and within a couple pages they’ll be fucking.  I would be posting these pages to the Facebook page for my comics, also, except that this is about as far in the story you can go before it gets too sexually explicit for Facebook.  I was originally drawing Batman a little more Adam West, and we decided to have him be a little more Neal Adams.

I thought there was a certain element of comedy with him, in the later pages, trying to be very serious and butch in a costume that looks somewhat ridiculous, because it is after all a Batman costume.  That’s always part of how I seem to draw sex, though.  The power that the top thinks he has is all an illusion.  Normally, I draw the top as a cartoon rabbit with a giant head, and I always draw the bottom to be as pretty as possible.  Or, what I consider to be pretty, anyway.  That’s my own projection.  I hope there’s enough of the awkwardness left in how I’m drawing Batman that some of that remains, but it was probably the right decision not to make it outright comical.

They get up to a room, and you can see Robin’s Bat-boner there in the last panel.  The idea is that, as soon as Batman gets forceful with him, Robin is immediately hard.

There’s a small homage to a David Hockney painting on the wall in the third panel there, which is sort of a joke for myself because I couldn’t tell you how many gay guys I’ve seen who have David Hockney prints hanging in their houses.  More of them have Hockney prints than actually know much about Hockney, I think it’s just in the gay handbook somewhere that we’re all supposed to like him.  I do like Hockney, though, probably his photo collages more than his paintings.

Four pages seemed like an eternity to wait to get Robin’s shorts off, which was obviously why I was drawing all this in the first place.  The boy from my Boy From Santa Cruz story saw this page a couple days ago, and he said that the pose in the last panel there must be a favorite of mine.  I didn’t realize until he said that, but I had drawn the rabbit taking off the BFSCs underwear in a previous comic in a similar pose.  I do like it, I think it’s a cute pose.  I also like that Robin’s dick is uncut, I find that cute, too.  It was described that way in the script, so I was happy to stick with that description.

Stay tuned for the storyline to get much more hardcore in a page or two :D

Also, there will be new A Waste of Time strips very soon, and I’m still working on the page where I’m going to be offering original art for sale, so thanks for checking back!