Week Six


The Underground Comic I read was Gay Comics copyrighted in 1980. Gay comics gave me a sense of struggle for the LGBTQ community before the 1980’s. 

            When I read Gay Comics, I got a clear understanding of what it was like to struggle with the effort to discover and define one’s sexuality/sexual attraction. One strip shows the reader a woman whose first love is another woman, and how she struggles to fit in with what is considered normal in society. The strip has three panels in sequential order, showing the protagonist not being able to do things that her parents, friends, or other family members can do because she is a gay woman.

            Later strips reveal that she is bisexual. From these, another message I got is that it can be a struggle to choose which gender a bisexual person might want to be with because that individual might be stuck between a man and a woman who they have sexual feeling for. The image from Gay Comics below represents the struggle well, in a very artistic way. The two separate panels each contain a joke, but the overall idea is that defining your own sexuality is difficult. 



            I believe this underground comic is trying to send an important message about sexuality, which is that it doesn’t matter who an individual is attracted to, we’re all people with our own issues and our own mindsets. For a long time, being gay or bisexual was considered out of the norm, and unacceptable in society. Now that society has changed, this comic is not as sad to read as it would have been back before LGBT rights were recognized and same sex marriage was legalized. 


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