Gay Comics #19 (1993)

Ten years later. My Guerrilla Theater partner and I were on our way to the studios of WRUW. We had been invited by a DJ and fan of our show to come in and be her on-air guests and to share some sketches we’d recorded for her new releases program.

The day of our visit also happened to be her birthday, and I had even brought a gift. I’d been to North Coast Nostalgia, that used to be next to the Cedar-Lee Theatre, and noticed the recent issue of Gay Comics was entirely created by Alison Bechdel.

One of the cool things about having our storefront theater in Tremont was that the weeklies would drop papers at our joint. We got short stacks of Scene, Free Times, Plain Press, Call & Post and the Gay People’s Chronicle, to make available for our audiences. 

I had been following Bechdel’s weekly strip, Dykes To Watch Out For in the Chronicle for some time by then. It was a very important education for me, not only in the lives and concerns (and humor) of non-heteronormative women, but women in general, also also women who were African American, Asian American, Latinx ... and even gay men!

Gay Comics #19 was an all-original book in which Bechdel told stories about herself (in keeping with Gay Comics’ stated mission) and her childhood, her coming out, laying the groundwork for her later, best-selling graphic memoirs, Fun Home and Are You My Mother?

"Coming Out Story"
Alison Bechdel (1993)
Click on for detail.

I picked up a copy of Gay #19 for our DJ friend, and showed it to my colleague as we made our way to the radio studios on the Case campus. He raised an eyebrow.

“You got her a gay comic,” he said, “because ... she’s gay?”

I hadn’t thought of that, and immediately felt self-conscious. I mean, it wasn’t like I was thinking, “Lesbian comic book?! I know a lesbian!!” This was an artist I really liked, and it was our friend’s birthday, and … well, shit.

Long story short, I gave the DJ the comic, and she was delighted. “I love Alison Bechdel!” she said, and I will assume she meant it. 

"I got out of college in 1981 and went into a gay and lesbian bookstore one day and found an issue of 'Gay Comix' ... It hadn't occurred to me at that point to put together my penchant for silly drawings with my personal life and my political interest in gay and lesbian issues, but there were these people who were doing it." - Alison Bechdel, 2007

Digging through my collection this week, I discovered that I had actually bought two copies of Gay #19, and kept one for myself. Smart boy.

Gay Comics ceased publication in 1998.

See also: The Bechdel-Wallace Test

Source:

“Life Drawing” by Emmert, Lynn, The Comics Journal No. 282, Fantagraphic Books (2007)

Guerrilla Theater Radio Hour (two)

We recorded Sunday mornings.

My last post describes how the Guerrilla Theater Radio Hour came to be. The drama series we produced for the program include: 

The Abnormal Doctor Boomer by Torque 

Dr. Frank Litigious Boomer is a disgusting, drooling, perverted old scientist, and the hero of these tales.

Most of the action involves his sycophantic assistant, Daniel Quick, getting into situations where he can test formulas developed by The Doctor that are meant to cure society of ills such as abortion, homosexuality, political dissent and Spanish.

The Raghouse by Tower

Biggles Malone, a member of “The 13th Generation” is a slacker and a nobody. He and his erstwhile “love interest” Malekha and his best "acquaintance" Satch insult each other and sit around and waste time at The Raghouse, a local coffee emporium.



The Adventures of Annie Gordon by Beemer 

Annie Gordon is a sensitive, young, professional woman, working as a manager at Harlow’s Department Store in Manhattan. Annie serves as a model for the right way to behave as a mature adult, whether dealing with her back-biting co-worker Stacey Petrillo, her gay co-worker Steve, her bigoted boss Mr. Harlow -- or falling in love with DJ Paul Travis.

Digit, Torque, and that amazing door.

There were also these three introductory episodes, produced near the end of our history:

Lucy Bontelle, Private Eye by Gooch, a classic, hard-boiled detective story set in a fictional past where women are aggressively dominant and the men aren’t. Lucy Bontelle is a hard-drinking, fast-loving private dick who falls for Donneyboy, a gangster’s moll.

I expanded on an old comic strip I’d created in college, and produced The Turtleneck, which was going to be a fast-paced and very short piece (ten minutes an episode, tops) about Maxwell Peavey who, through a circumstance (unfortunately similar to the one John Ritter found himself in in Hero At Large) becomes a reluctant costumed avenger.

Finally, Torque wrote The Plight of Mister Martin, an amazing Brechtian homage. In it Mr. Martin stands up to the Corporate Manager and loses his job -- but for entirely selfish reasons. His destitute wife June  leaves him to grovel with the Whore and takes up Martin’s sledgehammer.

With original music by Torque, hand-made sound effects created by Torque and myself during a fun afternoon in the ‘RUW studio, highly-stylized and tightly-written satire, Mr. Martin was inarguably the best piece we ever made. And, regrettably, the last.

Many thanks to Thom Cechowski for loaning me his Kenwood cassette deck to make these recordings possible!

Next up: The Raghouse!

Guerrilla Theater Radio Hour (one)

Torque & Gooch in "The Shower"

This year marks several notable twenty-five year anniversaries, a lot of stuff happened in 1994.

I directed my first Shakespeare, my wife and I began dating. And on January 28, 1994, the Guerrilla Theater Radio Hour debuted on WRUW 91.1 FM.

We were still producing a weekly political revue in Tremont with (‘ud’s me) four performances every Friday and Saturday, but we had also started messing around with some brief radio dramas for the station during the past year and requested a slot. We got the thirty-minute slot on Friday nights at seven, hence the name.

Any particular episode would be recorded earlier the same week, consisting of a produced episode penned by a member of the company, and gab about recent events. We pretended it was live, despite the fact that we would remind the audience that we would be there at The Actors’ Gym to open the doors for Mind Your Own Business pretty much exactly when the radio show concluded.

No one asked us about it. Maybe they thought we were broadcasting from The Actors’ Gym. Maybe nobody listened.



In order to save time editing we would mix the entire thing in one take. As a result, if something went terribly wrong (like if someone said “shit” like Gooch often did when she was in the booth) we would have to start again from the beginning.

I managed the board, acting as host and basically ‘directing’ the show, partly because I had previous experience working in a radio studio, and also because I am a complete control freak.

Sound Engineer Digit

What is pretty incredible about the dramas themselves is that they sound as good as they do. Torque and I each wrote and produced three (each) at the beginning of 1993, in the Professor Street Theater, using a cassette four-track machine.

We put down the dialog, and mixed in sound effects, inventing some pretty clever noises along the way. Skulls were cracked open, people urinated on the floor, and we created a wonderful homo-erotic dream sequence that took place during an aerial dogfight.

Finally, we were able to experiment with some of the techniques we'd learned working with David Ossman!

In addition to these six episodes, we created nine more the second year, at The Actors’ Gym. These were produced in The Shower, literally one of the gang showers in the basement, with mats hung on the walls and ceiling to soak up echo and a big, ugly, amazing Frankenstein of a door, hand-crafted by Torque. He also composed and performed many original themes..

During this second year I did most of the post-production, which was more out of a desire to get them done very fast than anything else. Torque was disappointed with how I started using sound effects CDs instead of creating our own sounds. I will not disagree that the hand-made sound effects always did sound better than the pre-recorded ones.



Next up: The Episodes!

Secret Transmissions

January 2, 1994. Outside, it is 2 AM. 

It’s a trick, you know, balancing a hot-dog in one hand, working it out of the wrapper so’s just a little bit sticks out, enough to get two bites, maybe, even though it’s covered in Stadium Mustard, coleslaw and chili, while steering with the other hand, trying not to fishtail, driving home, alone, down Lorain, toward Carnegie Avenue.

Especially if you’ve had a couple drinks and all of a sudden there’s a cop you pass every block, every single block, like, I wish these guys were around to help people during the day when there’s actually traffic, Jesus.

But things were so I needed to look forward to this. It was not just that we didn’t cook at home, or that I should have been hungry for some reason. I needed a reward for getting through another show, another day, and I needed to feel I was connected with the city, that I had my own city-oriented ritual, my own personal connection.

So I went to the Hot Dog Inn for one of those dogs, or two or three, and I listened to college radio on the journey home. Not The End, but Honest-To-God experimental radio. I had Wainstead All Night on WCSB, who had his own Harper’s Bazaar kind of list going where he recited all this shit from wire reports, like News of the Weird only it’s the Government that’s weird. 

Or a hip-hop show on WUJC where all the fellahs were giving their “shouts out" or taking the crank calls from guys trying to get the chance to say “fuck” or “ba-ba-booey” on the air. 

 Or WRUW was playing I don’t know what they were playing, whatever the hell it was they decided to play that night. Odds are good it was dub. It still is.

Thousands of people my age might have been listening to The End or Jammin’ 92, but how many could actually have been listening to this stuff at that moment? Doing what? Doing nothing? Sitting in their dorm or using it as a soundtrack in the basement, smoking weed, the radio full of chatter over here, the Dead playing on the tape deck over there? 

These were secret transmissions, in the middle of the night, signals sent through the sub-freezing temperatures reaching, whom? Maybe I was absolutely the only person listening at that moment, skidding through drifts of road-slush, careening past the towering, sightless, Guardians of Traffic. 

Someone was sitting warm and cozy inside a booth behind locked doors in Rhodes Tower or in the basement of Mather Hall, spinning records and telling the Truth before dawn so that a lonely guy driving from point A to point B would have something different to listen to.

Driving slowly down Carnegie, past the new ball park (opening soon) with a messy hot dog in my lap, feeling connected. To that. A mouth full of salt and sugar and fat, ears full of local, unpolished noise, with one hand on the wheel navigating the slippery boulevard. All my senses were full and I was alone. 

And in that place, that personal space, in limbo between the theater and my house, for a brief moment I felt like myself.

Old Fashion Hot Dogs is still located at 4008 Lorain Ave in Cleveland.