Maybe the most significant gay out of Birmingham was comics artist (idk what you’re supposed to call these people) Howard Cruse.
He’s best known today for his 1995 graphic novel Stuck Rubber Baby about growing up gay in Birmingham during the Civil Rights era. It’s rather lugubrious and not his best work visually, but was much-awarded at the time and without it there perhaps wouldn’t be what limited scholarship there is on Cruse. What interests me about him, however, is that he launched the Gay Comix anthology series in 1980 (it ran until ‘98, spanning 25 issues—after a certain point as Gay Comics)—and from 1983 to 1989 (with some interruptions) wrote and drew the comic strip Wendel in The Advocate (around the time Alison Bechdel—who cites Cruse as an inspiration began Dykes to Watch out for). Wendel books were published in 1985 (by Felice Picano on his Gay Presses of New York) and in 1987 & 1989 (by Michael Denneny at St. Martin’s).
Until the late 70s, Cruse lived in Birmingham doing counter-cultural comics celebrating LSD:
I find these cute, but uninteresting. There were lots of straight guys doing this shit. Psychedelic whimsy was anyway already played out in metropole.
But ‘it gets better’ after he moved to New York. Even very early strips of Wendel, before Cruse has figured out quite who the character is and how he should look, are charming:
Lol.
Wendel’s nose, happily, doesn’t stay that size. He is given a job at a gay magazine, which puts him settings where he encounters a variety of enduring gay types, from tedious PC whiners:
To pretentious queens:
Wendel’s politics or tastes could be variously described—he usually plays something of the well-intentioned moderate ‘straight man’ (as it were) to other people’s craziness. In the following strip, for example, would you say Wendel is unwoke or that he reads banned books?
Curious gay boys of culture are dodging censors of the right and the left—story of my life! (and note: this is several years before anyone had heard of Camille Paglia)
One of the longer-running plot arcs in Wendel concerns a Robert-Ferro-esque character, Wendel’s boss at the gay magazine, trying to convince readers that aliens shaped like pods will come rescue us from AIDS (was there a source for this besides Ferro? What wavelength were these girls riding? was this Reagan’s Star Wars program for gays?):
I remain, for the record, open to both sides on the Space Pods/Splendora question. Queer ways of knowing suggest they may be real!
Finally, here are some isolated panels I loved: