June 2005) (original) (raw)

More Than Just Mommy and Daddy: "Nontraditional" Families in Comics

by Rebecca Salek

I admit it: I'm one of those girls who believes that every citizen of the United States should have the same rights, regardless of skin color, religious persuasion, political affiliation, sexual orientation or gender. If you're a black, Buddhist, Libertarian, straight man you have the same rights (and responsibilities) as a Latina, Lutheran, Republican, bisexual woman — at least in my book.

Not everyone shares my opinion, of course. But those who do (gays, lesbians, bisexual men and women and the transgendered, and straight men and women) have begun to make strides in gaining their rights. Adoption, medical coverage, inheritance, marriage, to name a few; slowly, slowly, but surely.

And just as they are becoming more and more visible in society at large — recognized, respected as human beings — the GLBT community has also begun to appear in comics. Some of these comics are published by the big mainstream companies; others by the smaller presses; some by independent creators; many by Japanese publishers. In some cases, the portrayals are over-whelmingly positive; in a few, negative; in most, the GLBT characters are complex human beings with all the flaws, prejudices, aspirations and dreams that one would expect.

I polled my fellow Tarts, and discovered a few of these characters and titles. Take note that, while not all the titles are all ages, they do concern "family" issues, and may be appropriate for educating children about GLBT issues.

Denise: My all-time favorite portrayal of a queer comics family appears in Alison Bechdel's groundbreaking, justifiably-beloved comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For. DTWOF, as it's affectionately known, features a large and polymorphous cast, whose members, over the strip's more than twenty years (so far), have lived together/hooked up/fallen in love/fallen out of love/had kids, in multiple configurations.

Let's see .... Mo (the strip's central character, a lovably gloomy leftist in a perpetual striped turtleneck) used to live in a lesbian group house with Lois, Sparrow, and Ginger. Then the anti-capitalist Mo fell reluctantly in love with Sydney (a postmodernist college professor and compulsive consumer), and moved out of the group house and in with Sydney. Their sex life depends heavily on fantasies about Martha Stewart and the girl who cleans her swimming pool, or the Congresswoman who's investigating her business practices.

Meanwhile, Sparrow got involved with — gasp! — a man: Stuart Goodman (pun undoubtedly intended), who moved into the collective household. After Stuart and Sparrow had a baby girl (Jiao Raizel, known as J.R.), Stuart decided to be a stay-at-home dad; now he takes care of J.R. and the house, while Sparrow, Lois, and Ginger go to work.

Then there's Clarice and Toni, the strip's longest-running couple. So far the two of them have had a commitment ceremony in the backyard, a civil union in Vermont, and a marriage ceremony at City Hall. They have a son named Raffi — who insisted that his eleventh birthday party be a fundraiser for MoveOnPAC — and they've recruited an official Male Role Model for him, a Latino gay man named Carlos. But all is not peaches and cream for this pair: environmental lawyer Clarice is so obsessed with the evils being wrought by the Bush Administration that she's ignoring Toni and Raffi, while work-at-home mom Toni is dealing with her renewed attraction for Gloria, whom she works with on the board of directors of the Freedom to Marry Task Force.

And let's not forget Jasmine, one of studly Lois' former paramours, and Jasmine's former son Jonas, a young teen who is transitioning to Janis. "I miss my angelic little boy who used to play with dolls," Jasmine says wistfully. "Now I'm living with this ... this Valley Girl who steals my clothes and ignores me. But on the upside, all my anxiety about being a single mother of a young black man in this culture has completely disappeared." Stuart and Lois have volunteered to help home-school Janis; Lois claims to be a math whiz, while Stuart will teach French.

In the meantime, Ginger has become lovers with Samia, a Syrian woman who's a professional dog-walker and Arabic tutor. Samia happens to be tutoring Cynthia, a blonde WASPy right-wing Republican evangelical who's one of Ginger's students, and who has recently horrified her boss at the Right-to-Life office by coming out to her. (Cynthia wants to learn Arabic so she can go work for the CIA.)

The newly-out Cynthia can't go home to her parents for Christmas — unless she wants to attend daily prayer circles to save her soul from damnation — so she comes to the collective household's multi-purpose Festival of Lights. Cynthia is shocked to discover that the dinner isn't a Christmas dinner. "But we're not all Christian!" Janis explains. Turns out that Stuart's Jewish "in a non-observant, nature-mystic sort of way"; Samia's "a lapsed, sadly Westernized Muslim"; Sparrow was a pagan, but now she's an atheist; and Ginger's a "deprogrammed Catholic." What religion is Cynthia? "Assembly of God" — a phrase that could describe the people gathered together for the feast.

What's that? You think I've forgotten about the "family" question? But that's my whole point: all of these characters are involved in each other's lives; they're there for each other through the tough times. In other words, they're one big, loving queer family. In fact, I can't think of a better portrayal of "family" — queer or otherwise — anywhere in comics.

Margaret: In English-language comics, especially the allegedly more mainstream superhero comics, characters which fit any of the "non-traditional" GLBT sexual categories tend to be few and far between — with even gay or lesbian couples, much less more extended families, being even rarer. Japanese manga, on the other hand, has a whole separate shonen ai (literally "boys' love")/yaoi subgenre devoted to tales of male/male romance. As with heterosexual romances, some of these stories, such as the Digital Manga yaoi comics Passion and Desire, portray the lovestruck protagonists as focused almost entirely on each other in a tempestuous folie a deux virtually without any larger social context or easily-visualized post-initial-passion future. However, other, usually more extended series chronicle the spotlighted relationship's progress from courtship all the way to moving in together, in some cases complete with adopted children and/or meddling in-laws. Perhaps the best-known and (sort of) most realistic of the latter type of shonen ai/yaoi series is Sanami Matoh's FAKE (TokyoPop).

FAKE is about two New York City police detectives who, in the words of the TokyoPop house ads, "began as [professional] partners, but became much more." It's a classic case of opposites attracting when brash bisexual Detective Dee Laytner (whom the author's flashback-story comment informs us "started out as every woman's nightmare" in his teens and added "every man's nightmare" to his repertoire later) notices what a knockout his uptight half-Japanese new partner Randy "Ryo" McLean is and starts not-so-subtly hitting on him mere hours after they've first met.

For his part, Ryo, an almost pathologically nice, but overconscientious, play-by-the-rules type who is chronically appalled by Dee's negligent attitude toward paperwork and loose cannon approach to law enforcement, keeps protesting that he isn't gay and freaking out over Dee's increasingly successful recurring attempts to kiss him. The admittedly stubborn and egotistical Dee derives some encouragement from the fact that, for all his protests, Ryo does seem to like his partner well enough to willingly spend most of his free time with him — without punching Dee in the face for making improper advances, as he does when their superior officer Commissioner Rose tries the same thing. However, Dee's attempts to definitively take their relationship beyond the "just friends" level are complicated by the disapproving presence of Bikky, an orphaned juvenile delinquent whom Ryo adopted after he and Dee saved the boy from murderous drug dealers in the course of their first case together. The somewhat homophobic Bikky regards Dee as a sexual predator (at least when Dee isn't bailing Bikky and/or Ryo out of trouble, or vice versa) and Ryo as his naively trusting potential victim. This state of affairs presumably changes after Ryo finally admits in volume seven that he reciprocates Dee's feelings and goes to bed with him. However, since the manga ends almost immediately after Ryo and Dee finally consummate their relationship as a couple, the readers never get to see the obstreperous street urchin's initial reaction to the long-awaited change in his foster parent's romantic status.

Evidently he does eventually adjust to the idea, though. In the twenty-four-page FAKE postscript story "Like, Like, Love" published several years later in a collection of Matoh's artwork (unfortunately as yet unavailable in print in English), the now six-foot-four seventeen-year-old Bikky is still ritually squabbling with Dee and griping about how oversexed his adopted dad's longtime boyfriend is. But his only reaction to the news that Dee has asked Ryo to move in with him in his newly enlarged apartment after Bikky goes off to college in L.A. on a basketball scholarship is to complain, "You guys disappear on me, and don't tell me where the hell I'm supposed to go when I'm here on break? Which room's gonna be mine?"

Another famous yaoi manga same-sex household is that of Kei Enjyoji and Ranmaru Samejima in Kazuma Kodaka's Kizuna (Be Beautiful/Central Park Manga), published in the U.S. under the title Kizuna: Bonds of Love. The two leads in this manga have been friends edging towards boyfriends since junior high, but have only officially been lovers for a short time before Ranmaru is struck by a car and seriously injured in an attack which was really aimed at Kei, the illegitimate son of a yakuza crime boss. Despondent over the end of his career as an up-and-coming kendo champion and the doctor's diagnosis that he has only a thirty percent chance of so much as walking normally again, Ranmaru refuses to even attempt the recommended physical therapy. He even tells Kei not to visit him because it would be too painful for him to see him in his current half-paralyzed state.

Kei does stay away for a few days out of guilt and misplaced feelings of responsibility for what has happened. However, when Ranmaru's condition worsens, his sister Yuki begs Kei to go see him again, pleading, "You're the only one who can help him." In response, Kei goes to Ranmaru and asks him to move in with him so they can attend university together, telling him, "No matter what happens, you're you .... You're still the Ranmaru I fell in love with." Eventually, Ranmaru agrees. He begins going to physical therapy and works so hard at it that by the time he and Kei actually start attending classes and move in together (presumably with the blessing of Ran's sister and grandfather, who must have figured out the nature of their relationship by that time even if they hadn't been fully aware of it earlier), there is virtually no outward sign of his traumatic injuries. In Kodaka's own words, they are "acting like newlyweds," and seem well on their way to living happily ever after when Kei's obstructive younger half-brother Kai shows up, declaring his own love for Ranmaru and attempting to come between them. (See my Under a Microscope article onKizunavolume one in the December 2004 issue of Sequential Tart for further details.)

Then there's Gravitation (TokyoPop), Maki Murakami's screwball comedy about an excitable little fluffball (aspiring pop star Shuichi Shindou) who falls in love with a dazzling but cold-hearted snake (sarcastic romance novelist Eiri Yuki) when said snake, who is at that point a total stranger to him, picks up a sheet of Shuichi's song lyrics blown underfoot during a walk in the park, takes one look at them, and brutally informs their anxious author that he has zero talent as a lyricist and should find some other line of work. The two other relationships described above definitely have their psychological peculiarities, especially the one depicted in Kizuna. But Shuichi and Yuki keep being irresistibly pulled back into each other's orbits as if mutually magnetized no matter what they do because they — especially Yuki — are so thoroughly messed up in such perfectly complementary ways that it's downright creepy. After ten volumes of capriciously breaking up and grudgingly (on his part) reconciling, Yuki has finally managed to process enough of his truckload of psychological problems to actually admit (in a rather warped manner, and after a great deal of coaching by other people) that he loves Shuichi and wants him to move back in — again. But Yuki is still such a kneejerk emotional sadist that he can't let two minutes pass by before following this admission up with a remark so crude that anyone less masochistically besotted than Shuichi would immediately turn around and walk out, probably forever.

With a boyfriend like this, who needs interfering in-laws? Not Shuichi, but he's got them anyway. There's Mika, Yuki's older sister, who abducts the still-not-quite-finished-with-high-school Shuichi out of class in the middle of an exam so she can try to bribe him to sweet-talk Yuki into going home to visit his irascible old father; Yuki's kid brother Tatsuha, an oversexed bisexual playboy who actually likes Shuichi, but tries to molest him the first time they meet because Shuichi reminds him of the rock star on whom he's obsessively fixated; and Mika's husband Tohma, a record company executive who, once Shuichi's band gets signed by NG Records, also happens to be Shuichi's boss. Tohma, who has been in love with his good-looking brother-in-law himself for years, alternates between trying to break Shuichi and Yuki up and supporting their relationship in the hope that the indestructibly ebullient boy can somehow save Yuki from his inner demons where Tohma failed. Apparently the upcoming twelfth and final volume ends with Shuichi and Yuki managing to stick together yet again, but their endlessly self-renewingly unstable relationship is so toxic that it's like some kind of inside-out gay equivalent of the one portrayed in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

There is also a manga which actually deals with a literal gay marriage — well, sort of. This is Sanami Matoh's earlier series Until the Full Moon(Broccoli Books), a supernatural romantic comedy which chronicles the relationship between cousins David, a vampire, and Marlo, the offspring of a vampire and a female werewolf. For most of the latter's life, these two sets of supernatural genes seemed to have simply cancelled each other out. However, as Marlo reaches late adolescence, he is shocked to discover that during the full moon, he does indeed change shape — into a girl.

When even his Uncle Arnet, David's father, who is a doctor specializing in preternatural patients, can't figure out any way of undoing this periodic short-term sex change, Arnet and Marlo's parents decide that the perfect solution to this awkward situation is for Marlo and David to get married. Supposedly this will enable them to have children together and carry on the family name, but since Marlo doesn't even stay in his female form all twenty-four hours of the day during the brief period of each month's full moon (he transforms only when the moon actually rises, and turns back into a boy when it sets), it's difficult to see how he could possibly carry a pregnancy to term. But evidently some of his ancestors somehow managed to do just that. After further research into the family history, Arnet concludes that Marlo must have inherited this unusual form of shape-shifting from some of his mother's ancestors, who came from an all-male werewolf tribe who were able to reproduce because some of their members periodically changed into women, rather than wolves.

David is all for the proposed marriage, but Marlo is initially appalled at the prospect of both switching genders for part of each month on a long-term basis and marrying his male cousin. The two boys had been close as children, but the vampire David had an unfortunate habit of biting his cousin in his sleep when they shared a bed. Even worse, he's grown up to be a notorious womanizer. Once Marlo finally blurts out the reason for his hostility toward his prospective groom, David explains that, despite his penchant for chasing women (which is apparently at least partially attributable to the fact that even in the small, non-lethal doses he indulges in, their blood tastes sweeter), he has had a crush on his cousin since childhood, and would be delighted to spend the rest of his life with him even without the part-time femaleness factor. In fact, David doesn't really care whether Marlo is a boy or a girl at any given moment, although even after he manages to convince Marlo of this, the younger boy at least initially refuses to let his fiance even kiss him unless he's actually in his female form at the time.

Although he does stop resisting the idea of the marriage after his vampire cousin convinces him of his true feelings, the prickly Marlo remains rather grumpy and stand-offish about the whole thing for most of the series' two volumes. However, after one of David's female ex-lovers tricks him into what appears to be a compromising position with her in an attempt to make the man she is currently interested in jealous — only to be caught "in the act" by Marlo, as well as her intended audience — Marlo finally admits, if only to his fellow witness to this staged "love scene," that he does love David, once again denying it when the vampire arrives just in time to overhear this confession. Still, despite all these problems and misunderstandings, by the conclusion of volume two it's clear that the couple's feelings are mutual, and the series ends happily with their wedding — held at night during the full moon, with Marlo, in his long-haired female form, dressed in a wedding gown.

The motif of being magically transgendered at least part-time is actually surprisingly common in manga. This is probably at least partially a result of the popularity of the well-known Rumiko Takahashi manga and anime Ranma 1/2(Viz), about a boy martial artist whose accidental immersion in an enchanted Chinese spring causes him to change into a girl whenever he is doused in cold water, switching back to his original gender upon exposure to hot water. (Ranma's father, Genma, spends much of his time as a giant panda due to his own accidental fall into a neighboring enchanted spring on the same occasion.)

There is another series, Hiroshi Aro's Futaba-kun Change (Studio Ironcat), with a similar premise, although in this case the boy protagonist's periodic transformations, like those of the relatively ordinary junior high school boy Daisuke into the suave young adult super-thief Dark in Yukiru Sugisaki'sD.N.Angel (TokyoPop), are triggered by what amounts to sexual arousal. As with Marlo in Until the Full Moon, the boy Futaba's shape- and gender-shifting tendencies turn out to be genetic in origin. As he belatedly discovers, his entire family comes from some sort of mutant subspecies of humanity endowed with this gender-switching syndrome. How his relatives had been able to conceal all this from Futaba until he himself hit puberty is never adequately explained, especially in view of the fact that the parent whom he had always considered his father in reality turns out to be the one who had gotten pregnant and, eventually, given birth to him while in female form. As the latter circumstance would seem to suggest, people with this hereditary gender-shifting ability tend to be, at least in some sense, bisexual — a fact further evidenced by Futaba's older sister, in her male form, making a joking(?) pass at Futaba in his female form not long after he discovers the family secret.

There are also two manga series involving more long-term — potentially permanent — gender switches. In one of these, Ai Morinaga's Your and My Secret(ADV), a timid, dreamy boy winds up unintentionally switching bodies with the rather crude, boisterous girl he has a crush on as a result of one of her mad scientist grandfather's more irresponsible experiments. When the girl's violent reaction to realizing what has happened damages the equipment used in the procedure, her grandfather announces that he can't possibly change the two teenagers back to their proper forms until he repairs the apparatus — something which he appears to be in no particular hurry to do, partially because he claims that he doesn't have enough money to replace the malfunctioning parts.

In Hiroyuki Nishimori's Cheeky Angel (Viz), on the other hand, the nine-year-old boy Megumi is magically changed into a girl by a malicious genie after he incautiously wishes to be the manliest of men. Instead, the miniature magical being indulges his warped sense of humor by turning Megumi into the womanliest woman, simultaneously rearranging reality so that everyone but the friend who was with him at the time remembers him as always having been female. Six years later, the now-gorgeous Meg is a tough, tomboyish girl who fights like Xena and is still determined to be somehow restored to her original sex someday. But being stuck in a body of the "wrong" gender for all those years has not left Meg entirely unaffected. Although Megumi is perpetually annoyed by the persistent attentions of starry-eyed males (including her own father, who sneaks into her room early in the morning to take photographs of her lying in bed after a sleepover with her female friend Miki), she does enjoy being told that she's pretty, and is dismayed to realize that her reactions to certain situations seem to be considered stereotypically "girlie." And, having made the crucial transition into puberty as a member of what for her was originally the opposite sex, Meg has just as much trouble as her born-female classmates do dealing with the smutty innuendos and one-track sexual obsessiveness of her male admirers. (This is in vivid contrast to the somewhat analogous situation in Chris Hazelton's American webcomic Misfile, in which Ash, a teenage boy accidentally transformed into a girl a short time earlier by a feckless pot-smoking angel's clerical error, suffers all sorts of additional emotional complications in situations such as using the girls' locker room due to the fact that he is still strongly attracted to girls.) At one point early in the series, Megumi's realization of just how incomprehensible she finds teenage boys' preoccupation with sex plunges her into an identity crisis, causing her to wonder if she, too, would now be making what she considers repulsively crude passes at girls if she had retained her original gender, and doubting whether she will be able to cope if she ever does succeed in being restored to her longed-for boyhood.

Rebecca: When I think of positive portrayals of gay or lesbian characters, one title immediately comes to mind: Strangers in Paradise (Abstract). And one story arc in particular. Francine has just discovered that she is pregnant and she has a choice: stay with her fiance Brad or return to the woman who loves her, her best friend Katchoo. Ill with morning sickness, she locks herself in the bathroom and dreams; Francine dreams about what each future might be like — and the future with Katchoo was one of warmth, friendship, and love.

Wolfie: ElfQuest was the first place I encountered the idea of commited polyamory, or multiple-partner matings.

The first suggestion of it was in the original series (the arc covered by the first graphic novel), where Leetah had to choose between her long-time love, Rayek, and the man she'd Recognized, Cutter. Rayek challenged Cutter for her hand, and lost; as he left in self-imposed disgrace, Savah, the Mother of Memory, asked him if it was unthinkable that he might form a three-way mating with Leetah and Cutter; but he refused. So the possibility was there, just scorned.

In the third graphic novel's arc, Dewshine, because of Recognition, had to mate with Tyldak, even as she was in love with Scouter; she did her duty by Recognition, but returned to her lover. Still, ever after there remained a bond of sorts between her and Tyldak.

In the fourth graphic novel, faced with the prospect of war, the Wolfriders and Go-Backs had a "dance", which was, for all intents and purposes, an orgy. Lifemates Redlance and Nightfall, while remaining in physical contact, embraced Go-Back lovers. Skywise is notorious for multiple partners, and the dance was no exception. Even Cutter and Leetah, the story's token pairing, took other lovers, Leetah going with Rayek, and Cutter accepting Kahvi's invitation. Some people have complained about that scene, but I think most ElfQuest fans accept it for the life-affirming (and continuing) moment it was meant to be in the face of pending war.

As the series progressed, there was more and more evidence, of multiple-partner partnerings and of bisexual relationships:

Cutter and Leetah have "denned" together with Nightfall and Redlance. Leetah, with her healing powers, helped Nightfall and Redlance conceive. It's possible that Cutter and Redlance were never actually lovers, but Cutter and Nightfall have been together, and I'm guessing there's at least some degree of intimacy between Leetah and Nightfall, best friends who have even danced naked in the woods together!

Goodtree, Acorn, and Lionleaper had some trouble at first, because Goodtree loved them both. Eventually, instead of making her choose between them, Lionleaper and Acorn came to love each other as deeply as they loved her. Even when Goodtree Recognized Lionleaper, Acorn was not excluded from their child-making efforts or their family after.

Pike, Skot, and Krim had a three-way relationship, and Pike has been quoted as telling his Go-back lovers that they are his family. When Krim bore children, they neither knew nor cared who the father was. Skot's death clearly affected Pike as deeply as it did Krim; there's a good chance that Pike and Skot did not just "share" Krim, but were lovers together as well.

Dewshine and Scouter were lifemates already when Scouter recognized Tyleet. Rather than leaving Tyleet when they answered the demands of Recognition, or leaving Dewshine, Scouter is now mated to both. Dewshine, meanwhile, is thrilled for Scouter, even if his child was borne by another woman. It's unclear whether Dewshine and Tyleet have a sexual relationship, but they call each other lifemate, rather than just referring to Scouter as such.

Dart and the Sun Village man, Shushen, were lovers, Dart grieving as deeply for Shushen when he was killed as any half of a life-mated pair might. He did have a son of his own, however, after recognizing a Sun Village woman. Now he seems to be with Kimo, Newstar's son.

Cutter and Skywise are recognized (see Brothers In All But Blood). Skywise even denned with Cutter and his family. It seems Skywise and Leetah may have gotten intimate when she "cleansed" him of his wolf blood (at his request) ... one wonders if Skywise has been intimate with her when they denned together as well. Though Skywise and Cutter don't seem to be lovers, when asked about it once, Skywise replied that "Male wolves sometimes mount each other for sport, true — but I prefer what maidens have!" Gay sex is clearly something the elves know of, and have no problem with, even if they don't choose to partake of it themselves on an individual basis.

To this day, I still have to wonder, on a personal level, why people must always get jealous and fight over other people, instead of "share", or why they must limit their love to one sex. Granted, the elves don't get pregnant very easily, and they don't seem to have such a thing as venereal disease, but there is, in the real world, such a thing as "safe sex". ... At any rate, the series taught me that there are infinite kinds of love, and an infinite number of ways to express that love — and that living with acceptance and tolerance is a lot happier lifestyle than living to persecute those that are different than you!

Webcomics. Manga, in Japanese and English. Small press titles and a few mainstream series. In terms of GLBT characters and concerns, there are at least a few from which to choose. :) Take a look at some of titles suggested above; maybe you'll like them, maybe you won't. But they will make you think — and make the children in your life ask some tough, important questions.

Note: The definition of "all-ages" is entirely subjective. A parent or guardian should always read a comic first before giving it to a child to read.