I wanted to establish myself as a cartoonist first. I chose not to bring out the fact that he was gay until I had done the series for a while, a number of years, because I didn’t want to be type-cast or seen as trying to piggyback on the burgeoning gay liberation movement.
I had a character named Headrack, who was a gay, frustrated artist, which I could identify with. I decided, sometime around 1972, that I would eventually introduce a gay character into my series Barefootz, which was my central project during the 1970s. I don’t know if all of your readers are familiar with underground comix - they probably are they’re pretty savvy, I’m sure - but this was a very uninhibited and uncensored medium that didn’t bother to try to get the Comics Code Authority seal of approval.īasically, there was practically no gay presence in the early decade or so of underground comic books. Howard Cruse: I broke into the comic form through underground comix in the early ’70s.
