She-Ra, Kipo, and Korra ma 2020 the greatt, gayt year for rtoons - Polygon

Contents:

• 2020 WAS ANIMATN’S BIGGT, GAYT YEAR SO FAR
• 12 POPULAR CHILDREN’S TV SHOWS THAT HAVE GAY CHARACTERS
• GAY COMICS
• GAY COMIC STRIPS
• GAY MEN POSTERS AND ART PRTS

2020 WAS ANIMATN’S BIGGT, GAYT YEAR SO FAR

2020 was a bummer of a year, but when to all-ag animatn, was a culmatn of the many small steps buildg up to the current state of queer reprentatn: a glor gay celebratn that was unheard of jt five years ago. I thk that optimism, that expectatn where every time, ’s like, ‘Look, here’s this thg, this character, this relatnship, ’ ’s gay, they’re like ‘Cool, do more now, do better.

) It’s a small moment, but a fundamental one an dtry that until recently only acknowledged gay characters wh the fatt shadg and dg. Only two years later, Benson, a central character the seri, got to e out on screen and utter the words “I’m gay. But Terrace was always open about her tentn to have bi and gay characters her show — and that persistence paid off.

12 POPULAR CHILDREN’S TV SHOWS THAT HAVE GAY CHARACTERS

It’s the perfect end to this big gay year animatn.

) Fally, gay upl animatn are gettg the same experienc as their straight peers, om world-savg love nfsns to small self-fg moments, wh the faiar pg, blhg, and so much more. Wh shows like Steven Universe leadg the charge and changg the game, no longer do we have to settle for “child-appropriate” (read: homophobic) censorship.

Premierg on Nickeloon, The Loud Hoe ma history by troducg the work’s first married gay uple, Howard (Michael McDonald) and Harold McBri (Wayne Brady). In addn to s vibrant animatn and killer soundtrack, the show ma wav wh s troductn of Benson (Coy Stewart), an openly gay male character (who even the word gay onscreen, a rary kids’ animatn.

GAY COMICS

In fact, three of the leadg mastream children’s ble channels — cludg Disney, Nickeloon and Cartoon Network — have shows wh gay or lbian are twelve popular children’s shows wh gay characters:Photo urty: Getty Imag/LtleBee80. This popular live-actn tween-centric seri 2017 showsed a primary character, 13-year-old Cys Goodman, revealg he is gay. ” The storyle ntued to this year, wh Cys sayg for the first time, “I’m gay” The seri was nceled after three seasons.

GLAAD is a proment gay rights media watchdog. Gay Comix no. The fastt-growg area ics right now may be, broadly speakg, queer ics—ics that feature some way the liv, whether real or imaged, of LGBTQ (lbian, gay, bisexual, transgenr, and/or queer) characters.

Queer ics are one of the most vibrant areas of ntemporary ics, fueled large part by the naway succs of Alison Bechl’s 2006 graphic memoir Fun Home: A Fay Tragiic—the story of a gay girl and her closeted, ultimately suicidal gay father that was adapted to be a Broadway mil of the same tle, and went on to w the Tony Award for Bt Mil 2015. Gayns ed to be a public accatn leveled at ics to discred the medium: the 1950s, Batman and Rob, and Wonr Woman, were spected to be gay, and therefore a negative fluence.

GAY COMIC STRIPS

Fredric Wertham wrote his fluential book on ics that the former reprent “a wish dream of two homosexuals livg together, ” and for the latter, “the homosexual nnotatn of the Wonr Woman type of story is psychologilly unmistakable … For girls she is a morbid ial.

” The famo 1954 Comics Co, spired by Wertham’s study, banned “sex perversn or any ference to same”—a clear reference to homosexualy. But today gay ics are an ever-expandg feature of the field, markg a new era of self-exprsn. Comics ed to be read paranoilly as gay ; ntemporary ics queer inty is openly announced.

GAY MEN POSTERS AND ART PRTS

” Most signifintly, however, the range and volume of queer ics appearg right now monstrat how forcefully the reali and tails of gay life n get exprsed and visualized ics. Bechl’s hugely important and popular syndited ic strip Dyk to Watch Out For, which chronicl the everyday liv of a diverse group of mostly gay iends and lovers, began 1983 and ran for twenty-six years; changed ics culture and broar queer culture fively. The film director Lana Wachowski, of the Matrix anchise (and a trans gay woman), wrote recently that although she was a fan of mastream ics as a kid, and later the work of Robert Cmb, “It wasn’t until I disvered Alison Bechl’s Dyk to Watch Out For that I really unrstood what I was lookg for, a queer world wh stori and characters that I uld regnize, that I uld lgh wh and re about.

The history of gay ics, however, don’t start wh Bechl. Other newspaper strips have featured openly gay characters, some ntroversially. Garry T’s topil and polil Doonbury also troduced an openly gay character 1976—early for mastream ics.

(He later appears to longtime character Mark Slackmeyer a dream to tell Mark that Mark is fact gay, g him to e out of the closet. Akbar and Jeff—also early and proment gay characters who eventually beme well-known popular culture—are intil-lookg men fezz and Charlie Brown–style shirts who ially were troduced by Groeng as “brothers, or lovers, or both” but were soon acknowledged as gay.