Another sad loss of someone who died much too young, at 56. I didn’t know Paula personally, but always admired the radical legal vision of her work at the Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund, NGLTF, and the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission.
There’s a very good obituary in the Times that cites an article she wrote back in 1989.
“When analyzed from the standpoint of civil rights, certainly lesbians and gay men should have the right to marry,” she wrote in the fall 1989 issue of Out/Look magazine as part of a debate with Thomas B. Stoddard, a colleague at Lambda who strongly favored same-sex marriage. “But obtaining a right does not always result in justice.”
Ms. Ettelbrick continued, “Justice for gay men and lesbians will be achieved only when we are accepted and supported in this society despite our differences from the dominant culture and the choices we make regarding our relationships.”
I remember that debate in Out/Look very well—it helped to shape my own thinking about what is gained and lost as a liberation movement begins to achieve success. I don’t want to be accepted because I’m like everyone else. I want to be accepted despite the fact that I’m not.
I’m watching footage of the Wall Street protest. Everyone’s using their iPhones to photograph and videotape the police whacking people with batons.
This is my first computer, in 1992–a Mac Classic. I continued using the Apple Stylewriter black and white printer that I bought at the same time through the next 3 or 4 computers. I finally had to retire it not because it stopped working but because its connection cable had become obsolete.
Here’s Best American Comics 2011, hot off the press. I was the guest editor this year. There’s some amazing stuff in this volume. Work by Gabrielle Bell, Joe Sacco, Dash Shaw, Chris Ware, Jaime Hernandez, Kevin Mutch, Eric Orner, Kate Beaton, Gabby Schulz (Ken Dahl) and many many more. Jillian Tamaki did the cover and Robert Sergel did the endpapers.
It just got a very nice review in the Austin Chronicle.
I’ll be traveling to do a few bookstore events soon. This Saturday, October 8, I’ll be at Quimby’s Bookstore in Chicago. Next Saturday, October 15, I’ll be on a panel at the Boston Book Festival with Dan Clowes and Seth. And on Tuesday October 18, Gabrielle Belle, Kevin Mutch and me will be at the Union Square Barnes and Noble in NYC.
Also, it’s LGBT History Month. And I’m an icon! One icon a day for 31 days. It’s a very peculiar feeling to be considered “history.” A great honor, of course, but also disorienting. Watching the 10-second little slideshow-with-dramatic-voiceover about myself, I was overwhelmed with nostalgia for the present.
I’m drawing and drawing, on deadline for the memoir I’ve been working on for the past five years. It kinda freaks me out that the book is already up on Amazon.com, considering that it’s far from finished. But I guess it’s also motivating. The book will have seven chapters, for a total of around 280 pages. So far I’ve got 116 pages done…that’s the first time I’ve allowed myself to tally them up.
Thanks to the people who wished me a happy birthday on the last post. Today I’m 51. And I get to draw all day!
How odd to read that headline. I’m only just starting to grasp the extent of the storm damage here, after watching the news and reading the Times online…which I couldn’t do for the last 30 hours because the power was out.
I was going about my business yesterday morning, thinking things weren’t going to be too bad. It was windy and rainy, but no more than it often is. The electricity went out around noon, but that happens all the time too, here in my mountain redoubt. We got out the candles and the headlamps. Here I am drawing last night.
Hol and I had a crank radio that we listened to from time to time and we heard people calling in with reports of flooding and bridges washing out. But somehow, without the visuals, it didn’t sink in fully. Still no power this morning. I checked Twitter as I was charging my phone in my car, and started seeing all these stunning photographs of Richmond, the town near me. The ramp to the interstate was underwater. The river was running through the town.
Hol and I got in the car and drove down the hill to see what was happening. At the bottom, here’s what we found.
We watched a couple cars plow through the water–it was about two feet deep. We turned around and went home. When the power hadn’t come on by 3pm, we decided to make our way into Burlington to recharge our devices. We had to go a long, roundabout way because of the flooding.
On our way back home, we crossed the Winooski River bridge which was lined with people watching the surging floodwaters. All the rain from the hundreds and hundreds of brooks and streams all across the state was churning through the mouth of this river into Lake Champlain.
It was much worse in the southern part of the state than up here in the north. I’m a little concerned about our friend NLC, who last checked in here at 2:30 am on Sunday. I hope it’s just a power outage and that he will report in soon.
I keep meaning to post a link to this funny sci-fi takeoff on Fun Home, Space Home. One of the artists, Laurel Leake, alerted me to it last month. It’s an episode of Wilson Parker’s webcomic, Unwinder’s Tall Comics. As Laurel puts it, “We shamelessly gave your memoir’s authorship to the son of a recurring character, Gary P. Rastov, a C-grade sci-fi novelist from the 70s who ground out volume upon volume of stories that managed to turn impossibly vast interstellar conflicts into painfully mundane lists of statistics.”
It’s pretty funny. I got confused though about all the layers of fiction and reality. Is Gary P. Rastov a real person or a fictional one? I can’t keep track of much of anything lately except the pen nib moving before my eyes.
Jerome, thanks for the link to this in your comment on the last post—that nudged me to finally put this up.
Ever since my memoir about my dad, Fun Home, was published in May of 2006, I’ve been working on another graphic memoir–this one about my mother. Why is it taking so long? You can find a partial explanation in this little video clip.
But the good thing is, after many years of writing and fretting and throwing things out and starting over, I’m finally, actually drawing. (this movie was actually shot in April, which is why the news in the background is talking about the government crackdown in Syria.)
Jeff Newelt at Smithmag made this nice post about Harvey Pekar today, on the anniversary of his death. There’s a very nicely done video of a live reading Jeff did of a Pekar strip, illustrated by Sean Pryor.
Here’s a tiny Harvey sketch from a piece I illustrated for him 22 years ago. No one ever drew such expressive stick figures.
My editor had an intervention with me last week…remember the book I’ve been working on for the past five years? Well, I finally really have to turn it in. By the end of the year. So my editor suggested gently that considering how much work I have left, perhaps going to Chicago for the fall semester was not the best idea, and could I maybe switch my visit to the spring?
Fortunately this seems to be okay with the Chicago people.
I’m working hard, though. Here I am posing as my therapist for a scene I have to draw.
But I wanted to tell you about our pal June’s series about gay bars on Slate this week. In part two, she collects stories from a bunch of lgbt writers about their first time in a gay bar. I have a little squib there about my frightening visit to Satan’s in Akron, Ohio.
June could not have asked for a better hook for her piece than the image of people at the Stonewall Inn over the weekend, cheering the passage of same-sex marriage in New York. If that’s where the modern gay rights movement began, perhaps that’s where it ended too. At any rate, if we continue racking up civil rights like this, it’s hard to imagine the institution of “pride” persisting much longer.
