Lambda Legal hosts contests for gay comics

Earlier this year, Lambda Legal launched a competition for cartoonists to submit cartoons about the importance of fair courts for LGBT and individual rights, and from now until July 15 visitors to the organization's website can compare the five finalists and cast their vote for the winner. The finalists run the gamut, from nationally syndicated LGBT-friendly political cartoonists like Ted Rall and Matt Bors to syndicated gay cartoonist Greg Fox, creator of the comic strip Kyle's Bed and Breakfast, to relative unknown LGBT cartoonists like Astrid Lydia Johannsen and Jennifer Crut?. The contest is part of Lambda Legal's efforts to educate the LGBT community about the role of the courts in safeguarding LGBT rights. Hector Vargas, Lambda's deputy director of education and public affairs, said Lambda was excited at the response to the call for submissions.

"This is Lambda Legal's first venture into something like this, and I don't think we knew what we would get in terms of submissions, but we are extremely pleased that people with a reputation for strong editorial cartoons like Ted Rall would submit something to the contest ... But we're also happy that people who aren't as established in the cartooning community took this as an opportunity to show us what they can do," said Vargas.

Lambda received about a couple dozen submissions, and a panel of judges narrowed them down to the final five. Judges include syndicated cartoonist and frequent Bay Windows contributor Mikhaela Reid (whose work is collected in the forthcoming book, Attack of the 50-Foot Mikhaela), former Wonder Woman and X-Men artist Phil Jimenez, DC Comics editor Joan Hilty and The Advocate news and features editor Sean Kennedy. The contest is a joint venture of Lambda Legal, The Advocate, and the LGBT comics non-profit Prism Comics, and the winning cartoon will be printed in a future issue of The Advocate.

Reid said the five finalists took very different approaches to tackling the subject of fair courts. Rall, Fox and Bors all painted nightmarish visions of a world without a fair judicial system, with gay couples exiled to Antarctica and people thrown in jail for either engaging in or facilitating sodomy. By contrast, Johannsen and Crut? used a more personal perspective, showing how a lack of legal protections would impact their own lives as an M-to-F lesbian transwoman and a bisexual woman respectively. Reid said the contest is a great way to acquaint people with cartoonists like Johannsen and Crut? who do not yet have a large following.

"It's intended to give exposure to the winners, so this is a way for Astrid and Jennifer to get more exposure," said Reid.

The contest is one piece of the Life without Fair Courts series. The other is a series of 11 cartoons Lambda commissioned from Reid that show the impact of specific court decisions on the lives of LGBT people. The cartoons have run on The Advocate website and are featured on Lambda's site, and Vargas said Lambda is exploring the possibility of collecting Reid's cartoons, along with the finalists from the contest, into a printed volume.

Reid said that Lambda Legal selected her in part because much of her own work focused on similar themes as the Life Without Fair Courts campaign.

"I have a somewhat dystopian view in a lot of my cartoons of what the future looks like when we have people in charge who do not care about equality for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people," said Reid.

Each of the cartoons shows what life might be like for LGBT people if a certain court decision had not taken place, and the Lambda Legal website contains a description of the cases under each cartoon. Some of the decisions, like the Supreme Court's 2003 Lawrence v. Texas sodomy ruling and its 1996 Romer v. Evans ruling striking down Colorado's ban on gay and lesbian nondiscrimination laws, are relatively well known. In Reid's cartoon illustrating the former decision, a police officer representing the "sodomy squad" breaks into a lesbian couple's home and arrests them, and in the latter a state employee banishes a group of LGBT people with an anti-discrimination petition from the state house, telling them, "We don't have democracy for your kind."

Other cartoons focus on less well-known cases, such as the 1976 Supreme Court decision in Craig v. Boren, which ruled that Oklahoma could not have different restrictions on alcohol purchase based on gender; Lambda views the case as part of the body of cases that outlaws laws based on gender stereotypes. Another cartoon examines a world without the Supreme Court's 1972 Eisenstadt v. Baird decision, which upheld the right of individuals to buy contraceptives and which was cited multiple times in the Lawrence decision. Vargas said many people, particularly young people, do not know that there used to be laws restricting the sale of condoms and birth control pills to married people, and the cartoons are designed to show the part played by the courts in establishing rights people take for granted.

"People don't even think ... that there was a time when you couldn't just go and get those. There had to be a court case to establish people's individual right to do this without a marriage license or without being married. ... The role of the courts in our system of government is to ensure that the Constitution is upheld and to protect people's rights," said Vargas.