The Dee Snider SF Pride Incident

So here’s the story of the Dee Snider SF Pride incident. 
 
One night at a party Suzanne Ford, the Executive Director of SF Pride, and I were talking about what the message for Pride should be this year. With the relentless march of anti-transgender legislation and transphobia in the rise, how would Pride respond? As we kicked around ideas, Suzanne was very adamant the slogan should be “NO!”  Simply NO! It needed to be short and powerful and very clear. 
 
She took that idea to her PR team and together they came up with an brilliant concept: “No! We’re Not Gonna Take It!”, the Twisted Sister anthem would be an amazing rallying cry. Dee Snider is a famous liberal rock star, a champion of freedom and individuality, and is on record as an ally for LGBTQIA rights. He’d even told Trump not to use the song. Was it possible to get Dee to sign on to this? If so, it would generate a ton of free publicity to carry the message of fighting transphobia and anti-LGBTQIA hate. He could be our own Kid Rock! 
 
Suzanne called Snider’s people and Snider loved the idea. He wanted to perform the song on the Main Stage at Pride—which is a big deal to have a cis heterosexual perform at the nation’s premier Pride event. A very big honor, really. 
 
I was given a chance to design the t-shirts for the campaign. My first design, made with the assistance of AI, was too colorful and expensive to print. So we went with a very graphic two color design. Eventually the final design was a mix of mine and someone else’s (art direction by committee 🙄). 
 
Everything was set to announce. A press conference would be held, CNN would be there, the Rolling Stone, it was gonna be great. 
 
Then, just two days before the announcement, Dee tweeted about his opposition to gender affirming health care for trans children. 💔🙄🤬
 
Now, this has been called transphobic, and for a lot of us it is. Dee claims this is just a “moderate” position. He supports trans people, he just doesn’t agree with this. And of course it’s being used to score points against the “intolerant left”. 
 
The thing is, this isn’t something to be negotiated. This is doctors following decade-long well-established medical protocols  to best care for trans children and the state has no business policing what children and their parents know best. The trans community stands up for our most vulnerable members. Forcing trans kids to go through the wrong puberty is cruel and dangerous. End of story. Allies who don’t understand that are not being allies.
 
Short of a complete retraction and apology there was no way Pride could go forward with the campaign. Even then…this is San Francisco, it wasn’t gonna fly. 

A long conversation was held between Dee and SF Pride, an educational discussion of the issue from a trans perspective. It seemed as if Dee got the message, but his public response was disappointing.
 
It’s a real shame. Video of a giant crowd of queer people screaming “We’re Not Gonna Take It!” would have been amazing to see. 
 

This isn’t a fight about semantics or who is transphobic and who is not. This is a fight for people’s lives and happiness.

This would have been amazing.
One of the graphic designs for the t-shirt.
My dream design, incorporating some drag energy, was made with Midjourney AI and finished in Adobe Illustrator.

Invisible Men

Invis2

Invisible Men was story I did for the Prism Comics “Alphabet” Queer Comics Anthology edited by Jon Macy and Tara Madison Avery. I started the story when I was still in the midst of struggling with what it means to be a bisexual married man and to give some feel for the discussions and conflicts I had with my wife. By the time I finished the story I was already into transition and moving into a completely different category of person which I do not address. I leave my character in his life as bisexual cis-male and wish he and his partner luck and peace whatever they decide to do. I think the story does a great job of distilling most of my thoughts around being a bisexual man in a monogamous relationship and in the society at large. I’m proud of how the story is structured and how the characters are revealed. I am glad to be out of that particular closet and gender, but I am a big believer in bisexual liberation and in bi-men in particular being more visible and seen with honesty and compassion.

Read the PDF story here and please consider buying the Anthology, it’s filled with work by amazing queer artists. I was flattered to be asked to contribute by my longtime friend Jon Macy. It dragged me out of retirement from queer comics and I am hopeful I will manifest some new stories soon.

Walk On The Wild Side

There’s this story going around about a student union at a Canadian college apologizing for playing Lou Reed’s Walk on the Wild Side at an event. It’s being put forward as another example of leftist PC culture gone awry. Please don’t buy into it. Nobody is censoring Lou Reed.

The real worry is the way the alt-right uses something like this to divide us and further isolate the trans community from support. The right works very hard to encourage radical feminists, for instance, in their assault on trans people. And if the crazy trans people are attacking saint Lou, screw them! The headline does the job and the nuances of the topic are lost.

My first thought when I saw this was irritation at the younger generation for attacking what for some of us may as well be a liberation anthem that encouraged us to come out as well as immortalized Holly Woodlawn who should be on a postage stamp as far as I’m concerned. I’m 100% positive I shaved my legs listening to that song. It’s canon. When I was asked to do a page in the Queer Heroes Coloring Book she was my choice and the lyrics are right there in the picture.

A lot of the language in the song is out of date, of course, and I think it’s similar to older trans people using the word “tranny” and getting blowback from younger more “woke” folks. The idea that being with a trans woman is a walk on the wild side is indeed discomforting now, as is the casual “he was a she” line which kind of goes against current thinking.

What this song means to ME is different from what it means to a young person, and for that matter what it means to a transphobic bigot who finds things in the song that support their view of us as subhuman freaks. But that’s the deal with art, of course. It’s available to all to use and appropriate and you can’t control what the bad guys do with it. Ask Richard Wagner about that.

Mostly, I say cut them some slack, they are working it out. College campuses get a lot of grief for leftist PC censorship, but they are also currently cesspools of toxic 4chan masculinity and vicious transmisogyny and when we tell these kids to toughen up and deal their “widdle hurt feelings” we really don’t know what level of awful bullshit they are dealing with.

Red Car Crash

I made this painting during early recovery.When I used to speak at Overeater’s Anonymous meetings I would use a metaphor of a sports car to describe being skinny and beautiful. After being a chubby kid with a homely sense of self image I suddenly had this skinny gorgeous body. It was like being a teenager with a new license and a sports car. Too much, too fast. I promptly wrapped it around a tree and burst into flames. Or burst into fat, more like it. And then I was in hell.

The lyrics are from the musical Hedwig and the Angry Inch. I’m certainly not the first trans person to find intense meaning in those songs, and I’ll accept being so “on the nose”.

Forgive me for I did not know
For I was just a boy
And you were so much more
Than any God could ever plan
More than a woman or a man
And now I understand how much I took from you

redcar

forgive