The documentary, No Straight Lines, from director Vivian Kleiman, is both a history of LGBTQIA comic books and comic strips as well as an important document in the movement it seeks to bring to light. Over the course of the film’s 78 minutes, Kleiman tells the story of five queer artists who pioneered the underground gay comic scene: Alison Bechdel, Howard Cruse, Mary Wings, Rupert Kinnard, and Jennifer Camper. The documentary follows them as they all begin drawing comics working more or less on their own and without any models or much awareness of each other.. They did so as a means of expression and, it seems, without any expectation of becoming rich and famous. But they very quickly became the vanguard of a movement that exploded in size and popularity.
In the background are, inevitably, some of the major developments in LGBTQIA rights history in the United States, from the raids on gay bars to the AIDS epidemic, and, finally to a degree of mainstream acceptance.
Intertwined with this is the history of comic books themselves. The heyday of the traditional comic strips, when comic book artists could find work in the multitude of newspapers around the country, eventually gives way to the decline of print media, with a parallel shrinking of work opportunities for comic artists. Then came the rise of graphic novels, with Alison Bechdel’s 2006, Fun Home, which was subsequently turned into an off-Broadway musical, seemingly marking the pinnacle of mainstream success for LGBTQIA comics.
Throughout, Kleiman drives home just how vital a role LGBTQIA comics were for readers . They were both a way for authors to express themselves freely as they never had been able to before, and as a way for readers to understand themselves better.
To take one of the more obvious points, comic books are relatively easy to make and distribute (compared to, say, television shows or movies). They can be produced by a single artist and, if need be, can be printed anywhere and distributed by hand. There were, in the past, strict rules about what could or could not appear in comic books if they were to have the Comics Code Authority Seal of approval (nothing bad could be said about the police and no mention could be made about homosexuality), but since many of the first gay comics were made independently and sold in head shops, the artists could portray just about anything they wanted. Comics really turned out to be the ideal art form in the days when wider society denied queer identities and rights.
From the point of view of readers, one theme we hear more than once in No Straight Lines is that many queers had no idea how to ‘be’ queer. As Ivan Velez Jr. points out early on in the film, “You’re gay, you’re lesbian, whatever you are…you don’t know how to be that. There’s no reference, there’s nothing at all, no fairy tales even, no movies.” Gay comics were able to provide that model and in so doing help others figure out how to be themselves. One of the sources of Jennifer Camper’s early work, for example, was her own experience of sneaking into gay bars when she was underage and observing how things were done.
Kleiman’s documentary itself, arguably, serves a similar role in bearing witness to history for a generation of younger LGBTQIA comic artists. The early days of LGBTQIA comics, we hear, have become an inspiration for current LGBTQIA artists. As one interviewee says, there are few sources for emerging artists to learn about the history of LGBTQIA history just how far early artists went.
The struggle of coming out and coming to terms with queer identities is central to the documentary. But there is also a very strong sense of fun in these comics, especially those of Howard Cruse and Jennifer Camper. One of the primary functions of art is to help both creators and consumers understand what it is to be human and how one should live. In No Straight Lines, we see just how important art can be in helping queer people understand themselves.
© 2021. UniversalCinema Mag.