Reclaiming Diverse LGBTQ+ Comics Histories

Gay Comix (1980–98) is well known as an important comics series that brought together just over one hundred LGBTQ+ creators over the course of its twenty-six issues and nearly two decades. Despite its renown, there exists no comprehensive overview of the series and the impact it had in building the LGBTQ+ comics community. This article reviews how Gay Comix innovated queer comics storytelling by assessing how gender, sexuality, and race were depicted across the whole series, examining in particular how nonwhite artists—Jennifer Camper, Burton Clarke, Roberta Gregory, and Ivan Velez Jr.—represented racially diverse characters. In its varied approaches to portraying LGBTQ+ lives, Gay Comix set the stage for the explosion of queer comics in the twenty-first century that now portray an even broader LGBTQ+ spectrum.