Dying Is Easy. Comedy Is Hard: How Gay Comix Navigated the AIDS Crisis

This paper focuses on how the American comics anthology Gay Comix, which ran for 26 issues from 1980 to 1998, addressed the AIDS crisis. Gay male comics had historically focused on casual sexual relationships; however, the epidemic complicated gay men’s relationship with sex, rendering these strips “bad taste.” At the same time, because gay cartooning was associated with humor, it was also considered “bad taste” to depict the crisis in this medium. This created a dilemma for queer cartoonists—how could they continue to represent contemporary gay male culture in the comics medium without falling into “bad taste?” Because Gay Comix bookended the “Age of AIDS,” analyzing its AIDS-related strips provides insight into the evolution of comics’ responses to AIDS over almost two decades. Through a series of chronological, thematic case studies, this paper demonstrates how different authors responded to the double bind of it being “bad taste” to represent AIDS in the comics medium, but also “bad taste” to ignore the effects of the crisis, and how concepts of tastefulness in graphic representations of AIDS changed from the emergence of the syndrome in 1981 to the introduction of effective medication in 1996.