KNBC in Los Angeles refuses to air and equality ad. Earlier, KABC refused to air the ad during inauguration coverage.
Personally, I think this is ridiculous, considering the amount of taxpayer subsidies this overratted entertainment product receives through publicly funded stadiums. I will continue my non-interest in the NFL.
As a prelude to Banned Books Week next month, we have the tale of a heroic librarian defending a children’s story from the wishes of a religious homophobe’s attempts to suppress it. Of course a rational defense is never the end of something like this. A second person complained and stated there are 100 more ready to stand up for censorship.
As usual, those who cannot adequately defend their position through reason must make a competing information unaccessible. Censorship is always a sign of a weak message.
Banned Books Week draws attention to those who feel it necessary to impose their views on others by making messages they disagree with unavailable. Read a banned or challenged book today!
Thanks to a link from Neilalien I got some people to actually read this thing and even leave some valuable comments. If you link me on your blogroll I’ll link you on mine!
To be perfectly honest, my teenage mind never considered the possibility that the trucker’s comment could have been sarcastic. This, of course, turns the whole situation around. Doc is defending an underclass! Yay!
I think it can be interpreted either way equally, which makes the whole thing rather ambiguous. Still, it is something of a relief that my favorite fictional character isn’t going to explode into an Ann Coulter-ish fit of rage simply by meeting someone like me and zapping that someone into another dimension or a pile of fine ash.
In fact, one could say it leans toward the sarcastic angle since it’s never mentioned again in the ensuing forty years and his reaction many decades later to being asked the “are you gay” question is pretty much ambivalence and a hearty laugh. So, thank you commenters, this actually made me feel better.
Now, just for the heck of it: Howard the Duck, Sorcerer Supreme! (from Marvel Treasury Edition #12 via Essential Howard The duck #1)
Howard The Duck, Sorcerer Supreme
*As for the issue number error, you have my apologies. That’s what I get for scanning out of Marvel Masterworks after not having read the arc for a decade or so. Next time I won’t be so lazy and dig up the actual issue! (I don’t own the Marvel Treasury Edition issue for the above panel so deal with the black and white!)
I’ve been a fan of Doctor Strange for nearly 30 years, since I measured my age in single digits. I went on a mad frenzy looking for just about every book he ever appeared in (and I’ve probably got most of them from his first appearance in 1963 to about 1985 or so.) As someone just entering my teens and just coming to realize what my sexuality meant. Unfortunately, this was during Reagan’s first term, so even in the more liberal New York, being an out gay teenager wasn’t a very safe thing to be. Hardly the trailblazer, I was pretty quiet about everything and remained quite in the dark about far too much.
Still, even in this rather ignorant state, when I discovered the panel at the left in Doctor Strange #175 (November 1968) at the tender age of thirteen I was quite bothered. Heck, my hero was saying, by proxy, that I was beneath contempt. I even identified with the whole “Prince Charming” comment. After all, Frank Brunner’s later “Daddy Doctor Strange” in the early seventies had all the makings of a gay porn star and was tasty indeed. And to top it all off, after the good Doc turns away, his silver-haired beard gets all pee-ohd at the second rate Paul Lynde and goes on to perform some nasty hex on him and his truck. This must be comicdom’s first mystical gay bashing. I wonder what Terry Berg would say to that?
Now, there were plenty of other things wrong with this issue, mostly having to do with Roy Thomas writing the worlds most incredibly crappy dialog in the history of the universe for this story arc. But nothing bothered me as much as this single panel. Now, a quarter of a century after I first read it, I’m still dwelling on it! Homosexual content was forbidden by the Comics Code Authority, and no one would distribute your work without that little stamp, but monthly gay bashing certainly wasn’t required for an issue to pass.
Now, the good news is this is Doc’s only venture into the world of homophobia and decades later, when an old acquaintance asked Stephen if he was gay (he had grown a goatee as was the fashion of the mid nineties and with that outfit, how could you not) he merely laughed. Was Roy Thomas pushing a right wing agenda with his shitty writing? We’ll probably never know. Doc was never popular enough to get a pop culture response. But if he was, he chose an odd venue for it. After all, there’s probably no character as anti-christian as Doctor Strange.
I have officially vented!