I was reading an article at Occasional Superheroine about Megan Rose Gedris, the creator of two lesbian webcomics, getting some ugly hate messages on her LiveJournal. You can read the article here. It gave me food for thought as I’m currently doing a story arc about homosexuality.
Over the past month or so, I have been wondering about how “Weekends With Carl” would have been received if it was about two women rather than two men. Have Carl be a sassy black lesbian (name her Carla), and have Ryan be a naive girl from the country (Ryan is already a girl’s name). Part of me wonders if it would be an easier sell. It’s more like, “Ooh, maybe they’ll kiss,” rather than “Aw Gawd, they’re not going to kiss, are they?” And it would give me am excuse to have my Project Wonderful ads feature cute girls (which seem to get better click-throughs)
But then I would have been a target to the crap described in the article above.
One of my fears when starting “Weekends With Carl” was that someone might use it to justify their anger or hatred towards homosexuals. After all, Carl is not a character without flaws. There have been some comments on the blog about how Carl should be punched in the face, but I think that has more to do with the words coming out of the character’s mouth than the fact that he’s gay. Thankfully, I haven’t gotten any comics as gruesome and disturbing as the ones Megan got.
Hopefully I never will.
Yes, I agree. It is awful that some people can be so closed minded.
When I worked for a “certain company that is not to be named here,” there were many who felt more inclined to accept static and visual media that had the potential for “girl-on-girl action.” While, they would have an outright vocal disdain for any material that included or resembled “guy-on-guy action.”
As a proponent for wanting to punch Carl in the face, it has ALWAYS been about some of the things that he says and NEVER about his sexuality or ethnicity. Additionally, I am not the type of person that would enter into a physical altercation with anyone anyhow, so the call for violence has always been in jest.
Agreed, Dan. I have found Carl to be irritating at times, but mostly to personality flaws, not by anything tied to his orientation. This story is great because it has a huge chunk of reality in it and doesn’t push any stereotypes.