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.
