I Love My Comic Book Guys and Gals

As the 2009 Utah Pride Festival draws closer, I — like many of you — have a lot on my mind: the fabulous parties, the fabulous music, and the fabulous QSaltLake van that always ends up driving about five float lengths ahead of you during the parade, no matter how fast you run after it while handing out copies of TheQPages.

OK, so that last one is something only I  have on my mind. Still.

But since this is “Gay Geeks” and we’re rarely as serious as all that, I’m also thinking about comics. Well, and convincing Michael the parade route isn’t the autobahn. But mostly comics.

See, normally I hate writing about the theme of any event (memories of junior high Reflections contests … quel horror!), but the theme for this year’s festival really jumped out at me: Pride. Voice. Action. To me, this theme celebrates the many wonderful queer and queer-friendly organizations and individuals that keep our community strong, vibrant and active, from political groups like Equality Utah to social groups like sWerve to individuals like Jacob Whipple, Chloe Noble and Jill Hardman. We’re one lucky queer community, geeky ones, when you think about how much of a supportive network we’ve built up to sustain each other over the years. And if anything good can be said about California’s Proposition 8, that wicked piece of legislation served to make us even stronger and more cohesive.

Still, I think our strength as a community goes even further than that. Remember the businesses that got on board with Equality Utah’s Common Ground Initiative after the bigots in our legislature shot it down? They may not be as obvious as, say, Pride In Your Community, but they also take pride in our community, support our voices, and sustain us in our action.

Yeah, this is the part where comics come in.

For the past decade or so, I’ve bought all of my “funny books” from Night Flight Comics, which is truly one of the most gay-friendly businesses with which it has been my pleasure to deal. You might already known this, given the rainbow flags Night Flight’s library store flies during every Pride Festival. But chances are, if you haven’t strolled past this shop on one weekend out of 52, you might not know that.

So, Night Flight’s gay-friendliness, let me show you it.

In life, there are just certain people you have to be able to trust: your bartender, your doctor, your mechanic and your accountant come immediately to mind (even though not all of those may be applicable to everyone reading). If you’re a geek, add comic book guy or gal to that list. In fact, put comic book guy or gal near the top of that list — right above doctor, in fact (dentist, however, is another story).

I’ll tell you why: there are fewer things more frustrating and demoralizing than picking up a comic book you hate — especially if your comic book guy or gal recommended it to you. And I’m not talking some egregious offense like, say, having Archie appear in your hold tray with an “are you interested?” Post-It when you’re all about Sandman or The Walking Dead. No, geeky ones. I’m talking more like getting Grendel with an “are you interested?” note when you’re more about the goddamn Batman. The distinction between the two scenarios is canyon-sized.  

So, how do you make sure your comic book guy or gal knows what you like? Well, remember how I mentioned that trust thing before? Yeah, this is where that comes into play. To help your comic book guy or gal know what to recommend when you say, “I have all of this money I just need to get rid of,” you need to trust them enough to say such things as: “I love independent comics!” or “I only read comics about re-animated corpses having existential crises.” or “So, I’m a big raging queer. Got any comics about or by big raging queers?”

The difference here is that all of the above may get you some strange looks, depending on the comic book guy or gal; but only one of them might get you scolded, talked down to, ignored or outright banned from the store (hey, whoever said all geeks were gay-friendly?).

And this is where Night Flight is awesome, geeky ones. Back when I was just coming out in college, I struck up a friendship with owner Mimi Cruz and several of her hard-working, thoughtful and all-around great staff. And after testing the waters as all gay and transgender people do, I came out to her as a big raging queer who likes comics by and about big raging queers. And she and her staff not only introduced me to such wonderful comics as Strangers In Paradise, Bitchy Bitch, The Rawhide Kid: Slap Leather, the wonderfully queer worlds of genius Alan Moore, and about ninety thousand manga titles (seriously, gay and manga go together like jam and jelly), to name only a few, they did something even better: They accepted me as the big ragingly gay geek that I am without question. Oh, and they also provided invaluable help a few years ago, when I wrote a cover story for QSaltLake about gay comic book creators, which I think is one of the best features I’ve ever written.

In other words, they’re comic book guys and gals I trust even more than my doctor. They’ve never given me a recommendation I don’t like, or a reason to believe they’re anything but as gay-friendly as the displays they put up for Utah Pride. They talk the talk and walk the walk, and their selection and friendliness really just can’t be beat. And in doing that, they are just as much a part of Pride. Voice. Action. as is any other part of our community.

Not to mention way geekier. But of course that’s a good thing.