A Brief History of Gay Male Comics

This paper aims to give a necessarily brief introduction to the history of North American, gay male comics. This history can be considered in terms of a “pre-historic” or “pre-Stonewall” period, followed by three successive waves of activity. The paper presents the characteristics of the two dominant genres within gay male comics - the “gay ghetto’ and “gay porno” genres – and discusses the ways in which the gay comics that have emerged since the 1990s, take up and subvert the themes of these two dominant genres.