Comics critic and blogger Noah Berlatsky debuted The Gay Utopia last Friday. Designed to be an “online symposium devoted to exploring that ideal realm in which gender, sexuality, and identity dissolve” the site also features an abundance of comic-related material, with features/strips by folks like Dame Darcy, Johnny Ryan, Michael Manning, Edie Fake, Ariel Schrag and much more, including this essay on Alan Moore’s Black Dossier:
Moore’s book, however, seems to suggest that exposure to polymorphous sexualities and gender-identities will somehow lead us to an acknowledgment of gender’s inherent falsehood. While Black Dossier thematizes the fictionality of gender, it more often shows us lots of sex (especially in the first third of the book), a practice that tends not to serve the interests of post-feminism, but instead has the reverse effect. Mostly, what readers of the book are given (and it is a given, in the world of mainstream comics, that most of those readers are male) is a plethora of beautiful women in various states of undress, performing sex acts with men and/or other women. Rare is the depiction of homosexual male intercourse, and rarer is the depiction of sex that doesn’t conform to what might be typically titillating to men.
Go check it out, we’ll wait. (Note: Obviously some of the above links are not necessarily safe for work.)
