TimeOut New York talks with David Heatley about his new book My Brain Is Hanging Upside Down and explains something I had been wondering about, namely why he censored all the naughty bits out of his “Sex History” strip:
Heatley’s “Sex History”—early childhood fumblings, polymorphous couplings at Oberlin College, dating in mid-’90s New York, compulsive masturbation—originally appeared in his self-published comic Deadpan. For the version that appears in My Brain, however, he’s placed tiny fluorescent triangles and rectangles over his characters’ genitals—an act of concealment after so much confession. “I was getting fan mail from a couple twentysomething boys, saying, ‘Oh, your strip gave me a boner,’ and I thought, This isn’t what I had in mind. It’s really about longing and bad sex and lack of connection.” The bleep-outs “almost draw attention to it, but it’s like another layer of the narrative—me kind of covering up a little bit before publication.”
David Heatley: Preventing twentysomething boners since 2008.







