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4 Howard Cruse's Stuck Rubber Baby: How 'Gay Is the New Black' Discourses Shape the White Gay Imaginary

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"#$%! ,-*.$! =0*./! 3'%> 3$04$+!'=!!"#$%&'#(()*&+,(-6!/#$!1*)2#03!%'4$5!='*E)/!().!0%!0/.!0%=)%3:J!"055! ?0.%$*P.!?&4/:"*,$"&E7">&3/2&G78LHI6!/#$!=0*./!4'5-E$!'=!K*/!S20$1$5E)%P.!F,#B& G78HMI6! )%+! K5)%! T''*$P.! <,"$>6):& G78HLI! #)+! $./);50.#$+! 0E2'*/)%/! 2*$3$> +$%/.!0%!*$)3#0%1!)!(0+$!)-+0$%3$!(0/#!;''<>5$%1/#!3'E03.!/)3<50%1!.$*0'-.!.-;> ! 184 | Good White Queers? ject matters. However, A Contract with God was a collection of short stories ra- ther than an actual ‘novel’ and both Maus and Watchmen had first been pub- lished in a much shorter, serial format and had only been compiled into books at a later point in time. Drawing a comic that was over 200 pages long and would all be published at once was almost unheard of in the early 1990s. Accordingly, Cruse encountered tremendous difficulty in securing funding for the four years it eventually took him to draw his graphic novel (cf. Cruse, “Long and Winding”). The novelty of Cruse’s endeavor with Stuck Rubber Baby is expressed in a last- minute publishing decision to reduce the size of the book so that its outward ap- pearance would resemble a novel more than a comic. In a letter he wrote in 1993, Cruse traces the thought process that went into this decision, “The larger size is obviously better, but it virtually guarantees that the book will never find a place in the fiction section of most bookstores, whose shelves often cannot ac- commodate books of a greater height than 9-1/4"; but if it’s placed in the humor section next to Garfield, browsers for fiction will never discover it” (“Long and Winding”). In the mid 1990s, a graphic novel like Stuck Rubber Baby still had no obvious place in the literary production of its time, even though Will Eisner had already started to use the term “graphic novel” “in a more commercial con- text, to sell A Contract with God (1978) to publishers” (Chute, “Comics as Liter- ature?” 453) in the late 1970s. Stuck Rubber Baby’s greater length also allows for greater complexity. The story line is much richer, more textured, more serious, heavier than any of Cruse’s previous work. Stuck Rubber Baby is a coming-of-age story set in a fic- tional Southern city in the early 1960s. It tells the story of Toland Polk, who at- tempts to fight his growing realization that he might be gay by getting involved with Ginger Raines. While both Toland and Ginger are white, Ginger is involved in the Civil Rights Movement and leads Toland to question many of the racist and cis_hetero_sexist assumptions he grew up with. After several close brushes with deadly violence and after accidentally fathering a child with Ginger, Toland finally finds the courage to come out as gay. Stuck Rubber Baby’s greater seriousness as compared to Barefootz or Wen- del also finds its expression in the comic’s drawing style. Cruse himself remarks that he had to “shake [his] cheery approach to designing characters (clearly in- appropriate for this book) that had become ingrained during [his] long tenure on the Wendel strip” (“Long and Winding”). He often used photographs of actual people “to short-circuit (or at least inhibit) the unconscious importation of old stylistic habits from Wendel” (“Long and Winding”). 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