Queer graphic novels are the latest target of moral panic whipped up in the current culture war.
From a mob assault against peaceful queer activists by Sydney’s Christian Lives Matter group in March, to multiple legal attacks on LGBTIQA+ freedoms in the US, the current climate globally is increasingly hostile towards the queer community.
Such attacks are driven by ‘a perfect storm’ of right wing, ultra-conservative and conspiracist thinking according to long-term queer activist Simon Hunt (aka Pauline Pantsdown).
‘You essentially have a collusion, I’d call it, of four groups that are separate in some ways, but historically have a lot of connection as well,’ says Hunt.
Leading the charge are conservative Christians in the US, Hunt believes. ‘They’re the ones with the money; they’re the ones who have been funding most of the organisations running all the [anti-queer] bills in the [US], and then that just gets exported directly to Australia.’
Such activity, which is focused on ‘the reestablishment of a patriarchal worldview,’ according to Hunt, is then feeding three other distinct but related groups.
‘You’ve got the far right, the Nazis. Obviously, their main game is anti-Semitism but, as was the case in the late 1920s and the early 1930s in Germany, transgender people are used as a recruitment tool, essentially,’ he says.
Read the article by Richard Watts on Arts Hub.