one
In the beginning, Sloane Hong says, crackly over the voice call: in the beginning, there was Patreon, and Patreon was open to all, and Patreon courted sex workers, and queer pornographers. And that was the beginning. That was the beginning for many platforms, as Sam Orchard says. Queer comics the underdog. Sex workers the unwanted. People who would bring others to their platforms—get them to spend their money there, give them clicks. Reputability. The trick is discarding them once they become a liability. Once you need to become a family-friendly platform that people will invest in. The visitors become your product.
two
Alex Scott describes comics as hard to read. There are rules to the genre, as there are to any other. It feels stupid—it only feels stupid because people don’t take comics seriously. Sloane quotes somebody, and I don’t catch it: people think about comics as something for people who want to read but aren’t really readers. But comics are not a gateway to reading, Sam agrees. There is a ritual to the things that happen outside respectability, that can only be learned through exposure. A new client must somehow learn to leave his fee in an envelope, to enquire in ways that don’t sound like a cop. A new comic reader must learn how to follow the artist around the page. A new artist must learn how to draw that path. A new prostitute must learn a lot, and fast.
three
A lot of publishers choose palatable queer stories. Sloane goes on: queer stories and comics are both often chosen for what is marketable to children. This shuts many of us out of the market—censorship affects not just what is silenced after creation, but what is made at all. Sam talks about the changes in the way he diarises his life, years into Rooster Tails: the political context is different. He finds himself self-censoring more than he used to. He has chosen, quite deliberately, to be this contained happy trans person, to avoid talking about things publicly which some readers are hungry to take in bad faith. And maybe there’s trans people out there looking for that complexity who miss out. But I’m not brave enough to feed them. I’ve seen what’s been done to my peers.
Companies don’t want to be associated with adult content, Sloane says, but we are adult content. Trans art inherently obscene. Comics inherently queer. We are adult content because we live in a world where control over our destinies—our bodies our sexualities our reproductive organs our genders our livelihoods our names our right to fucking live and find a way to pay our bills—is radical. Threatens to destroy a political order that holds up the family as a cudgel to beat away other families where people dare to be brown or crazy or trans or poor. Family-friendly means palatable means nothing that tells people to dare to be anything other than what they are told they can be. Nothing that reminds people: there are others suffering so you can live the life you live. And they are clawing at the walls—not to demand entry, but to tear them down.
four
Sam says: comics are uncomfortable, confronting, overwhelming. It is possible to choose to make a page easier—or harder—to read. The friction is part of the experience of reading something taboo. Of paying for kink. Sloane reminds us that you need to know the rules to break them. I think about the ways that’s true: this context, form and composition and framing and suspense. The very bones of the art form as a conscious choice.
An audience member asks: what would a graphic poem look like? I want to tell him that they already exist, that all poetry is built the way comics are, too-aware of their skeletons. Repetition and structure and jagged lines and flow that tears you from one revelation to another. But there are ways you break rules without knowing them. Ways the rules are built after the fact to shut you out. Patreon bans adult content; Tumblr bans trans women and sex workers; the porn bots that fill the void steal from us and pretend to be us; the furious public which claims to defend our queer dignity wield weapons so broad they crush us anyway. The good queers, they say—the ones who colour within the lines. As if they know the genre’s conventions. As if they know the thrill of breaking them.
five
Sam says, opening the panel: comics are inherently queer. Neither here nor there, neither prose nor visual art. Certainly not literature or high art. By virtue of their liminality they are shut out, and yet that exclusion creates their vitality. Then they become lucrative. Then they become graphic novels. Hookers become companions. But every euphemism gets dragged into the mud eventually. Escort becomes a derogatory term. People clarify that they don’t read comics, they read graphic novels, but they aren’t fooling any of the people they most want to impress.
Alex says: sometimes you have to market yourself, have to play the game. She draws the line between “gay cartoons” and “a real book” in her own work. My ads say lover, say escort, say companion. My clients need it from me. There’s the fundamental tension: an audience member asks, hesitating, What does success look like for you? Sam and Alex talk about making things that make them happy. Things people like. Things people see themselves in. I think about the beautiful stories I tell about supporting men who are socially anxious, traumatised, lonely.
And over Zoom, because she has COVID, Sloane’s voice wavers: I wish I could feel satisfied with that. But she has never made more than minimum wage, never lived a life good enough for the things that are beautiful and sincere and drawn from life to easily become art. I would like to live a life that isn’t a scramble to survive.
six
The closing audience question draws a hiss of suppressed laughter, or maybe hysteria: what advice do you have for beginner comic artists? I know that laugh from friends, half-drunk: I could totally be a sex worker. Do you have advice? Sam and Sloane say, in one breath, half talking over each other: Don’t. Don’t do it. It’s not worth it.
But they have also said that they do it because they have to, because there is nothing else to do, because they fell into it, because there were stories threatening to tear free, because they—and someone else, everyone else—need it. And there is no money in it, no glamour. Not half as much as people seem to think there is. Alex thinks for a moment. Says: Start now. You can’t put it off until you’re ready, until you’re really good. You have to get better by learning. Failure is—sometimes devastating, but then so is success. Traps you in a job that pays more in unwanted attention than in dollars. That isn’t a career for all but the very lucky. But you have to get better. You have to make bad art to make good art. You have to take your clothes off, and be okay with that, and keep going. You have to survive. You have to tell your story, and to do that you have to survive.
seven
In the beginning was the Internet, Sam says. In the beginning, the Internet was a place where people could prove there was a market for queer stories—and there was! But markets are about profit. Cishet consumers want stories that don’t trouble their concept of queerness. That elevates privileged voices. That are about sad gays or dead gays or gays that are easy to understand. That are not about horror the way trans people love horror, see ourselves in the othered and terrifying. See ourselves in villains. See ourselves. Cishet people don’t want stories that see us messy, and empowered, and monstrous. Monstrousness doesn’t sell the way airbrushed stories sell, so polished they cut through water like a knife, soundless and without lasting impact.
And yet the market demands authenticity. Posts, photographs, reels. Ethical clients search for happy hookers like they’re deciding which eggs are the most cruelty-free. The parasocial self as product as comic as autobiography. Undressing; evisceration. Contortion into shapes that titillate and don’t alarm. We pierce them with our quills and strapons and traumatic backstories, move them to maybe-orgasmic catharsis, get discarded. Hours of labour into minutes of consuming content. And there’s no afterglow—we become monsters the moment they finish. The moment we dare ask for dignity in turn.
Trans as whore as object as desirable until the sun comes up. As spectacle by night that has to draw the shades by day. And be consumed. And not be seen.
Featured image: digital collage by the author.
