AT THE VANGUARD

“Françoise asked me—with little notice—to do a gay marriage
cover and the only thing I could think of was gay divorce. I’ll do
gay divorce for the day it becomes legal.”

–IAN FALCONER

When the Clinton policy of
“Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” was
instituted in 1996, Barry
Blitt greeted it with a sailor-
on-sailor kiss titled “Don’t
Ask” (opposite). Blitt’s take on

Alfred Eisenstaedt’s photograph of a sailor kissing a nurse in
Times Square was denounced at least as much for The New
Yorker featuring two men kissing on its cover as for its “desecration” of a well-known war
image. The legalization of gay marriage in Massachusetts in 2004 prodded Mark Ulriksen’s
twist on the perennial search for that special wedding dress (above). The image proposed by
R. Crumb in 2009 (below) seemed out of step with its times. And fifteen years after “Don’t
Ask,” in 2011, Blitt’s two brides cross the Brooklyn Bridge on their way to City Hall,
flower girls in tow, as same-sex marriage becomes legal in New York (right).

R. CRUMB IN HIS OWN WORDS:

“I asked my friend Paul, who’s gay, if this
picture offended him, and he said, ‘If I had
that, I’d hang it on my wall.’

“The whole idea of this cover is that you can’t
tell what gender these people are. So what are
you supposed to do? Have a gender inspection
to see who has what? There are guys who’ve got
their dicks chopped off and girls who’ve had
them added on, so the whole idea of a gender
criterion for marriage is ridiculous. At first I
thought of drawing two unisex creatures with
a minister marrying them—but I drew this
thing instead, that was more lurid. I didn’t
consider it offensive.

“When I was young and full of piss and
vinegar, in my twenties, I made drawings with
the deliberate intention to offend bourgeois
straight people. But then, you can do stuff that
you think is just funny and unintentionally
offends people—the stuff I did that’s considered
racist, I didn’t do to offend black people or
white liberal sensibilities. It was to bring to
the surface the underlying cancer that’s within
all of us whether we know it or not—and for
people to see that and maybe laugh at the
absurdity of it.”

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